Proposed Oregon Pipeline Could Give Utah’s Natural Gas Industry a Big Boost

SEATTLE (Oil Monster): A $10 billion gas-transmission project under development in Oregon could open up Asian markets for Utah’s natural gas, long plagued by low prices because of a persistent domestic glut and the inherent difficulty of shipping the product overseas.

Federal regulators are now reviewing the environmental impacts of the Jordan Cove LNG project, which aims to connect an existing pipeline in southern Oregon to the Port of Coos Bay, where a terminal would be built to liquefy the gas and load it onto ships.

“We have natural gas that is stranded and not used, so it is being flared or vented to no benefit,” Uintah County Commissioner Bart Haslem told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at a field hearing Thursday in Medford, Ore. "We could be shipping this gas to other countries to replace other, dirtier sources of energy and receive the benefits to our economies and environment.”

Uintah, Utah’s largest gas producing county, was joined by officials from neighboring Duchesne County, as well as gas-producing counties in Wyoming and Colorado to speak in favor of the project proposed by the Canadian energy firm Pembina Pipeline Corp.

The firm seeks to build the 229-mile, 36-inch-diameter Pacific Connector gas pipeline from the town of Malin — where there would be a tie-in with the existing Ruby pipeline — to a liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminal it plans to build on 240 acres it owns on Coos Bay’s North Spit. Kinder Morgan’s Ruby pipeline runs 680 miles from the Opal Hub in southwest Wyoming across northern Utah and Nevada and into Oregon.

The Sierra Club’s Oregon chapter is fighting the project as part of a statewide coalition called No LNG Exports, arguing the pipeline would clear-cut a 95-foot-wide swath through southwestern Oregon’s forests, farms and rivers, such as the Rogue and Umpqua, valued for their salmon runs. Exporting the West’s natural gas would drive up prices for U.S. consumers by up to 25% and would promote more drilling and fracking on public lands, the groups contend.

The project recently failed to secure a permit from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which concluded proponents have not demonstrated how the pipeline and terminal would comply with the state’s water quality standards.

Courtesy: www.sltrib.com