As industrial facilities go, LNG terminals are generally among the cleanest and quietest to be found. But every terminal has to start somewhere. And that starting place comes with a history.
It may be the pristine coastal forests of Oregon or Maine. Or, as in the case of the UK’s Isle of Grain LNG terminal, it may be a site where earlier industrial activity—and nature—have left footprints.
Beneath the gleaming, visually impressive terminal on the Thames estuary in north Kent lie some legacy effects of the previous tenant, the BP Kent oil refinery. And before even that, some furrier tenants called the site home.
Building the terminal there had to contend with both realities.
What’s there
The site of the current terminal began modern (i.e., post-World War II) industrial life as BP’s Kent refinery, built in the early 1950s and closed as a refinery in 1983.
Also, the site was home to one of the UK’s five LNG peak-shaving plants operated since 1981 by Transco Ltd., part of what then was British Gas, which purchased the refinery land to build an LNG terminal. But increased North Sea gas production torpedoed those earlier terminal plans.
Transco became part of Lattice Group PLC, which in 2002 merged with National Grid Group PLC to form National Grid Transco, parent of Grain LNG. But in late 2000, plans were already forming to build the Grain LNG terminal to address declining natural gas supplies to the UK. That project started up in late 2005.
Grain LNG declined to specify to OGJ what its own environmental surveys found other than to call them “legacy contamination issues” and frequently to note its efforts to “protect ecology” during site development. The company did admit that site access “to protect ecology…was often limited by the presence of asbestos.”
Anyone familiar with refinery sites even in environmentally conscious Britain can imagine what else lay on and beneath the surface.
But Grain also cited its efforts in another environmental issue that came with the site.
The Isle of Grain (from Old English greon meaning “gravel”) is not an island at all but the north end of the Hoo (OE for “spur of land”) Peninsula. A line of sand and clay hills dominates its landscape surrounded by extensive marshland consisting of alluvial silt.
In addition to the anticipated contamination problems Grain LNG faced, it turns out that Hoo Peninsula is, according to the company, one of the “few remaining strongholds in Britain” for water voles.
A water vole, according to the BBC website, is a small mammal that grows to a body length of 5-8 in. and has dark fur, a round body, a short, fat face, and a long, fur-covered tail. Anyone fortunate enough to grow up in the UK since 1908 probably knows something about water voles: A main character in Kenneth Grahame’s famous children’s book Wind in the Willows is a water vole named Ratty.
Protecting ‘Ratty’
But water voles are not rats. More to the point, these mammals’ numbers in the UK have been in near freefall for decades. Intrusions of agricultural, industrial, and residential development into their marshy habitats have combined with predation by the American mink (Of course, the culprit has to be American.) to shrink the water vole population to a few 100,000 recently, from an estimated 2 million in 1990, according to several websites that track Ratty’s descendants.
The Grain LNG terminal cannot be blamed for being the first industrial intruder on the water vole’s habitat, but it has nonetheless taken on responsibility not to aggravate the decline. The company says it has embarked on a coordinated “mink strategy” that involves landowners and statutory authorities working together. “The aim is to maintain the current distribution and numbers of water vole on the Isle of Grain by controlling mink” before they reach the site.
This requires close communication with landowners and other organizations, interested in conserving the creature, about any occurrences of mink within Hoo Peninsula. Efforts also include monthly checks of rafts on site for evidence of mink and prompt trapping if such is reported.
Other environmental sensibilities probably prevent Grain from turning this trapping effort into another profitable sideline. A modern dilemma if there ever was one.
But LNG is a modern commodity—and a clean one. And natural gas can warm almost as well as a mink coat.
