FERC Chairman Pat Wood indicated Tuesday that a final decision on whether Cove Point LNG will be permitted to retain its certificate to reactivate and expand its liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility should be issued before the end of the year.

“I don’t think we want this thing to linger past the end of the year,” he told reporters during a press briefing that followed the regular Commission meeting. As for which way FERC was leaning, he said “I can’t talk about that because a) I don’t know it, and if I did, I can’t tell you anyway.”

The Commission held a closed-door technical conference last week during which it heard from parties about the potential security risks associated with re-opening the Cove Point LNG import facility in Lusby, MD, due to its close proximity to the Constellation Energy-owned Calvert Cliffs nuclear facility. The two facilities are located within four miles of each other.

FERC earlier this month announced that it would reconsider its decision to allow Cove Point to re-start its import operations after Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) denounced the agency’s post-Sept. 11 action on the Senate floor, noting that it posed a “nightmare scenario.” Mikulski demanded that Wood review the Cove Point ruling in the “interest of national security and national safety.”

Wood defended the Commission’s decision in October to grant Cove Point certificate authorization, noting that “the issue of terrorism had been raised in the environmental assessment” that FERC performed on the project last summer, even before the events of Sept. 11. “A lot of [people] think this is the first time that terrorism [has] ever come up in an environmental assessment,” he told reporters Tuesday.

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