I spent some time over the weekend in Coos Bay, Oregon with a local anti-Liquefied Natural Gas activist. Oregonians should be aware of the threat of LNG facilities; there are four proposed sites along the Oregon coast and Columbia River. LNG is a green washed version of fossil fuel use. If anyone has ever seen video of huge fires in extraction sites like Nigeria, it was probably natural gas. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling. Usually, companies set it ablaze to get rid of it, however, the newest thing to do is to catch it, compress to liquid form, ship it to a LNG facility, return it to its gaseous state and then send in via pipeline to California for use.

Originally, the proposed facility sites were in California. However, mass citizen (and celebrity) outcry has nearly terminated any chance for LNG processing in the state. The obvious next step for LNG corporations is Oregon’s logging communities and developing nations like Peru. These communities have been targeted because they are historically resource extraction based and the city politicians are eager to revitalize the local economy from the boom-bust logging era to LNG processing. To give you a hint of the money trail of this project, the Port board and other influential members of this pro-LNG group in Coos Bay alone have direct ties to the Regan administration and the Iran Contra Scandal.
Why is LNG bad? First, it isn’t a sustainable resource.

Providing LNG is only sustaining, not reducing or eliminating our oil addiction, providing this as an “answer” will only suspend the real sustainable energy projects. Second, while LNG itself might be a cleaner fuel, the process is far far from it. The natural gas will first be turned into liquid form, put on a ship (from Russia or Nigeria most likely), taken across the ocean to a port along the NW coast, returned to a gaseous state and then piped down to California. This doesn’t even take into account the implications of building the facilities to do this work (in Coos Bay the facility would fill in a natural wetland with sand from the tsunami protection dune that has to be destroyed for the site. Also, the bay would have to be dredged and expanded hundreds of feet to accommodate the ships, 1200 feet in length).

The Columbia sites would also require mass dredging, multiple times a year to keep the river big enough for the ships. I want to remind everyone of the disastrous dredging in the 70’s near Vancouver where so much mercury and other noxious chemicals were brought up from the bottom of the Columbia that rare cases of cancer and polio took the lives of many young people of that generation growing up in the area.

Well, that is a pretty brief overview of the subject. It’s hard to find Oregon information about this because it is relativly new, but here are a few links:

California based: http://www.coastaladvocates.com/

RG article: http://www.onwardoregon.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ffIOIRMEG&b=440777&ct=577065%20

Green washed pro LNG site: http://www.lngfacts.org/About-LNG/Environment.asp

RISING TIDE, great organization, they are going to be doing a lot of direct action around this issue including a bike tour to the proposed sites in Oregon before their Convergence in August. I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing it if any is interested in joining: http://risingtidenorthamerica.org/wordpress/liquified-natural-gas/

We don’t need these cruising the Columbia…