Mobile Register, 12/23/03

By BEN RAINES and BILL FINCH
Staff Reporter

A new review of studies about liquefied natural gas safety -- ordered by the U.S. energy secretary and described by him as a "comprehensive review" -- is in fact narrowly focused, examining only three of the numerous LNG studies available to scientists, according to a spokesman for the federal laboratory performing the work.

In early December, amid allegations that federal officials had misused and mischaracterized the conclusions of several LNG safety studies while pushing to open LNG import terminals in populated areas, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham instructed his agency's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to conduct a review of LNG safety studies.

In a speech at an international energy conference last week in Washington, D.C., Abraham promoted the Sandia effort as a "comprehensive re view of LNG safety."

Officials with Sandia and the Department of Energy refused last week to discuss the Sandia findings, but said that at least portions of the review would be released in January. A Sandia spokesman said that the review had been completed and turned over to DOE officials, and that the lab had been asked to analyze only three studies.

One of those three studies, according to the spokesman, was a controversial, non-scientifically reviewed study by Quest Consultants Inc., which predicts that hazards resulting from LNG tanker accidents would be much smaller than those predicted by most scientifically reviewed studies.

Federal officials have frequently cited the Quest study as evidence that LNG terminals pose an acceptable level of risk to the public. The author of the Quest study told the Mobile Register in October that he feared federal officials were misusing his work.

Absent from the Sandia spokesman's list of LNG studies used in his lab's review was a study by Lloyd's Register of Shipping, which explored the possibility that a LNG tanker spill could evolve into a catastrophic loss of the ship and its cargo. Leading LNG scientists have argued that the Lloyd's study and the scenario it describes deserve a careful examination by federal officials who are charged with assessing the safety of LNG facilities.

ExxonMobil Corp. has proposed building a $600 million LNG docking terminal next to a residential neighborhood on Mobile Bay, about two miles south of the Mobile city limits. About twice a week, the facility would receive ships carrying tens of millions of gallons of super-cooled natural gas, which would be offloaded and injected into the nation's natural gas pipeline network.

Abraham, in a speech Thursday morning to the Global LNG Ministerial Summit, said the nation needs "a large and growing market in imported liquefied natural gas," and that the time is right to build terminals, "because LNG has compiled a record that should reassure those concerned about the safety of LNG tankers and onshore facilities."

Federal energy officials have altered regulations in an effort to facilitate the construction of LNG import terminals. The United States has four operational terminals for LNG, all constructed in the 1970s; Abraham said the nation needs 13.

Critics have said that the LNG industry's safety record is irrelevant in the face of new terrorist threats. One facility, the Distrigas LNG terminal in Everett, Mass., a suburb of Boston, was shut down following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It reopened several weeks later, but has remained a focus of debate and protest.

Leading LNG scientist have said that a terror attack on an LNG ship, styled after the boat bomb strike on the USS Cole, could lead to a massive and uncontrollable fireball in one of the nation's ports. If such an attack were to occur as the ship passed through a populated area, such as around Boston Harbor, thousands of people could be killed, according to some scientists.

Questions from Congress:

Some members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, have voiced concern that serious safety risks -- as well as federal laws designed to encourage the siting of LNG terminals in "remote" areas -- are being overlooked, or even ignored, by federal agency officials.

Letters from Shelby to the commandant of the Coast Guard and the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission raise questions about whether federal officials have made improper use of scientific documents as they tried to reassure communities that LNG facilities make good neighbors.

Other letters by U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., to the directors of FERC and the departments of Transportation and Energy, suggest that officials made selective use of information to downplay dangers posed by LNG tanker ships.

Two safety studies in particular, one by Oklahoma-based Quest and one by the London-based Lloyd's Register, lie at the heart of the concerns expressed in the Shelby and Markey letters.

Of those two studies, only the Quest study -- which was commissioned by the DOE -- was included in the government safety review by Sandia National Laboratories, according to Chris Miller, the Sandia spokesman.

Miller said Sandia also examined a frequently noted study by James Fay, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which predicts that a limited release of LNG in Boston Harbor could lead to a fire a half-mile wide, producing second-degree burns a mile away.

The third study in the Sandia review was issued in 2001 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Miller said. The Mobile Register has been unable to determine the NOAA study's findings or the names of its authors.

Both the Quest study and the Lloyd's Register studies were completed within weeks of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Federal officials said that both had been commissioned to help assess the risks of reopening the Boston area's Distrigas LNG terminal.

The studies figured prominently in the government decision to reopen the terminal in Boston Harbor.

Neither of the studies has been critiqued by other scientists in the rigorous process known as peer review. Federal officials, however, have used portions of the studies to portray an accident involving an LNG ship as a relatively contained incident that would pose little threat to surrounding communities.

ExxonMobil officials referred to the studies in presentations earlier this year in Mobile, as did J. Mark Robinson, a top FERC official, during a November public meeting in Mobile called at the behest of Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Mobile.

In federal documents and in letters to Congress, the studies were, in the words of Rep. Markey, "used by the federal government and the (LNG) facility operator to minimize the potential danger of a fire and explosion."

In contrast to the relatively benign risk scenarios frequently offered by federal agency officials, nearly all peer-reviewed LNG studies indicate that a spill and ensuing fire could cause widespread damage.

LNG accident scenarios produced by the Coast Guard, NOAA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California all suggest that a fire resulting from an LNG tanker accident would be at least five or six times larger than the fires predicted by Quest.

