LNG shipments to US in jeopardy?

AN ARTICLE in Friday’s New York Times claimed that Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) shipments into the United States from Trinidad and Tobago and other nations could be in jeopardy because of safety concerns about regasification terminals. The article, written by Simon Romero, said due to the increasingly limited supply of natural gas in the US within recent years, American energy companies announced plans to build a host of new terminals where large amounts of gas could be imported by tankers as LNG and then distributed by pipeline to American customers.

However, the article claimed that “a growing outcry over the environmental and safety risks associated with the terminals is blocking those plans in one community after another, eroding all hopes that imports of liquefied gas will provide any relief from high prices for years to come.” The article went further to state that several plans to construct regasification terminals in Mexico, California and Alaska have been scrapped. The article also questioned whether the five existing regasification terminals on the American eastern coast could adequately handle the increasing LNG shipments coming mainly from TT and Algeria with Qatar, Indonesia, Russia and Peru waiting in the wings. TT currently accounts for 68 percent of all LNG imported into the US and Prime Minister Patrick Manning said this figure could increase based on current trends in the industry.

“Experts disagree on just how dangerous it may be to handle large shipments of imported gas. In its liquefied form, it is not generally combustible,” the article said. Although Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has spoken in favour of terminal development, the article said: “Those arguments have made little headway with people who would be living near those operations.” Former Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj said there are legal matters on this particular issue currently before the courts in TT.