The yearslong battle over the Jordan Cove Energy Project is heating up as the federal agency overseeing the proposed $10 billion pipeline and terminal pushes to complete a final environmental review.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is working quickly to finish the final environmental impact statement for the project this fall. Federal agencies and other interested parties have submitted comments – some critical – to inform the impact statement.

FERC intends to issue the notice of availability for the final EIS on Oct. 11, and a final order on Jan. 9, 2020.

Meanwhile, more than 100 local residents and environmental activists last week filled a City Council meeting last week to debate a key request for land use approval needed to dredge in a Coos Bay estuary zone.

For Canadian corporation Pembina, the pipeline would provide a route to market for North America’s booming natural gas fields. The proposal has been the subject of debate for more than a decade – long enough for the planned terminal to go from an import terminal to an export terminal, as the business case shifted to sending liquefied natural gas to Asian markets.

The Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline would stretch approximately 229 miles beginning at an interconnector near Malin, in southeastern Oregon, across land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation and private landowners. But the debate is perhaps most pointed in Coos Bay, where massive ships would be loaded with liquefied natural gas for export abroad.

Pembina seeks permission to dredge in the bay, which would require a zoning change. The bay is dredged regularly to provide ocean access for the area’s commercial and recreational fishing fleets, but Pembina wants to dredge in a 3.3-acre estuary that is an important nursery for the South Coast’s crabbing industry.

A consultant hired by Coos Bay, the Lane Council of Governments, has recommended the City Council deny the land use change.

“It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this estuary as a nursery for Dungeness crabs,” said Michael Graybill, retired manager for the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Graybill said he recently pulled up crab pots that were teeming with hundreds of juvenile crabs. “Dredging the channel margins will kill tens to hundreds of thousands of crabs,” he told the council at the Aug. 27 meeting.

Jody McCaffree, who leads a group called Citizens Against LNG, said the terminal could threaten the area’s thriving recreational fishing industry. The Coos Bay area hosted 31,560 recreational boating trips annually, mostly tied to crabbing and fishing.

“We have a thriving adventure coast here dependent on our natural resources,” she said.

Local residents whose land the pipeline would cross have also been among the opponents.

“Even though we received a decent offer for a settlement on our property, we refused to sell out to Pembina,” said Clarence Adams, a resident of Winston, south of Roseburg. “To us, it’s about quality of life.”

Trade unions have been among the project’s steadfast supporters. Union leaders, port officials and other local boosters point to the economic benefits the project would bring to the coastal community, which has struggled to replace timber jobs.

“This is a project that could be potentially huge for this whole area of Oregon,” Ken Messerle, a former state senator from the Coos Bay area, told the City Council.

According to Pembina, the project would create 6,000 construction jobs at its peak and generate property tax revenues of $60 million a year to southern Oregon counties and $50 million to the state.

The council chose not to make a decision at its Aug. 27 meeting so that it could consider oral and written testimony submitted recently. The council is scheduled to again take up the matter on Jan. 21, 2020.

A lawyer representing Pembina said the public comments were lacking in substance.

“There were a lot of heartfelt statements,” said Steve Pfeiffer, a partner and land use attorney at Perkins Coie in Portland. “There’s definitely a lot of passion. There’s a lot of conclusions. But there’s a limited amount of evidence to back them up.”

Pembina must address a complex tangle of local, state and federal regulatory approvals before any construction can begin on Jordan Cove. While federal regulators have largely welcomed the project, Pembina has encountered obstacles at state and local levels.

By all accounts, FERC is moving quickly to accelerate federal approval. The draft EIS was largely favorable, and Pembina is anticipating approval in January, a spokesman said.

In July, FERC announced it would open a new LNG division, with regulators based in Washington, D.C., and Houston, signaling the federal government is open for such business. There are also signs the Trump administration is pushing for the project. The Guardian reported emails suggested Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had met with a Jordan Cove lobbyist and expressed support for the project. Bernhardt’s former lobbying firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, had lobbied for Jordan Cove, the newspaper reported.

Other federal agencies are involved because it crosses their land. The Bureau of Land Management, in a July 3 letter, stated it would enforce seasonal and daily timing restrictions near marbled murrelet stands and breeding restrictions for the northern spotted owl.

The BLM recommended FERC reconsider its finding of no significant cumulative impact to cultural resources. The agency also urged FERC study the project’s impact on housing in the Coos Bay area.

At the state level, Jordan Cove has encountered roadblocks. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in May denied the project a needed water quality certificate. Jordan Cove is working with the agency to satisfy requirements in anticipation of reapplying for the water quality certificate this fall, Pembina spokesman Paul Vogel said.

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Oregon State University and its Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center recently announced submission to the federal government of a plan outlining construction and operation of a wave energy test site off of the Oregon coastline.

