With its senior officers declaring they will win the fight, the sponsors of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal in Long Beach (CA) harbor fired shots in three different directions Thursday — in a state court, at city hall and in the FERC corridors in Washington, DC. In the end, Sound Energy Solutions (SES) expects to be vindicated before the Port of Long Beach Harbor Commission.

In addition to seeking a court mandate to force the port to complete the environmental review process on the proposed LNG terminal site, SES filed a claim with the City of Long Beach seeking reimbursement for its aborted permitting costs, which it estimates now total $80 million. Finally, in response to an opposition group’s appeal to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), SES informed the federal regulators it is seeking to complete the environmental review.

When pressed, SES CEO Tom Giles would not speculate on when the environmental process might be completed. However, he did say that the company assured FERC it is still actively engage in the permitting process. “We believe the harbor commission erred in unfairly abandoning work on the EIR without providing a full accounting of all information to the public,” Giles said.

Just last month SES was spurned by a harbor commission board that refused to complete several years of environmental review work, prompting a filing Thursday asking a state Superior Court in Los Angeles to force the port to complete the job it took on jointly with FERC more than three years ago. Giles said he is confident the company will eventually get the writ.

A harbor commission spokesperson said Thursday that the port governing board would not have any comment on the court filing and that the writ of mandate was forwarded to the Long Beach City Attorney’s Office for review and action. Eventually, the city attorney will file a response to the court, the spokesperson said, but it is not expected to be done anytime soon.

In a writ of mandate, SES, a joint venture of Mitsubishi and ConocoPhillips, asked the court to order the harbor commissioners to complete the environmental impact report (EIR) on SES’s proposed $800 million, 1 Bcf/d receiving terminal.

“The Harbor Commission wrongly curtailed an established environmental process that is designed to objectively evaluate the project on a comprehensive basis and provide the facts to government agencies and the public so they can make an informed decision,” Giles said.

With a legal opinion supporting the move, the Port of Long Beach Harbor Commission Jan. 22 terminated the long-ongoing environmental assessment, rejecting a four-year-old SES proposal. The nearly billion-dollar proposal had been floundering since mid-2006 with numerous delays in getting past the draft environmental review stage that began in late 2005. Finally, the Long Beach city attorney concluded that the environmental impact work would never be in a legally binding document.

Giles said SES now wants the court to force the harbor commission to direct the Port of Long Beach staff to complete the EIR process as required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Otherwise, SES argued that the harbor oversight board’s action will “set a precedent with statewide implications” for other projects examined under CEQA.

The harbor commission action, without the court’s clarification, “deprives an applicant of the certainty and finality in the permitting process,” said SES’s Rick Hernandez, COO. “It suggests that at any time during the environmental review process, a project applicant may be at risk of having its project abandoned at any moment.”

“We are not asking at this time for approval of the project,” Giles said, “just that the environmental review process be completed. We believe that there are many issues that the court would want to consider and that basic fairness and due process are fundamental legal principles.”

Saying the process was cut off “prematurely and arbitrarily,” SES said the harbor commission’s action has prevented the public from a fair hearing of the facts (about safety, environment, energy and economic impacts.

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