I have made at least a half dozen trips up the Texas and Louisiana coast over the past 10 years, have seen the many refineries and petrochemical plants around St. Charles, Beaumont, Port Arthur, the Houston Ship Channel, Baytown and Corpus Christi. I always return home grateful and relieved that where I live, the Rio GrandeValley, we have none of those. The defunct 1970s’ small Brownsville Union Carbide refinery left its legacy as a designated superfund site due to its nationally significant hazardous pollution of soils and/or groundwater.
The RGV is the only urbanized area of the Texas coastline without petrochemical industrialization. But that may soon change. Rio Grande LNG, which if built will be the largest industrial facility ever built in the Rio GrandeValley, is just a few steps away from its financial decision to start construction. It lately has been on a public relations blitz, gathering “support” from local businesses and politicians and making presentations to the public how safe and benign liquefied natural gas is. This blitz is a ruse. The support letters are largely Next Decade-written form letters. Presentations include a video depicting people drinking water, but with no lit match nearby. Here are some things their PR people don’t tell you:
– LNG is methane cooled to minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit, whereupon it changes from a gas to a liquid. When LNG leaks or spills it quickly returns to a gas and as it mixes with air becomes intensely flammable and explosive. Freeport LNG at QuintanaBeach had an explosion and fire a year ago from a ruptured LNG pipeline. A major catastrophe would have occurred had the massive storage tank ruptured and ignited. Still, it took 8 months for the plant to resume operation.
– Rio Grande LNG will replace nearly two miles of thornscrub forest, salt prairie and wetlands along state Highway 48, land almost unrivalled for fishing, birdwatching and off-road vehicles, into concrete, steel, jet engine-like compressors, 12-story tanks, lights, noise and flares. It will pave over and make inaccessible land that is sacred to the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe of Texas. It will impact most heavily LagunaHeights and Port Isabel, people who are least able to evacuate should a disaster occur. The beautiful landscape that draws nature and beach tourists to our area will be diminished.
– Rio Grande LNG, if built, will be the largest stationary source of air pollution in the Rio GrandeValley. Very small particles (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, all will make our air quality worse, and make life harder for people with pulmonary problems like asthma and COPD, common illnesses here in the Valley. Certain days in May and June the Valley already has the highest air particulate levels in the state. Rio Grande LNG will make those days worse. The fundamental medical ethic, “First, do no harm,” apparently doesn’t apply. It should.
– Rio Grande LNG would 8.5 million more tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, along with extensive methane emissions from the source of its gas, the PermianBasin. Rio Grande LNG is slated to have a 30 year or longer life expectancy. Building new fossil fuel infrastructure is directly contrary (“incompatible with human survival”) to the urging of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and climate experts worldwide who state that reliance on fossil fuels must cease or greatly diminish if we are to have a chance of stopping runaway global warming. It is also contrary to the current U.S. policy to reduce greenhouse emissions to 50% below 2005 levels by 2030, reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035, and achieve a net zero emissions economy by 2050.
There is no upside to Rio Grande LNG. Once it is built and the construction jobs are gone, what will we be left with? Few jobs, the hellscape of a massive industrial complex with 24/7 noise, lights and flaring, worse air quality, risks of fire and explosion, less green space for wildlife and recreation, and desecration of ancestral native American land. Rare is the local politician who will say no to the oil and gas industry and their campaign money, no matter how damaging the industry is to the rest of us. They ignore Guterres’ words, at our peril. “Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral.” Just as the Carrizo Comecrudo put it to Bechtel Corp. (the construction contractor) earlier this year, Rio Grande LNG should cease and desist.
Jim Chapman of Brownsville is a member of Save RGV.