The facility would be built seven miles west of Seal Rock in Lincoln County, and when complete it would be the first full-scale wave energy test site in the U.S. connected to the electrical grid.

OSU‘s 1,000-page test site plan details not only how the wave energy site would be built and run, but also measures that would be taken to minimize potential environmental impacts to local marine fisheries and other resources. The plan is part of the university’s draft license application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that regulates electricity transmission.

Work that went into creating the project plan was paid for largely with dollars from a $35 million U.S. Department of Energy grant received by the university in December 2016. The state of Oregon also is backing the project.

Wave energy converters are among the devices the Energy Department is researching to generate energy from the ocean. Other examples include tidal and current energy converters as well as ocean thermal energy conversion technologies. These devices are collectively referred to as MHK technologies.

If the university’s application is successful and the wave energy test site becomes operational, likely sometime in 2021, it is designed to have a maximum output of 20 megawatts of electricity under optimal conditions. That is enough power for roughly 20,000 homes.

Burke Hales is an Oregon State University professor and the chief scientist for the wave energy project, which began more than five years ago with the work of a Newport-area site selection team. Despite the relatively mature technology at the heart of wave energy, construction of such facilities for permanent use has, to date, been cost-prohibitive, he said.

“That’s the big issue – money, money, money,” Hales said.

Since those early days, OSU has gone through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s alternative licensing process, which requires collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders.

Hales said the test site would be a proving ground for companies involved in manufacturing wave energy conversion devices. Currently, several are available in the marketplace.

Industry sources show these devices range in design from point absorbers, which capture wave motion, to attenuators, which resemble articulated snakes and are designed to respond to wave curvature. There also are devices that are open to the ocean on the bottom and use oscillating water columns to drive a turbine and generate power, and there are hybrid devices using one or more of these techniques.

“It will allow the developers to come to us to test their devices in a full electrical grid state,” Hales said. “We’re building the infrastructure that allows the people who build the energy devices to connect to the grid. Regardless of how the developers choose to produce wave energy, it doesn’t matter; we’re just providing the infrastructure.”

According to Department of Energy documentation, the test site would be six nautical miles west of Seal Rock in Lincoln County in waters ranging from 213 to 256 feet deep. It would be around two square nautical miles in surface area.

When finished, the site would hold four test berths, each capable of operating either an individual device or an array of devices – up to 20.

Power generated at the site would be transmitted to facilities onshore via four undersea cables that would be buried and run through conduits. Expectations are that the site would have a 25-year life span.

As for construction, Hales said it would actually be fairly simple.

A set of commercial buildings would be built onshore at the point where undersea electric cables connect to the wave energy devices at the shoreline.

Then there is the seabed excavation and boring required to emplace the electric cables beneath the sea floor. Only a handful of contractors across the globe carry out this type of heavy work, Hales said.

OSU is working with 3U Technologies, a Texas-based firm offering design and engineering in many areas, including submarine cables, to find a contractor for the project. As part of its support, the company is providing transmission cable design, delivery and installation planning, as well as cable route selection.

The company did not return calls seeking comment.

The total cost of construction would likely be around $15 million, Hales said.

“It’s actually really simple,” he said. “There (would be) sea cables that are buried in the sea floor. They (would) run about 20 kilometers into a set of buried splice vaults, which are like giant underground manholes.”

There, the four-inch-thick cables would feed up to 36,000 volts of raw power from the wave energy devices into the terrestrial conversion facility so it could be directed into the wider electric grid.

“We take what are likely to be complicated and diverse types of energy in terms of voltage, frequency and power,” Hales said, “and we convert that to a form that is compatible with the grid.”

OSU already has extensive experience in similar projects, having installed a series of undersea cables connecting ocean-based observation platforms with facilities onshore.

“People have been laying big undersea cables across the Oregon shelf for decades,” he said.

Two years’ worth of environmental studies have been carried out to date. Project managers like Hales now believe the wave energy concept can be carried out safely with little adverse effect on the marine ecosystem, including the potential impact of noise on marine wildlife.

“We’re taking a lot of those things into consideration,” Hales said. “But once the cable is in there, once it’s buried on the sea floor, there isn’t that much of an impact. So it’s really a matter of how much disruption will the construction cause? We think it’s pretty minor.”

At this point, FERC regulations require a 90-day period to allow submission of public comments. OSU will then be in position to submit a final application, likely late this year. If approval were given, university officials expect construction of the test site infrastructure would begin in fall 2019, Hales said.

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The consortium pushing a revamped plan to build a massive natural gas port in Coos Bay says the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president had no impact whatsoever on its decision to reapply for permits.

Despite reports last year heralding the death of the $7.5 billion , backers are currently preparing another application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — a third try — and this one they say will have a much stronger chance of success.

