LNG company seeking approval for North Jacksonville production, shipping complex

Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, sent this today.  She is in the Jacksonville area speaking on this for the Sierra Club:

Eagle LNG facility makes application in the JAX port area of north Florida for domestic making and shipment. Pay attention folks. Florida is poising itself to become the next exporter of fracked continental gas. These are dangerous facilities that leak and explode. We should not have them on our shorelines or inland for that matter. They intend to ship the cargo by trains and vessels. Permitting has not been approved.

This article is in the Jacksonville Times Union today, Feb. 18, 2017.  Read the original here.

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Posted February 17, 2017 05:56 pm | Updated 06:07 pm

By  Steve Patterson

LNG company seeking approval for North Jacksonville production, shipping complex

Eagle LNG Partners posted this rendering online as one possible layout for its liquefied natural gas production and storage complex off Zoo Parkway in North Jacksonville. (Eagle LNG)

A company planning a liquefied natural gas terminal in North Jacksonville is asking the federal government for approval to start construction.

Eagle LNG Partners’ terminal off Zoo Parkway along the St. Johns River would be bigger than the company planned a couple of years ago, able to process up to 132 million cubic feet of gas per day and store 12 million gallons of cooled liquefied gas.

Construction could start early next year and finish in 2019 if the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission clears the company to start work, Eagle LNG CEO Dick Brown said in a release. The company has asked for a decision by December.

The project, which the regulatory commission application prices at more than $300 million, would be separate from a production and storage facility the company is already building off Normandy Boulevard on Jacksonville’s Westside.

The North Jacksonville complex would be built on 194 acres divided between buildings for liquefaction – the process that condenses natural gas into a liquid – and storage and loading facilities for moving the gas onto ships and trucks.

The Westside facility will target domestic markets, including fueling Crowley Maritime LNG-powered ships, while the North Jacksonville site is meant to reach customers in the Caribbean and Latin America, company spokeswoman Blaire Lancaster said Friday.

The site would have just eight to 12 jobs, but could add about $34 million yearly to the region’s economy, company officials told the commission.

The 12-million-gallon LNG storage tank, 50 percent bigger than Eagle LNG planned in 2015, would hold the equivalent of a billion cubic feet of natural gas that hasn’t been liquefied, the commission said in a public notice this week.

The company plans to eventually build three liquefaction “trains” that would process gas supplied by Peoples Gas into LNG.

LNG could be hauled from the plant by truck as containerized cargo or pumped to small or medium-sized LNG carrier ships at a loading platform by an 885-foot concrete jetty.

Texas-based Eagle LNG is asking Energy Department permission to export a million tons of LNG yearly.

The company told the regulatory commission its North Jacksonville site would be a good fit for carriers serving Caribbean islands with small, shallow harbors.

“Absent an LNG export terminal of the size and scale that Eagle LNG proposes to construct in Jacksonville, the target markets in the Caribbean might not be served by U.S. LNG export facilities,” said the application that company attorney James Bowe filed to the commission Jan. 31.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263