No terrorist scenario:

DOE officials have told the Mobile Register that the agency commissioned the Quest study so there would be a safety study of the terrorist threat "specific to Boston Harbor" to use in decision-making.

But the author of the Quest study told the newspaper that he never fully analyzed what would happen if an LNG tanker was ruptured by terrorists in Boston Harbor. Instead, the Quest study focused on the impact of a collision between two ships in "outer Boston Harbor."

In a recent interview, a senior DOE official in Washington, D.C., acknowledged that department officials were surprised to discover that the Quest study did not examine the possibility of a terrorist attack in the harbor. "Quite frankly, we wondered why in the hell they didn't talk about terrorism," said the official, who spoke to the Mobile Register on condition that his name not be used.

Terrorists have demonstrated that an explosive charge can do extensive damage to ships. In 2002, terrorists operating off the coast of Yemen blew a 26-foot-wide hole in the Limburg, a double-hulled French oil tanker.

John Cornwell, author of the Quest study, said in an interview two weeks ago that he had not considered such extensive damage to be a credible scenario in the early days after Sept. 11, 2001, when he analyzed the Boston safety situation.

Cornwell told the Mobile Register that he believed that only an accident involving two ships could produce a major LNG spill, and the only place that could happen near Boston was in "outer Boston Harbor" -- which he identified as the vast unpopulated area between the actual entrance to Boston Harbor and the open Atlantic Ocean.

Cornwell said that his prediction that an LNG tanker accident would result in a small, relatively contained fire was based almost entirely on Quest's assumption that large waves in the outer harbor would limit the spread of LNG.

A number of scientists have recently described the wave theory as little more than an untested hypothesis, and said they are not convinced that waves would limit the spread of LNG in the way that Quest's computer models suggested.

And they added that any scenario involving large waves would not be representative of the usually quiet waters of bays and harbors, where companies are likely to build LNG docking terminals.

The Mobile Register has discovered another assumption in the Quest analysis that may further undercut its usefulness for doing what it was commissioned to do: assessing safety hazards in Boston Harbor.

A review of federal nautical charts and new documents provided by Quest shows that Quest retrieved its average wave height estimates from a buoy anchored in 150 feet of water in the open Atlantic, 16 miles from the entrance to Boston Harbor. Waves as high as 27 feet have been recorded at that buoy.

Shawn Kelly, a Boston Harbor ship pilot who served eight years in the Boston area's Coast Guard unit, said that wave conditions in Boston's outer harbor, which is well protected and nestled behind a series of barrier islands, are nothing like the rough conditions in the Atlantic.

"It's pretty well-protected water," Kelly said in an interview last week, describing the ship channel that begins five miles from the entrance to the harbor. "It's pretty calm once you get in there, unless there is a really big storm."

Last week, Cornwell acknowledged that his study would not be valid for Boston's outer harbor unless wave heights there were typical of the waves measured at the buoy in the Atlantic. Cornwell told the Mobile Register that without the wave data, his study would predict fires as large as those predicted in most LNG studies.

The Lloyd's Register study:

Leading LNG scientists contacted by the Register said it would have been far more useful for Sandia to have re-examined the Lloyd's Register document, rather than the Quest analysis. They called for a major research effort to address threats outlined in the Lloyd's study, which was conducted for the owner of the Boston area's Distrigas LNG terminal two weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"I do think the report is very important, because it breaks new ground on the questions surrounding LNG commerce post-11," said Jerry Havens, a University of Arkansas pro fessor whose scientific work lies at the heart of federal LNG regulations.

Federal agency officials have promoted the Lloyd's finding that no lives have been lost and no land-based property damaged as the result of an LNG shipping accident.

Receiving almost no attention until now is Lloyd's chilling examination of what might happen if terrorists attacked an LNG tanker ship. According to the study, terrorists who blew relatively small holes in the inner and outer hulls of an LNG tank ship could trigger an escalating series of explosions and fires. The ship, said the Lloyd's study, "would become a total loss with a continuous fire that would be inextinguishable until all gas had been consumed."

For reasons not explained, the Lloyd's study did not analyze how large a fire would result from such a major incident.

A group of LNG experts -- including Havens and Fay -- have suggested that a fire resulting from the catastrophic loss of a ship could be more than a mile wide, with flames so hot that people up to two miles away would experience second-degree burns within seconds. Buildings and people closer to the fire would be incinerated, according to the predictions.

Officials with Lloyd's Register refused to discuss the study, saying it was proprietary, and they referred all questions to the owners of the Distrigas facility. Distrigas officials said they were confident in the study's science and its conclusions, but refused to discuss its details.

The Lloyd's study, which the Mobile Register obtained from confidential sources, has never been formally released to the public, though it was distributed to a number of government officials and is sometimes cited in public comments by federal officials.

The study's extensive examination of catastrophic ship failure is only rarely and obliquely referred to in government publications reviewed by the Mobile Register. Instead, the Lloyd's study has most often been used to suggest that a missile attack on an LNG tanker would create only a small fire that would be unlikely to affect people in nearby communities. For instance, a report issued this September by the Congressional Research Service stated that the Lloyd's study "found the risk of a public catastrophe to be small."

The Mobile Register was unable to find such a statement anywhere in the 90-odd pages of the Lloyd's study.

After reviewing a copy of the Lloyd's study provided to him by the newspaper, Havens warned that portions of the study appeared to be incomplete and not sufficiently thorough, but said that the study seemed to mark the first effort to carefully examine the fate of a ship enveloped in a massive LNG fire.


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