September 17, 2007
Getting it straight | A conversation with author Virginia Thorndike, whose new book tackles the many misconceptions in the LNG debate
By Whit Richardson
Virginia Thorndike, like most writers, was simply curious. As a Maine resident, Thorndike had been peripherally aware of the ongoing debate over locating a liquefied natural gas terminal Down East, as two companies are proposing to do. Being "on the green end of things," as she says, Thorndike assumed she was probably anti-LNG, but she questioned that assumption while writing her previous book, On Tugboats: Stories of Life and Work Aboard, published in 2004. Her "tugboat buddies" told her that LNG terminals and tankers were very safe and, in fact, would be an economic boon for Washington County.
She went looking for answers on the Internet, but couldn't find any objective information, only partisan arguments and loads of contradictory information. "There's nobody with no axes to grind," she says.
So Thorndike, 62, the author of several maritime and Maine-related books, including most recently, Islanders: Real Life on the Maine Islands, decided to tackle the LNG debate from an unbiased perspective. "I thought that I'm probably not the only person on the planet who just doesn't know what the truth is," she says.
The result is her most recent book, LNG: A Level-Headed Look at the Liquefied Natural Gas Controversy, published this year by Down East Books in Rockport. The book doesn't focus on the Maine LNG debate, but approaches the issue from a national perspective, discussing energy trends in the United States and the more than 20 proposals for LNG terminals that federal regulators are currently considering.
Mainebiz recently spoke with Thorndike, who lives in Morrill, about the new book, her conclusions and if an LNG tanker could really wreak as much destruction as a small nuclear weapon. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: In the book, you say you set out to write an unbiased book that looked at the facts. Do you feel you were able to remain completely objective ˆ especially since you say you tend towards being green and since you live in a state where there's an ongoing LNG debate?
Virginia Thorndike: I do feel that I was able to remain objective. That does not mean that I ended up without an opinion. But I was able to look at it with an objective eye, I believe, in order to come to the conclusions I came to.
What were some of those conclusions?
The fact is we're running out of energy. That's a given. There will be an end to oil and there will be an end to natural gas and there will be an end to any of the non-renewables. Nobody knows exactly when it's coming. But in the meantime we're demanding more and more and more all the time.
For instance, for the last several years we've produced a certain amount of natural gas, and I think it's 18 trillion cubic feet per year we've produced in this country, but we've been using about 22 [trillion cubic feet]. So we already have to import some. The [U.S.] Department of Energy has been predicting how much more energy we're going to be using at this time or that time, and they say that by 2025 there'll be about a 40% increase in demand for natural gas over what there is now in this country, and 70% more internationally, which is astounding. And it's all got to come from somewhere, and it's not going to come from [the United States] because we don't have that much natural gas in reserve. So LNG is a logical source to fill some of this demand. And so then it just comes down to a question of where do you want to put it.
It's also interesting that because the industry started in the 1970s and then faded for so long and now it's started up again that the manpower issue has become an issue. But it looks as if the American maritime academies are looking at it as an opportunity. An awful lot of LNG captains are due for retirement in the next few years worldwide, and they're doubling the size of the fleet in that same period of time, and they're going to have to come up with some good, strong manpower in the meantime, which is an interesting wrinkle.
In your book you talk about the risks of LNG. How safe is it? And are the safety concerns that are voiced by people opposed to LNG in Maine valid?
Sure, they're valid, but I don't think they should be an overriding factor. Every form of energy we have has dangers associated with it, and we've got some stuff out there that we take for granted now that maybe we shouldn't be taking for granted, but we're just so used to them that we don't think anything about it, like barges full of gasoline, for instance, or jet fuel, or all these kinds of things that go running around all over the place. You can make a big mess with any of those guys. LNG has a nearly impeccable record since the 40s, when there was that big explosion in Cleveland. But since that time there's been no civilian life lost due to LNG, and there have been very, very few plant workers worldwide [lost] due to LNG. There have been things that have happened in LNG plants when LNG wasn't present, but you can't hardly blame the LNG for that.
Some of the people who are against LNG refer to the incident a year or two ago when a ship came by and the wake disturbed an LNG tanker and it broke loose from the pier. In spite of that happening, there wasn't even a drop [of LNG] spilled, as I understand it. The engineering worked. I believe they've got that down, which is not to say you won't have
human error or something, but they've got redundant systems and all that kind of stuff, and in the normal course of events it is pretty darn safe.
You do have to worry about terrorism. It's a different world than it used to be. It would be difficult for terrorists to make a huge mess with LNG, but they could do it. It has been shown that you can get through the double-skin tankers if you're serious enough about it, and so it could be done. And so to me that's the essence of the whole thing. You don't want to put these guys going places where if it should happen you'd kill off a whole lot of people. And not only that, but you don't want to put it in a place where it would be an attractive nuisance to a terrorist. If you build your plant in a place where there's not too much else going on there, why would he even bother?
