Woodside Natural Gas’ liquefied natural gas (LNG) project offshore Southern California remains at least two months away from completing a global lifecycle assessment of its greenhouse gas (GHG) impact, a spokesperson said Tuesday. Pending implementation work on the state’s GHG emissions rules is needed by the developer of the ship-to-ship transfer and regasification project 28 miles offshore

In March the ongoing environmental review of the project was suspended by the U.S. Coast Guard, pending the completion of GHG lifecycle assessment (see Daily GPI, March 6).

With the help of two consultants, Santa Monica, CA-based Woodside is working on the lifecycle environmental analysis, and it needs the added detail on what the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will be requiring in terms of GHG reductions and credits for meeting requirements that won’t be fully effective until 2012.

UK-based Worley Parsons and the global environmental firm AECOM, ENSR are helping complete the lifecycle analysis, which the company hopes will get the Coast Guard environmental work restarted.

The lifecycle GHG work is the first of any serious magnitude in the LNG siting process, looking at the project’s GHG footprint all the way from the extraction of the gas in Australia through the shipping to Southern California and the offloading and 28-mile undersea pipeline. Also in the final report resulting from this analysis will be comparisons with lifecycles for similar amounts of energy from other sources domestically — U.S. pipeline supplies, coal and maybe even renewables, according to Woodside.

In March the LNG project proponents estimated the lifecycle work would be completed by late summer or early fall. That timeline has now passed the target for when the draft environmental documents would be released and the public hearing process begun.

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