It's easier to obstruct than to build. Organizing protests and filing lawsuits against construction projects require less work and expenditure than the targeted activities do.
Popular culture exalts obstructionism, making it even easier to practice. Financial support flows to groups dedicated to resisting any and all physical manifestations of economic development. Activists who block big projects become local and sometimes national heroes. Movies are made about their righteous adventures in conflict with powerful corporations and governments.
Relative ease and popular embrace combine to make obstructionism a potent and increasingly systematic force in modern politics. It's a force dedicated not to safe, orderly development, which is a good thing, but to no development at all, which is not. And it influences politics no less in the growth-oriented US than anywhere else.
Avoiding crisis
Because of obstructionism, the US isn't taking the steps it must if it's to avoid a crisis involving the supply of natural gas. Economic growth, escalating requirements for electrical power, and environmental concerns promise to increase gas demand, which can't be met by gas from fields now on production. Because of obstructionism, however, the federal government won't lease acreage offering the potential for discovery of fields large enough to make a difference.
Also because of obstructionism, potential contributions are shrinking from what should be a rapidly growing source of gas supply. Resistance is strong and growing, especially on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, to construction of facilities for the import and regasification of liquefied natural gas.
A June 14 article by Sara Banaszak and Franz Traxler of PFC Energy, Washington, DC, documented the resistance to efforts to expand LNG import capacity in the US (OGJ, June 14, 2004, p. 20). Sponsors of two projects each on the East Coast and in California have canceled their plans at least in part because of local opposition.
In California, three surviving proposals face heavy opposition, according to the authors, who didn't have enough information to assess the degree of public acceptance of a fourth proposal. No Californian LNG proposal fell into categories of low or moderate opposition.
On the East Coast, in addition to the two canceled projects, two proposals face heavy opposition. One project faces moderate opposition and another one low resistance, according to Banaszak and Traxler.
On the Gulf Coast, public acceptance of LNG import projects is much greater than it is elsewhere. Of 16 gulf proposals identified by the authors, only two face heavy opposition—both near Mobile, Ala. Developers of the region's only canceled project, in Louisiana, withdrew their proposal for reasons other than opposition. For remaining proposals in Texas and Louisiana, assessable opposition is no greater than moderate.
To be sure, not all of the LNG import projects proposed in the US can be built. Competition and economics can be as deadly as obstructionism. Furthermore, much local opposition represents understandable concern, as opposed to antidevelopment bias. Presented with the choice between having an LNG terminal built within view and not having one built there, who would select the first option?
The choices in LNG facility siting, however, aren't that simple. They involve not just what a relatively few people in one area see but whether significant numbers of people throughout the country have affordable energy. So the issues are national as well as local. The country needs more gas than it can produce from accessible land and import through existing pipelines and LNG terminals. It needs more terminals—and not just in Texas and Louisiana. It needs them soon. And it needs them even though no one has yet figured out how to make an LNG terminal or any other physical facility invisible and free of risk.
Obstructionism's reach
While most opposition to LNG terminals is local in nature, it feeds off obstructionism, which is broader in reach and more rigidly disposed against development. Local opposition in concert with obstructionism readily overwhelms efforts by responsible developers to address project-specific concerns.
Where the antidevelopment political agenda lurks, therefore, blocking construction of LNG terminals is easy—too easy for the national good. The challenge for industry is to distinguish between obstructionism, which it must fight, from legitimate local worry, to which it must always and honestly respond.
