Offshore Threats: Liquefied Natural Gas, Terrorism, and Environmental Debate in Connecticut

Abstract

Broadwater Energy is one of a number of recent proposals to construct a liquefied natural gas facility along the East Coast of the United States. The proposal calls for the construction of an import and regasification terminal in Long Island Sound, roughly halfway between the states of New York and Connecticut. First made public in 2004 by its sponsors, TransCanada and Shell, the Broadwater proposal has inspired opposition from a range of interest groups. An examination of the Broadwater debate with a focus on arguments made by Connecticut residents in the months leading up to the release in late 2006 of the proposal's Draft Environmental Impact Statement reveals explicit and implicit points of overlap between concerns about the facility's environmental impacts and concerns about its status as a potential terrorist target. Discussions about terrorism deployed in the Broadwater debate have initiated and informed a politics of scale through which themes common to environmental debates have been transformed. This transformation, in turn, highlights the discursive and material influence of terrorism in contemporary U.S. society. Concerns about terrorist attacks have been deployed by activists to enhance the strength of an otherwise environmental debate and, in the process, those concerns have developed the potential to shape land use policy in Long Island Sound.

Broadwater Energy es una de varias propuestas recientes para construir una instalación de gas natural licuado a lo largo de la Costa Este de Estados Unidos. La propuesta implica la construcción de una terminal de importación y regasificación en Long Island Sound, aproximadamente a media distancia entre los estados de Nueva York y Connecticut. Publicada en 2004 por primera vez por sus patrocinadores, TransCanada y Shell, la propuesta Broadwater ha provocado la oposición de varios grupos de interés. Un análisis del debate de Broadwater con un enfoque en los argumentos presentados por los residentes de Connecticut en los meses anteriores a la publicación de la Declaración Preliminar del Impacto Ambiental de la Propuesta revela puntos explícitos e implícitos de coincidencia entre la preocupación del impacto ambiental de las instalaciones y su condición como posible objetivo terrorista. Las discusiones sobre terrorismo que se generaron en el debate de Broadwater han iniciado e informado una política de escala a través de la cual se han transformado temas comunes a los debates ambientales. A su vez, esta transformación recalca la influencia discursiva y material del terrorismo en la sociedad estadounidense contemporánea. Los activistas han desplegado inquietudes sobre ataques terroristas para intensificar la fuerza de un debate que de otra manera es de naturaleza ambiental, y en el proceso, esas inquietudes han desarrollado el potencial de conformar las normas de uso de la tierra en Long Island Sound.

Key Words:

• environmentalism
• liquefied natural gas
• Long Island Sound
• scale
• terrorism

关键词:

• 环保主义
• 液化天然气
• 长岛海峡
• 规模
• 恐怖主义

Palabras clave:

• ambientalismo
• gas natural licuado
• Long Island Sound
• escala
• terrorismo

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Audrey Kobayashi for her thoughtful and encouraging comments. I am also very grateful to the article's two anonymous reviewers, who pressed me to take my ideas further than I had. Thanks as well to Martin Pasqualetti and Colin Flint for their early thoughts on the project, and to Rebekah Irwin for multiple readings.

Notes

¹ Not included in this list are additional concerns about the potential use of taxpayer dollars to fund security measures for the facility or to pay for emergency response in the event of an accident or terrorist attack at the facility. Although I do not focus on these concerns in this article, they have remained important among opponents.

² Residents in both Connecticut and New York oppose the project, and their arguments typically echo one another. The two sides often feel very distinct and disjointed from one another, however, due in large part to the geographic boundary created by the LIS between Connecticut and New York's Long Island. My direct experiences with the opposition have been almost entirely restricted to the activities of those on the Connecticut side of LIS.

³ These include facilities in Everett, Massachusetts; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Elba Island, Georgia; and Lusby, Maryland. All were constructed in the 1970s. A fifth import facility is located in the Gulf of Mexico, south of Louisiana.

⁴ That review process begins with a prefiling stage, during which information is shared and meetings are held among federal agencies, energy companies, and the public. Next, companies file their application formally with FERC, which then produces a Draft Environmental Impact Statement and a final Environmental Impact Statement. FERC then denies or approves the project and forwards it for permitting according to the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and Coastal Zone Management Act.

⁵ A fire at a Cleveland, Ohio, storage facility in 1944 destroyed a residential neighborhood, killing 128 people and injuring hundreds more. One worker was killed in a 1979 explosion at the Cove Point import terminal in Lusby, Maryland. In 2004, an explosion occurred at a liquefaction facility in Skikda, Algeria, killing twenty-seven.

⁶ One individual involved in the thwarted 1999 “millennium” plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport entered the United States as a stowaway on an LNG tanker in 1995. A related case linking suspect workers with natural gas facilities occurred in Boston in 2006, when fifteen undocumented workers employed by ExxonMobil were arrested while trying to access equipment stored at an adjacent natural gas storage facility. The arrest was used by some LNG opponents to support their position.