And the ascension of a fervently pro-deregulation Republican to the nation’s highest office had nothing to do with it, according to Michael Hinrichs, spokesman for Calgary-based Veresen, the project’s lead investor.

“Like a lot of the nation, many on our team were surprised by the outcome,” Hinrichs said. “We certainly didn’t plan for one administration or the other. The decision to reapply occurred pretty much immediately when we realized our last appeal was denied.”

The project was first considered by FERC in 2007. In that iteration it would have served as an import facility that received gas from the Middle East and Russia. Despite winning approval, changes in the global market for fossil fuels altered the picture for developers, who abandoned their plan to import.

The most recent application, this time for an export facility at the same location, was rejected by FERC last year. It would have provided more than 8 billion cubic feet of LNG per day. But Obama-era regulators argued that the project application failed to demonstrate existing commercial demand. The plan was also opposed by environmentalists and many landowners along the 235-mile connector route through Oregon.

Hinrichs said the latest iteration includes more than 50 route changes to accommodate property owners. And two Japanese buyers interested in the vast natural gas deposits of the U.S. West are now involved. A 420-megawatt power plant has also been cut from the plan.

But the FERC application is just the first of around 30 state and federal permits needed for the project to move forward.

Another apparent advantage for supporters is Jordan Cove appears to have a . Trump’s administration may have tipped its hand when economic adviser to the president Gary Cohn said at a policy talk that it’s looking to expand fossil fuel extraction in the U.S. West.

“The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to permit an LNG export facility in the Northwest,” Cohn said at the time, according to the Washington Post.

In response, Oregon’s two senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, wrote letters urging the president to stay out it. (Neither has formally taken a side for or against the project.)

Longtime project opponent Robyn Jenssen, executive director of Rogue Riverkeeper, said the opposition coalition is still engaged and keeping a close eye on the project.

“Under the new administration, there will probably be more support, but I would honestly say that the campaign against it has grown and that it’s bigger and better than ever,” she said. “Things actually haven’t changed. It’s actually fired up this side even more.”

Rogue Riverkeeper is concerned the project will negatively affect waterways in the upper Rogue Basin. But Jenssen said it’s difficult to know where to focus opposition with so much hinging on handshake agreements among the owners and their partners.

“It’s a lot of talk until we see some documents,” she said.

Another boost for project supporters came last month when Coos County voters rejected a ballot measure that would have banned the project. Emboldened by the chance of success after 15 years, Hinrichs said owners are ready to file “pretty much” every document again.

“By the time Jordan Cove moves fully through this process, we think that it’s going to be one of the most thoroughly vetted projects in the nation,” he said. “We know that there are going to be legal challenges – Oregon has strict environmental laws. But I think we’ll meet all those and the federal laws, and we’re more than willing to do it because we know that our project is sound.”

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Two weeks after their project looked dead in the water, investors behind the Jordan Cove Energy Project announced they’d found an Asian buyer and planned to appeal an unfavorable regulatory ruling.

The announcement by Veresen Inc. of a deal with a consortium of Japanese investors came 11 days after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied applications to build and operate a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal and pipeline project that would have affected more than 600 Oregon private property owners and radically altered the tiny coastal town of Coos Bay.

FERC regulators reasoned that Calgary-based Veresen and its partner, Williams Companies, hadn’t shown that the project’s public benefits would outweigh the . The project would have enabled transfer of liquefied natural gas from North America to Asia, but the global market for fossil fuels is much different today than when the project was first proposed more than a decade ago.

Veresen’s deal with JERA, a joint venture of Japanese utilities, would cover about a quarter of the terminal’s capacity of natural gas, which is expected to be about 1 billion cubic feet per day, according to a Veresen press release.

“We are pleased to have JERA as our first customer and look forward to deepening our relationship with them as we continue to progress Jordan Cove LNG,” the statement reads.

Opponents praised FERC’s denial of the project; however, project supporters like trade unions and Associated General Contractors’ Oregon-Columbia chapter have insisted that the team keep fighting. Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline is still promoting informational workshops to discuss with citizens how it acquires land rights.

Mike Salsgiver, executive director of AGC‘s Oregon-Columbia chapter, said it will write a letter to FERC supporting an appeal.

“There’s one customer lined up that we know of, and obviously, if the project’s approved there will be more,” he said.

Supporters argue that the project would be the largest private project ever in Oregon, and a long-overdue boost to economically-depressed Southern Oregon. Hundreds of union workers have crowded into public hearings to express their support.

“It would be absolutely marvelous news for the southwest coast,” Salsgiver said.

The $7.6 billion project would involve three major aspects – a terminal, including an access channel from the existing Coos Bay navigation channel and a marine slip with berths capable of accommodating a large LNG vessel; a 420-megawatt power plant; and a 232-mile pipeline from Coos Bay to Malin.

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