So that's an argument in favor of putting an LNG terminal in a rural place like Down East Maine?
Exactly.
In your book, you take time to debunk some of the falsehoods thrown around about LNG, such as if an LNG tanker blew up it would be like a small nuclear explosion.
That one is actually an interesting one. It's not quite as simple as that, but you can't explode an LNG ship. That's the key, and that's an important thing that people will not understand.
Do these myths affect the debate over LNG in Maine?
I really can't address that because I've not spoken directly with the folks who are against LNG. A lot of them have these beliefs, but where they got them and why they got them, I can't tell you.
I think the debate now seems to have landed on Head Harbour Passage, and that's a legitimate argument, too. The professional mariners that I know are very serious about their jobs and very capable people who are extremely conscious of what they can and cannot do safely, and so when the pilots tell me that there's not a problem coming through Head Harbour Passage, I tend to believe them. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why there would be a concern, because it is a narrow rocky passage. And that does seem to have ended up being the key argument.
There are arguments about fishermen and all this kind of stuff, but I think that the companies have tried to work very closely with the fishermen to make sure that the passages up to Robbinston, for instance, will be in a channel where they can affect the fishermen as little as possible. And I think that they've also offered to replace any gear that gets damaged and whatnot, so I think they're working very hard to work with these people to have as little of an impact as they possibly can.
Before you decided to write this book, how closely were you paying attention to the LNG debate in Maine?
Oh, very little.
Are you paying much closer attention to it now? Are you intimately involved now?
I'm not intimately involved, but I am following it. And people keep sending me articles and stuff that I better keep track of, because they think I'm interested, which I am. But, to be frank, I'm not as concerned about the Maine facilities as I am, say, Fall River [in Massachusetts] and Long Beach [in California], which I think are outrageously ˆ I'd almost say evilly ˆ bad sites [for an LNG terminal], both of them.
Does this get back to your idea that LNG import terminals should be away from population centers?
Yes. To me it's a no-brainer. Look at Long Beach: You have within a mile of the terminal all these other facilities, that should they catch on fire in some way, would just make the whole thing a whole lot worse, to say nothing of the population centers and stuff. It just doesn't make any sense.
Natural gas provides more than 50% of Maine's electricity. How big a deal do you think LNG will play in Maine's future?
I think we're going to get natural gas from LNG whether we get it from Maine plants or Canadian plants. We won't get the LNG if it comes from Canada, we'll get it in the form of natural gas coming down through my pasture ˆ the Maritimes' northeast pipeline does come down through my pasture, which is something I hadn't really thought about before I went into this project.
While writing this book, what were some of the most surprising discoveries you made?
I tend not to be surprised by stuff because I really try to go in with an open mind and without preconceptions, so I don't get surprised by stuff in general. But certainly striking is the fact that people talk about the stuff blowing up, and it won't. The only way that it can blow up is if it's in an enclosed area. It can't even burn unless it's in the right mixture with air. However, if it is in the right mixture with air, it can make one heck of a hot fire, and I don't want to belittle the strength of this stuff. But of course that's why we want it, because it's got energy, isn't it? If it didn't burn, nobody would want it.
There are so many LNG plants being proposed, but there's no way they could all be built, right?
That's absolutely true. It is astounding to me. For instance, to go back to Fall River. They've always given this argument that they're the ones because they have to bring natural gas into the Boston market. Well, that's ridiculous. The Boston market can be fed from New Brunswick or Texas or Down East Maine or any place, same as it is today. There's so many of them that have already been approved even, let alone the ones that have not yet been approved. There's no need for any more if a certain number of them get built, so why would people keep spending money on applications that aren't really strong applications? I don't get it.
What do you think the chances are of the Downeast LNG and Quoddy Bay LNG projects getting approved?
I think it's entirely in Canada's hands. This is my personal view on the thing. [The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] does not have a record of turning anybody down, even stupid proposals, so why they'd turn down one that maybe wasn't so stupid, I don't know. But if Canada says you can't go through [Head Harbour Passage], then you can't go through there. I assume it'll end up in international court sometime. But maybe they'll resolve it before that, I don't know. So, I really think that's the biggest stumbling block.
After writing the book, have you come down on one side or the other? Are you pro-LNG in Maine right now?
With reservations, yeah. I think that if a company were to come into Maine, they must be responsible. They must be respectful of the area they're coming into. They must build a facility that fits where they're trying to build it.
Would you feel comfortable living in the vicinity of an LNG terminal?
