What officially was a public hearing mutated at times into a boisterous and emotional demonstration against a multi-billion-dollar concept, a potential excavator to help a bankrupt city dig its way out of financial peril.
In five years, if it comes to fruition, a liquefied natural gas facility will have created thousands of jobs and generated more than $700 million in tax revenue for the host city, county, and state, according to an analysis by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association.
Unstated was the fact that the bankrupt City of Chester would be an ideal site. Once an international shipbuilding power, it has a port with easy access to the ocean. And could it ever use the money.
Yet the sign-hoisting Chester residents among the standing-room-only crowd at the hearing at Widener University on Tuesday, convened by the state-appointed Philadelphia LNG task force, emphatically said no, thank you.
The reaction was “understandable,” Carl A. Marrara, the manufacturers association’s executive director, said after he testified. But he argued that making the gas in this area would be a far better alternative than importing it from Russia.
Task force member Toby Rice, head of EQT Corp., a Pittsburgh company that is one of the country’s largest gas producers, said that the protesters were so focused on the environmental and safety issues that they were ignoring the economic “opportunity.”
» READ MORE: Chester’s bankruptcy was 70 years in the making
Michael T. Doweary, the state receiver who nine months ago took the city into what has become a contentious and often ugly bankruptcy proceeding, and Stefan Roots, who is expected to become mayor in January because he is running unopposed in the general election, are siding with the protesters. For Chester, they suggested, the prospective plant may well be fool’s gold.
It’s not about the money, they say, nor is it exclusively about hazards and pollution, which have been focal points of LNG protests around the country. They hold that it’s very much about the future of Chester’s economy and what kind of a city it will be when it emerges from bankruptcy, whenever that might be.
Said longtime activist Zulene Mayfield, after her testimony had elicited the loudest cheers at the hearing, “It would be like another nail in the coffin.”
The plant
No proposed site has been identified officially, but as The Inquirer has reported, a New York firm, Penn LNG, headed by a Philadelphia native, has wanted to build an export terminal along the waterfront in Chester or a neighboring area to exploit the state’s bounty of shale gas and escalating worldwide demand.
Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland, whom Roots defeated in the May primary, said in an interview Tuesday that he had concerns and had not yet made up his mind about the plant. He reiterated that position the next day at a city council meeting.
He said that safety is an issue, and that an undetermined number of residents in riverfront neighborhoods would have to be displaced to make way for a buffer zone.
But Kirkland, who has had a deteriorating relationship with the receiver’s office, has met several times with company officials and said last year that the plant would “probably put us in a great financial position for decades to come.”
He said at last week’s council meeting that he never said he supported such a plant in Chester, but that he had “a right and a duty to listen” to anyone offering ideas that might ultimately benefit the city.
» READ MORE: The prospect of an LNG plant caught Chester residents by surprise
What is believed to be the targeted Chester site currently houses a 60-acre warehouse property and formerly was occupied by a Ford Motor Co. plant in the city’s industrial heyday. It’s about a half-mile north of the Commodore Barry Bridge.
The plant presumably would be similar to those constructed along the Gulf Coast as the nation has become a natural-gas exporter. Massive refrigeration units cool natural gas sufficiently to liquify it. It then is stored and shipped in insulated tanks and reheated into vapor form. The nearest large-scale LNG plant, in Cove Point, Md., on the west bank of the Chesapeake Bay, has been the target of protests.
LNG proponents say it is gentler on the environment than traditional fossil fuels. On its site, Penn LNG said it planned to build a “state-of-the-art near-zero-emissions facility.” But environmentalists contend that all the processing and shipping represent a major source of pollution and greenhouse gases. They also say that potential explosions present eminent danger to residents.
While such explosions appear to have happened rarely, last year one occurred at an LNG plant in Freeport, La.; no injuries or deaths were reported.
The receiver’s office holds…
Read More: Chester bankruptcy receiver, residents wary of LNG prospects