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BP plans Northeast LNG port New Jersey facility would provide market for Caribbean production Allen Baker Petroleum News Contributing Writer
With proposals for new LNG terminals popping up all over the map, BP is going for the energy-hungry Northeast market.
The company plans to build a big LNG terminal in New Jersey designed to handle enough liquefied natural gas to pour 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day into the Northeast pipeline system from about a hundred dockings a year.
That would make it about 20 percent larger than Cove Point, the largest LNG terminal currently operating.
Shipping directly to the big Northeast population centers bypasses pipeline bottlenecks and accesses a market where gas brings a premium price.
BP has plenty of supply from the big LNG plant at Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. The company already is shipping product from there to Dominion’s Cove Point LNG port on Chesapeake Bay south of Baltimore, and has secured about 30 percent of the capacity at Cove Point.
BP owns a third of the Atlantic Co. of Trinidad and Tobago, which has the big liquefaction plant there that began shipping LNG in 1999 and still has major expansions in the works.
“This facility (in New Jersey) will provide an exclusive import terminal for BP’s use for a lot of the product that’s coming up (from Trinidad and Tobago),” said Howard Miller, a BP spokesman. Permit applications coming BP is preparing applications for the terminal, and intends to file them this month, Miller said. It’ll take about 18 months for the permitting to be completed, and gas could start flowing sometime in 2008.
“We haven’t put a dollar figure on it as yet,” Miller said, but the price will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
BP has options on the site, about 175 acres along the Delaware in an industrial area. Only about 40 acres will be needed for the terminal facilities, so there is plenty of buffer. The site is in an industrial area adjacent to a coal-fired cogeneration plant and a chemical plant.
There are just a few residences interspersed in the area, Miller said, and officials in nearby cities are being contacted to address their concerns. As for environmental concerns along the river, “we’ll have very little need for impacting any of the wetlands areas,” he said. Easy access to three big pipelines “Two interstate pipelines intersect at this property, and a third is nearby,” Miller said. The site is downstream of Philadelphia with plenty of depth to handle the big new LNG supertankers, and the dock will be constructed to handle them, he said.
The LNG would be unloaded and stored at the site, regasified there and then sent out into the pipeline system. It would provide about 60 permanent technical and managerial jobs, with hundreds employed for the construction process.
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