A university professor and chemical engineer, Jerry Havens contests the Weaver's Cove containment plan and details the potential damage various LNG spills could do.

01:00 AM EST on Thursday, December 9, 2004

BY MARK REYNOLDS
Journal Staff Writer

FALL RIVER -- An expert hired by the mayor to help shed light on the risks posed by LNG is firing back at the energy developer who has proposed a shipping port on the Taunton River.

At a City Hall news conference yesterday, the expert, Jerry Havens, defended his statements on the shortcomings of the proposed terminal, where tanker ships would deliver large volumes of liquefied natural gas.

Havens is a University of Arkansas professor and chemical engineer who has developed some of the methods that the U.S. government uses to gauge how LNG will behave when it spills.

In late October, lawyers for Weaver's Cove Energy accused him of wildly inflating the dangers posed by the developer's proposal. They also questioned his credentials.

"I do not know what credentials Weaver's Cove is talking about," Havens said yesterday, "but I am convinced that I know what I'm talking about in all of the matters concerned here."

How LNG would behave during an accident, or in the midst of a terrorist attack, is a central issue in the government's permitting decisions on the proposal in Fall River. The issue also plays into the government's regulation of another LNG shipping proposal in Providence, at Fields Point.

Regulators and LNG developers say the risks can be managed. Safety hawks aren't so certain.

Liquefied natural gas is a nonflammable version of the natural gas that powers the heating systems of many New England homes.

A chilling process liquefies natural gas for shipment. A warming process returns it to a highly flammable gas product.

If LNG leaves a pressurized tank or pipe, it releases vapors into the atmosphere.

A mixture of gases containing 10 to 15 percent LNG vapor and 85 to 90 percent air is highly flammable.

On contact with water or soil, a single cubic foot of LNG will rapidly produce 620 to 630 cubic feet of natural gas.

For this reason, engineers try to design LNG facilities with special features for controlling spilled LNG and its associated vapors.

The government also establishes areas where a fire fed by LNG vapors could put people at risk.

At certain distances from an LNG site, residential structures or public gatherings are prohibited.

The government's regulations also require developers to have legal control over land and property in certain types of exclusion zones.

Weaver's Cove has asserted -- without any objections from federal regulators -- that vapors from a spill of the worst type would never leave the project site.

The developer's proposal calls for an embankment of earth around almost the entire facility, including the tank and certain places where LNG would be handled.

This is an area about 400 feet wide and 1,300 feet long.

The dike would be 15 feet tall -- high enough to contain the entire contents of the tank in an emergency.

Weaver's Cove says the dike would adequately contain any LNG vapors from three different types of hypothetical spills involving 98,900 gallons of LNG, 17,600 gallons and 4,350 gallons.

But Havens has vigorously contested this assertion.

In filings with regulators, and once again yesterday, Havens asserted that Weaver's Cove used a method specifically designed for assessing the spread of vapors from pools of LNG on the surface of water or some other flat area.

To make the correct calculation, the developers must use a method for assessing the spread of LNG vapors from an area surrounded by dikes, he said.

When they tried to rebut Havens' earlier criticisms last month, the developer's lawyers argued that the method he suggests is incomplete and was unavailable to Weaver's Cove LNG.

This seems to conflict with the federal regulators' preliminary review of the project.

Meanwhile, Havens is now citing a 1987 study that examined the containment of LNG vapors by a dike-type enclosure.

The study by Livermore National Laboratory found that flammable vapors escaped from an enclosure with barriers 10 meters high and traveled about 787 feet from the site.

Havens contends that it is "physically impossible for the gas to simply fill the impoundment space without mixing with air ..."

LNG vapors could travel about a half-mile from the site in Fall River, according to Havens' estimates.

He also provided an assessment of LNG spills on water that he performed using calculations and methods recommended by FERC in a report last spring.

In one example, about 3 million gallons of LNG spills onto the water from an LNG tanker ship carrying 33 million gallons of the product.

If the spilled LNG has escaped from a hole about 3 feet wide, flammable vapors from the spill can travel about 3.5 miles.

If something causes vapors at the spill to ignite, the heat is hot enough to inflict second-degree burns in 30 seconds as far as 2,100 feet away. If the hole in the ship is 16 feet, such burns are possible almost a mile away.

The developer challenges the potential for such an incident. The possibility is the subject of a continuing study at at Sandia National Laboratory, in New Mexico.

Havens argues that the possibility should be recognized at least until the study is complete.

"The questions I have raised have important implications for the safe siting of the Weaver's Cove project in Fall River," Havens said. "Indeed, I believe the questions raised are important to the public safety issues attending the siting of any LNG terminal in our country."