Cove Point LNG Export Terminal Approved; Dominion Resources -- September 29, 2014

Comment: if one can get a LNG-export terminal approved this close to Washington, DC, on the Chesapeake Bay, it seems it would be very difficult to deny a permit elsewhere if all conditions were met. The only "new" condition I can think of is whether one of the approving agencies could question the "need" for yet another LNG-export terminal. But for me, this is the tipping point when it comes to LNG-export terminals in the US. 

Link here.

U.S. federal regulators on Monday approved construction of Dominion Resources Inc's liquefied natural gas export project in Cove Point, Maryland.

Cove Point is the fourth U.S. LNG export project to get the green light to begin construction from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

It will be able to export up to 5.75 million metric tons of LNG a year when fully operational.

Dominion's facility is one of about two dozen projects that hope to ship a growing bounty of domestic natural gas to countries in Asia and Europe.

The Cove Point site, a little more than an hour's drive southeast of Washington, D.C. on Chesapeake Bay, boasts four large storage tanks and a pier built in the 1970s to import LNG from Algeria, underscoring just how much U.S. market dynamics have changed.

Construction is estimated to cost between $3.4 billion and $3.8 billion, the company said, adding that it has fully subscribed the marketed capacity of the project with 20-year service agreements that will see LNG shipped to Japan and India. 

Most interesting thing about this article? No one sent me the link; I didn't see it in any of the headlines of the "things" I routinely read; it was buried pretty deep at Rigzone. I easily could have missed it. US LNG-export licenses are becoming a "dog-bites-man" story. Interesting.

FERC has approved three other LNG export projects, all in the Gulf of Mexico: Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass, the Freeport LNG Development project and Sempra Energy's Cameron facility. Some 14 more projects are pending with FERC with additional applications expected.

The project has been criticized by environmental groups. It lies close to hundreds of homes in the town of Lusby, a golf course and a state park, as well as the complex ecosystem of Chesapeake Bay itself, the largest estuary in the United States.

From Yahoo!In-Play, September 30, 2014: The construction of the export project, which is estimated to cost between $3.4 billion and $3.8 billion, will create thousands of skilled construction jobs, 75 permanent jobs and an additional $40 million in annual tax revenue to Calvert County. Other economic benefits included millions of dollars of new revenues for Maryland and the federal government as well as a reduction in the nation's trade deficit by billions of dollars annually.

******************************

His "Walter Cronkite Moment"

Senior citizens will remember the evening Lyndon B. Johnson lost the American voter on his Vietnam War. The story is apocryphal but the timeline was not.

With this op-ed in The Los Angeles Times, one wonders if we aren't seeing the "Walter Cronkite moment" for Barack H. Obama and the ObamaWar.

t's funny how President Obama is always talking about "I" and "me" whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it's "they" and "we" when mistakes are made.

For instance, for years, Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq war and how he withdrew American troops. "You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say," he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. "I said I'd end the war in Iraq. I ended it."

Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama's decision to pull all of our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. "What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops]."

On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of CBS' "60 Minutes" noted comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Clapper said, "We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight."

"That's true. That's absolutely true," Obama replied. "Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria."

Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a "former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq," who was, in Lake's words, "flabbergasted" by the president's remarks. "Either the president doesn't read the intelligence he's getting or he's bulls—ing," the official said.

It's almost surely the latter.

Now it's "we" and "they" where it used to be "I." Or "Michelle and I." 

By the way, there was a great question on NRP today when discussing the ObamaWar: "Exactly who are we bombing in Syria?" Great question.