Lasting longer than the Pittston oil refinery debate in the 1970s and ’80s, the 12-year controversy over three proposals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals on Passamaquoddy Bay finally appears to have ended. The last LNG man standing -- Downeast LNG -- was knocked out earlier this month when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) dismissed the company's application for a terminal in Robbinston, which had been before the federal agency for 10 years.
     "We did it! We defeated three developers with deep‑pocket oil and gas investors and with numerous lawyers and law firms, against all odds and against the developers' whopping $90 million spent in pursuit of their permits," says Robert Godfrey of Eastport, researcher for Save Passamaquoddy Bay 3-Nation Alliance, which opposed the LNG plans for the bay. "Downeast LNG, along with the other two defeated LNG developers in Passamaquoddy Bay, failed to anticipate the resolve of people here to preserve what is special about this place. The environment is the driver of our local economy and is what makes this place special and worth fighting for."
     LNG proposals first began cropping up in the Quoddy area in 2004, with Quoddy Bay LNG proposing a terminal at Pleasant Point, followed by Downeast LNG's Mill Cove plan and Calais LNG's proposal for Red Beach, south of Devil's Head. Almost immediately, the proposals created a great deal of controversy around the bay, with Nulankeyutomonen Nkihtahkomikumon (We Take Care of Our Land), a member of Save Passamaquoddy Bay 3-Nation Alliance, leading the fight against the Pleasant Point terminal. Quoddy Bay's application ended up being dismissed by FERC in 2007, and the following year the Pleasant Point tribal government ended its ground lease with the company. The Bureau of Indian Affairs finally cancelled the land lease in 2010.
     Calais LNG's financial backer, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, ended its relationship with the company in 2010, and the company withdrew from state permitting later that year because of a lack of financial capacity.
     Downeast LNG first filed with FERC for an LNG import facility in 2006 and then proposed an export/import facility in 2014. That proposal called for exporting natural gas from the shale gas fields in the northeastern U.S. by means of the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline and from gas reserves in western Canada. This past May, though, the company's board and shareholders decided to put the company up for sale. Downeast LNG's majority shareholder has been Yorktown Energy Partners, which manages approximately $7 billion in energy investments.
     Since changing its proposal to an export/import terminal, Downeast LNG had asked three times for FERC to hold its proceedings "in abeyance," with the latest request being in June. FERC's August 17 order of dismissal states, "At this point, Downeast's project has been before the commission in one form or another for more than 10 years. There has been essentially no progress at all toward completion of an application in the past nine months, and Downeast has presented nothing to persuade us that its situation is likely to change in the immediate future. Accordingly, we decline to grant Downeast's request to hold the proceedings in abeyance until September 30, 2016."
The order continues, "Because Downeast has not demonstrated meaningful progress in the pre-filing review process toward a single, integrated proposal, its pending import application and bidirectional import/export pre-filing proceedings have become stale and warrant dismissal and termination without prejudice."
     Dean Girdis, the founder of Downeast LNG and its former president, says he is no longer with the company. In 2015 he had started Nova Scotia LNG, which proposed two small LNG facilities in the province, but he now says that project too has been stopped, since "the LNG market is very soft these days."