Officials in Rhode Island and Massachusetts told federal regulators yesterday that the states opposed a five-year extension sought by the company to build a liquefied-natural-gas terminal in Fall River.

With time running out, Weaver’s Cove Energy has asked federal regulators to extend its permit to build an LNG terminal by an additional five years.

The company is facing a July 2010 deadline to complete the project. In 2005, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave Weaver’s Cove a conditional permit to build the terminal. That permit was good for five years.

In the three years since that permit was issued, Weaver’s Cove has not begun construction; it is still awaiting a number of approvals from various federal and state agencies before work can begin.

Weaver’s Cove and Mill River Pipeline LLC, the company that would build the pipeline for the project, filed a joint request with FERC on Tuesday asking for an extension to Nov. 1, 2015.

“As the commission may be aware, despite Weaver’s Cove’s and Mill River’s best efforts to obtain all the federal and state permits and approvals necessary to begin construction of the project, Weaver’s Cove and Mill River are still in the process of securing certain permits and approvals because of a series of unanticipated delays and decisions affecting the timely receipt of such permits and approvals,” the companies said in their two-page request.

“Weaver’s Cove and Mill River have worked diligently to obtain all federal and state permits and approvals related to the construction and operation of the project, but have experienced delays beyond their control.”

But Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch and the City of Fall River said the request was “wholly deficient, unsupported, and premature.”

In their nine-page response, submitted to FERC yesterday afternoon, Lynch and the city said Weaver’s Cove had satisfied only one of the 77 environmental conditions it must meet before it is allow to construct the terminal.

They said that the company failed to mention that the U.S. Coast Guard found that it would be too risky to allow LNG tankers to traverse parts of the Taunton River because of the closeness of the old and new Brightman Street bridges. Coast Guard approval is one of the conditions set by FERC that Weaver’s Cove must obtain.

That Coast Guard finding, Lynch and the City of Fall River argued, “is largely the reason for delays in issuing permits related to dredging and related activities, including the required dredging permit from the Army Corps of Engineers.”

They also contended that Weaver’s Cove had failed to fulfill a requirement to develop emergency-response evacuation routes for the areas along the route of the LNG vessel transit.

Weaver’s Cove has appealed the Coast Guard’s ruling but has also offered another proposal that the company said would satisfy the concerns. It proposed building an offshore LNG berth in Mount Hope Bay that would allow tankers to unload the gas about a mile from the nearest shore. Tankers would not need to maneuver under the bridges.

Instead, the LNG tankers would transfer their cargo at the berthing structure into a four-mile pipeline that would be buried in a trench under portions of Mount Hope Bay and the Taunton River. The LNG would be piped to a storage tank and re-gasification facility in Fall River, where the company has proposed building the LNG terminal.

The berthing platform would be situated in waters within the town of Somerset, about one mile from the nearest shoreline and two miles south of the Braga Bridge, Weaver’s Cove said.

Local officials have vehemently opposed this new plan as well.

FERC will hold two public meetings next week to get public comment on the new proposal. The first will be held Tuesday at Mount Hope High School, in Bristol, and the second will be held Wednesday at the Venus de Milo restaurant, Swansea.

FERC staff members are seeking comments about what the agency should address when preparing its draft Environment Impact Statement for the offshore berth.

tbarmann@projo.com