Tractebel Electricity and Gas plans “going full bore” to complete the $500 million Calypso pipeline project planned by Enron to carry natural gas between the Bahamas and Port Everglades.
James Ebeling, the project’s director, said Thursday during a visit to South Florida that the firm hopes to complete the environmental and safety approvals this year and start construction on the pipeline next year.
Tractebel is an American wing of a Belgium firm, which in turn is owned by Suez, a French utility. Last November, it purchased the project from a bankruptcy court handling the Enron case in Houston for $11 million.
Two other entities are also still in the race to construct a Bahamas-Florida pipeline.
AES Corp. wants to build a pipeline from Ocean Cay, a tiny island near Bimini, to Dania Beach.
El Paso Corp. envisions a link from Grand Bahama Island to the Port of Palm Beach.
Tractebel’s idea is to connect a plant at the port of Grand Bahama to a line running through Port Everglades, in Broward County.
All three plans envision getting natural gas from various sites overseas, freezing it down to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit, transporting the liquified natural gas in enormous tankers to the Bahamas, where plants would warm the gas back up for transmission through pipelines. In Florida, all three would connect with Florida Gas Transmission pipeline, which is jointly owned by El Paso and Enron.
The firms believe the hugely expensive projects make sense because Florida’s population is growing rapidly, and the state’s electric utilities are moving toward natural gas for new and remodeled facilities because they create less pollution.
It would be cheaper, of course, to build the re-gasification plants in the United States, but the firms believe the approval processes for the plants would be so arduous and complicated here that they could save money — and get them done faster — by constructing them in the Bahamas.
Even so, all three plans still face complicated approval processes here.
Ebeling says Tractebel needs the approval of eight federal agencies, 10 state departments and one county group here, as well as from an environmental agency in the Bahamas.
There’s already some resistence.
“We have some grave concerns about any pipeline,” said Brenda Chalifour, attorney for Save Our Shoreline, a Broward County environmental group. Any company wanting to do the project should be able to prove that its work does minimal damage to coral reefs and shoreline mangroves — and should be safe for residents of the region.
Ebeling said Tractebel could do an excellent job, because its European affiliate already builds liquid natural gas facilities, the company has tankers that carry the material and the firm runs two existing facilities, one in Belgium and the other in a Boston suburb.
Ebeling said Tractebel would be happy to talk to environmentalists and other local groups. Enron had already started that process with a series of public meetings in Broward. AES had a similar public meeting last month, and Tractebel may have one in March.
Analysts have expressed doubt whether the marketplace could support more than one Bahamas-Florida pipeline, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission must approve each project as filling a need.
But Ebeling thinks FERC may approve more than one. “Their charge is to protect the public. So they could approve more than one and let the marketplace do the work.”
By John Dorschner, The Miami Herald
