Liquid natural gas company will not build plant in Port St. Joe - WMBB - mypanhandle.com
Liquid natural gas company will not build plant in Port St. Joe | mypanhandle.com
PORT ST. JOE, Fla ( WMBB) — On Monday, the liquid natural gas (LNG) company Nopetro announced they will no longer pursue building a plant on the site of the old paper mill “purely due to market condition.”
The announcement comes after months of pushback from both Port St. Joe and Gulf County residents.
“I think it’s a real testament to the incredible organizing by the people of Port Saint Joe,” Energy Program Director for Washington DC-based think tank Public Citizen, Tyson Slocum said. “Once they started to learn about what had been negotiated behind closed doors, they rose up in very clear opposition to building an LNG export terminal.”
Several hundred Port St. Joe residents attended community meetings where they voiced their opposition to the plant.
“We develop a mill that was harmful to this community,” Longtime Port St Joe Resident Chester Davis said. “And to put another gas plant in here, that we think or based upon the history, will be just as harmful.”
The land in question is owned by The St. Joe Company.
At the May shareholder’s meeting CEO Jorge Gonzalez said the public got the wrong impression.
“We never signed a lease with them,” Gonzalez said. “We issued a license agreement for them to do their due diligence. We extended the license agreement a couple of times, and they finally came to us and they said they’ve completed their due diligence and they’re not moving forward with the project at this time. So the license agreement expired.”
In an email to News 13 Port St. Joe’s Mayor Rex Buzzett said elected officials hope to put the matter behind them.
“This issue has divided our City for two years,” Buzzett wrote. “It is our intention to continue moving forward on current and future projects for the betterment of all our citizens.”
Port St. Joe residents said they will keep watching Nopetro, in case marketing conditions become favorable in the future.
In the meantime, they said they’d like to see a green industry locate on the old mill property.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.