Washington Co. LNG foes file new complaints
An Eastport group has filed new objections to a proposed $600 million liquefied natural gas terminal in the Washington County community of Robbinston, according to the Bangor Daily News.
Downeast LNG first proposed the terminal in 2004, raising objections in December 2011 from opposition group Save Passamaquoddy Bay, which complained that the company was not meeting deadlines for providing environmental data to federal regulators.
The new complaints — two filed in September and another in July — focus on a 1976 University of Maine study and a 2004 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study that suggest offshore construction in the bay would upset long-settled heavy metals, like mercury, that entered the water from a Baileyville paper mill upstream.
The new filings claim that the company ignored the later EPA study in its most recent environmental impact statement.
The company's president, Dean Girdis, told Mainebiz in 2010 that he hoped to receive approval for the project from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by 2011, seeking state approvals afterward.
About the latest complaints, Girdis told the BDN that the company does not plan to respond.
"Downeast LNG believes that the Biological Assessment prepared by FERC with the input of multiple federal and state agencies addresses any potential impacts as a result of the proposed project, including those issues raised in the submission by SPB and that said impacts would be minimal," Girdis said Sunday in a prepared statement, the BDN reported.
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