THE OWNERS of the ambitious Calypso pipeline, an $800-m project intended to bring gas into Port Everglades in Florida, announced a major change of plans in early April. Instead of using a port on Grand Bahama Island, from where a plant would pump the gas under the Gulf Stream to Fort Lauderdale, the Calypso owners now propose a “‘deepwater port” 16km off Port Everglades, where LNG transporters could dock at buoys and from where the gas could be pumped to Florida. The reason for this is that, while the pipeline has had all its US federal, state, and local permits for almost two years, the Bahamian permit process has been dragging. After four years of talk in the Bahamas, “‘We have no indication from the government of a timetable” to approve the project, said Dan McGinnis, a vice president of Suez Energy North America, part of a European conglomerate that purchased the Calypso project from Enron.
In consequence, the company has decided on the deepwater port option, which is basically a location offshore where the LNG carriers will anchor at buoys that can connect them to the pipeline. The firm is making a similar proposal for the waters off Massachusetts to serve New England. “We know there’s a huge demand in the United States for natural gas, and we want to respond to that as fast as possible,” McGinnis said. The key problem is how and where to convert the LNG to gas: though the industry insists such regasification plants are safe, many environmentalists are concerned about them. A crack in a plant in Cleveland sparked fires that killed more than 125 in 1994.
Rather than go through an arduous approval process for a regasification plant on mainland United States, Suez thought it might be easier to get the Bahamas to approve the plants and then pipe the gas to Florida. Those efforts have stalled.
Under the new proposal, Suez Energy would build a fleet of expensive LNG carriers that would contain equipment to convert the super-cooled liquid to gas at the deepwater port. The gas then would be pumped to the mainland. While some of the federal, state, and local pipeline approvals would still apply, Calypso would need new approvals from the US Coast Guard to have the buoy-port system approved.
At the end of 2004, pipeline officials estimated that the project could be operating by 2007 or 2008. McGinnis said on 4 April that regulatory approvals will probably take until the latter part of 2007, and operations could begin by 2009 or 2010. In the Calypso project, Suez had originally partnered with El Paso, a member of the FPL Group, but FPL has now dropped out, and McGinnis said the company is now doing the pipeline without partners.