I might not want to be within a mile of it, but I'd be pretty content to have it beyond that. And there's probably no reason at all why I shouldn't be within a mile of it, either. I think it'd be kind of fun to watch the ships go by and that kind of stuff. I think it's so much less apt to have a problem in a rural area than so many things that we take for granted that I just don't worry about it. When the people from Robbinston went down to Maryland and talked to people on the street about how they felt about living next to an LNG terminal, most of them didn't even know it was there. That's pretty cool. I think that any such plant is going to do its very best to be a good neighbor.
She went looking for answers on the Internet, but couldn't find any objective information, only partisan arguments and loads of contradictory information. "There's nobody with no axes to grind," she says.
So Thorndike, 62, the author of several maritime and Maine-related books, including most recently, Islanders: Real Life on the Maine Islands, decided to tackle the LNG debate from an unbiased perspective. "I thought that I'm probably not the only person on the planet who just doesn't know what the truth is," she says.
The result is her most recent book, LNG: A Level-Headed Look at the Liquefied Natural Gas Controversy, published this year by Down East Books in Rockport. The book doesn't focus on the Maine LNG debate, but approaches the issue from a national perspective, discussing energy trends in the United States and the more than 20 proposals for LNG terminals that federal regulators are currently considering.
Mainebiz recently spoke with Thorndike, who lives in Morrill, about the new book, her conclusions and if an LNG tanker could really wreak as much destruction as a small nuclear weapon. An edited transcript follows.
Mainebiz: In the book, you say you set out to write an unbiased book that looked at the facts. Do you feel you were able to remain completely objective ˆ especially since you say you tend towards being green and since you live in a state where there's an ongoing LNG debate?
Virginia Thorndike: I do feel that I was able to remain objective. That does not mean that I ended up without an opinion. But I was able to look at it with an objective eye, I believe, in order to come to the conclusions I came to.
What were some of those conclusions?
The fact is we're running out of energy. That's a given. There will be an end to oil and there will be an end to natural gas and there will be an end to any of the non-renewables. Nobody knows exactly when it's coming. But in the meantime we're demanding more and more and more all the time.
For instance, for the last several years we've produced a certain amount of natural gas, and I think it's 18 trillion cubic feet per year we've produced in this country, but we've been using about 22 [trillion cubic feet]. So we already have to import some. The [U.S.] Department of Energy has been predicting how much more energy we're going to be using at this time or that time, and they say that by 2025 there'll be about a 40% increase in demand for natural gas over what there is now in this country, and 70% more internationally, which is astounding. And it's all got to come from somewhere, and it's not going to come from [the United States] because we don't have that much natural gas in reserve. So LNG is a logical source to fill some of this demand. And so then it just comes down to a question of where do you want to put it.
It's also interesting that because the industry started in the 1970s and then faded for so long and now it's started up again that the manpower issue has become an issue. But it looks as if the American maritime academies are looking at it as an opportunity. An awful lot of LNG captains are due for retirement in the next few years worldwide, and they're doubling the size of the fleet in that same period of time, and they're going to have to come up with some good, strong manpower in the meantime, which is an interesting wrinkle.
In your book you talk about the risks of LNG. How safe is it? And are the safety concerns that are voiced by people opposed to LNG in Maine valid?
Sure, they're valid, but I don't think they should be an overriding factor. Every form of energy we have has dangers associated with it, and we've got some stuff out there that we take for granted now that maybe we shouldn't be taking for granted, but we're just so used to them that we don't think anything about it, like barges full of gasoline, for instance, or jet fuel, or all these kinds of things that go running around all over the place. You can make a big mess with any of those guys. LNG has a nearly impeccable record since the 40s, when there was that big explosion in Cleveland. But since that time there's been no civilian life lost due to LNG, and there have been very, very few plant workers worldwide [lost] due to LNG. There have been things that have happened in LNG plants when LNG wasn't present, but you can't hardly blame the LNG for that.
Some of the people who are against LNG refer to the incident a year or two ago when a ship came by and the wake disturbed an LNG tanker and it broke loose from the pier. In spite of that happening, there wasn't even a drop [of LNG] spilled, as I understand it. The engineering worked. I believe they've got that down, which is not to say you won't have
human error or something, but they've got redundant systems and all that kind of stuff, and in the normal course of events it is pretty darn safe.
You do have to worry about terrorism. It's a different world than it used to be. It would be difficult for terrorists to make a huge mess with LNG, but they could do it. It has been shown that you can get through the double-skin tankers if you're serious enough about it, and so it could be done. And so to me that's the essence of the whole thing. You don't want to put these guys going places where if it should happen you'd kill off a whole lot of people. And not only that, but you don't want to put it in a place where it would be an attractive nuisance to a terrorist. If you build your plant in a place where there's not too much else going on there, why would he even bother?
So that's an argument in favor of putting an LNG terminal in a rural place like Down East Maine?
Exactly.
In your book, you take time to debunk some of the falsehoods thrown around about LNG, such as if an LNG tanker blew up it would be like a small nuclear explosion.
