Plans for offshore gas terminal spark controversy | StateImpact Pennsylvania Skip Navigation

Plans for offshore gas terminal spark controversy

Plans to build a new natural gas terminal off the New York and New Jersey coast are attracting controversy, according to the Associated Press.

Liberty Natural Gas is looking to build a new $600 million deep-water port in federal waters. It’s designed to bring more natural gas to the New York area during peak demand times.

From the AP: 

Business and labor groups support the plan, which was first proposed in 2008 and is projected to generate 800 construction jobs. But environmentalists, fishing groups and some elected officials say it is a dangerous, unnecessary project, given that America is awash in large supplies of domestically produced natural gas, much of which is produced in the Marcellus Shale formation just west of New York.

A public hearing on the proposal last week drew more than 1,000 people, many of whom said they fear the project, dubbed Port Ambrose, is really a Trojan horse designed to be switched to an export facility once it is built, to facilitate the sale of gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, to overseas markets.

“It seeks to bring us liquefied natural gas — a dirty, foreign, expensive fossil fuel that will be a target for terrorism, and threaten fisheries, clean ocean jobs and tourism,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action.

Liberty strongly denies having any plans to export the gas. “It’s crazy to try to export gas from that location,” Liberty CEO Roger Whelan told the AP. “It would be the most expensive gas on the planet.”

The project currently is under review by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Up Next

EPA's repackaging of power plant rules could thwart court challenges