That one is actually an interesting one. It's not quite as simple as that, but you can't explode an LNG ship. That's the key, and that's an important thing that people will not understand.
Do these myths affect the debate over LNG in Maine?
I really can't address that because I've not spoken directly with the folks who are against LNG. A lot of them have these beliefs, but where they got them and why they got them, I can't tell you.
I think the debate now seems to have landed on Head Harbour Passage, and that's a legitimate argument, too. The professional mariners that I know are very serious about their jobs and very capable people who are extremely conscious of what they can and cannot do safely, and so when the pilots tell me that there's not a problem coming through Head Harbour Passage, I tend to believe them. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why there would be a concern, because it is a narrow rocky passage. And that does seem to have ended up being the key argument.
There are arguments about fishermen and all this kind of stuff, but I think that the companies have tried to work very closely with the fishermen to make sure that the passages up to Robbinston, for instance, will be in a channel where they can affect the fishermen as little as possible. And I think that they've also offered to replace any gear that gets damaged and whatnot, so I think they're working very hard to work with these people to have as little of an impact as they possibly can.
Before you decided to write this book, how closely were you paying attention to the LNG debate in Maine?
Oh, very little.
Are you paying much closer attention to it now? Are you intimately involved now?
I'm not intimately involved, but I am following it. And people keep sending me articles and stuff that I better keep track of, because they think I'm interested, which I am. But, to be frank, I'm not as concerned about the Maine facilities as I am, say, Fall River [in Massachusetts] and Long Beach [in California], which I think are outrageously ˆ I'd almost say evilly ˆ bad sites [for an LNG terminal], both of them.
Does this get back to your idea that LNG import terminals should be away from population centers?
Yes. To me it's a no-brainer. Look at Long Beach: You have within a mile of the terminal all these other facilities, that should they catch on fire in some way, would just make the whole thing a whole lot worse, to say nothing of the population centers and stuff. It just doesn't make any sense.
Natural gas provides more than 50% of Maine's electricity. How big a deal do you think LNG will play in Maine's future?
I think we're going to get natural gas from LNG whether we get it from Maine plants or Canadian plants. We won't get the LNG if it comes from Canada, we'll get it in the form of natural gas coming down through my pasture ˆ the Maritimes' northeast pipeline does come down through my pasture, which is something I hadn't really thought about before I went into this project.
While writing this book, what were some of the most surprising discoveries you made?
I tend not to be surprised by stuff because I really try to go in with an open mind and without preconceptions, so I don't get surprised by stuff in general. But certainly striking is the fact that people talk about the stuff blowing up, and it won't. The only way that it can blow up is if it's in an enclosed area. It can't even burn unless it's in the right mixture with air. However, if it is in the right mixture with air, it can make one heck of a hot fire, and I don't want to belittle the strength of this stuff. But of course that's why we want it, because it's got energy, isn't it? If it didn't burn, nobody would want it.
There are so many LNG plants being proposed, but there's no way they could all be built, right?
That's absolutely true. It is astounding to me. For instance, to go back to Fall River. They've always given this argument that they're the ones because they have to bring natural gas into the Boston market. Well, that's ridiculous. The Boston market can be fed from New Brunswick or Texas or Down East Maine or any place, same as it is today. There's so many of them that have already been approved even, let alone the ones that have not yet been approved. There's no need for any more if a certain number of them get built, so why would people keep spending money on applications that aren't really strong applications? I don't get it.
What do you think the chances are of the Downeast LNG and Quoddy Bay LNG projects getting approved?
I think it's entirely in Canada's hands. This is my personal view on the thing. [The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] does not have a record of turning anybody down, even stupid proposals, so why they'd turn down one that maybe wasn't so stupid, I don't know. But if Canada says you can't go through [Head Harbour Passage], then you can't go through there. I assume it'll end up in international court sometime. But maybe they'll resolve it before that, I don't know. So, I really think that's the biggest stumbling block.
After writing the book, have you come down on one side or the other? Are you pro-LNG in Maine right now?
With reservations, yeah. I think that if a company were to come into Maine, they must be responsible. They must be respectful of the area they're coming into. They must build a facility that fits where they're trying to build it.
Would you feel comfortable living in the vicinity of an LNG terminal?
I might not want to be within a mile of it, but I'd be pretty content to have it beyond that. And there's probably no reason at all why I shouldn't be within a mile of it, either. I think it'd be kind of fun to watch the ships go by and that kind of stuff. I think it's so much less apt to have a problem in a rural area than so many things that we take for granted that I just don't worry about it. When the people from Robbinston went down to Maryland and talked to people on the street about how they felt about living next to an LNG terminal, most of them didn't even know it was there. That's pretty cool. I think that any such plant is going to do its very best to be a good neighbor.
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