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Neighbors add plant to undesirables list
By JAMES THORNER © St. Petersburg Times, published October 1, 2000 HOLIDAY -- A giant flare of burning gas hissing over the tree tops. Storage tanks brimming with a million gallons of flammable liquid. The din of electric turbines chopping the air. Buccaneer Gas Pipeline's proposed $30-million liquid separation facility has conjured up all sorts of infernos in the minds of residents of the Baillie's Bluff and Anclote communities. "There's going to be a flame 24 hours a day just like those oil rigs in the gulf," said Anclote resident Carlene Hobbs. Two miles farther north, Dr. Don Schwartz, a retired pediatrician whose home occupies a sandy finger jutting into the gulf, has equally nasty visions. "Liquid separation facility is a euphemism for a noisy, polluting, commercial refinery which is dangerous and ugly," Schwartz said. Buccaneer officials say their concerns are overblown. The Buccaneer Gas Pipeline Co., seeking federal approval to build a 678-mile pipeline from Mobile, Ala., to Cape Canaveral, wants to build the liquid separation facility on 68 acres west of Baillie's Bluff Road, just north of Florida Power Corp.'s Anclote Plant. Here's how it would work, according to Buccaneer officials: Under normal conditions, natural gas processing plants in Alabama would remove liquids from the methane before shipping it across the gulf. But in the rare event of power failures at the processing plants, untreated gas would stream through the pipeline. Many of those impurities would condense into liquids during the trip under the ocean. If the liquids reached Buccaneer's customers at various Florida power plants, the impurities could literally gum up the works. So the Anclote plant would draw the liquids from the methane and store them in two storage tanks of 420,000 gallons apiece. John Zygo, an engineer who builds separation plants for Williams Co., one of Buccaneer's parent companies, said such facilities are essentially expensive backup systems. Historically, they are used only about twice a year, usually during major power outages, Zygo said. "We build these things for the worst case of worst case scenarios," Zygo said. The facility would also include a flare tower for use in case gas bubbled from the liquid separator and needed to be vented. Zygo stressed the rarity of that occurring, too. "I venture to say it will never be used," Zygo said. But it's hard to blame the Anclote neighbors for overestimating the threat of the facility. This is a neighborhood that occasionally feels as if fate has frowned on it. Just south of the Buccaneer site is the oil- and gas-burning Anclote electric power plant. Nearby is the Stauffer chemical cleanup site and the Florida Gas Transmission Line. As if those intrusions weren't enough, Tampa Bay Water has considered building a giant seawater desalination plant near their homes. Most of Hobbs' extended family, including six grandchildren, live within a couple of miles of the liquid separation facility. It's not that the facility will be the worst polluter in the area, but that it just adds to the cumulative besmirchment of the area. "We're already dealing with Florida Power and the Stauffer toxins from the old closed chemical plant," said Hobbs, who lives on Hickory Lane, not far from the cooling towers of the Anclote plant. "It's very difficult for the environment to battle all these toxins." Bruce Dickey, who brought his wife and small children to a recent pipeline meeting, complained about the 80 tons of pollutants the separation facility could release each year. "The residents are already choking," Dickey told a panel from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that must approve the pipeline. But the numbers show the liquid separation facility would be a minor polluter compared to its Florida Power neighbor. Almost all of the emissions would come from the gas flare, which the company insists will almost never be used. In its application with FERC, Buccaneer said it expects to generate about 53 tons of carbon monoxide a year. That's less than one-tenth of the 704 tons of carbon monoxide released at the power plant each year. Nitrous oxides emissions would total about 5 tons at the separation facility versus 4,501 tons at the power plant. In the category "volatile organic compounds," which includes escaping methane, the Buccaneer facility would release an estimated 23 tons, compared with 107 tons at the power plant. In fact, the potential emissions at the facility are so low they won't trigger federal air permit requirements. Nor are state regulators overly worried about pollution. "My understanding is it's negligible compared to all the vehicles in the area and the other activities people look at and don't think twice about," said Kent Edwards, reviewing the pipeline project for the Florida Department of Environmental Resources. As for the storage tanks that would hold the flammable condensation from the natural gas, Buccaneer said it will truck away the liquids before they fill both tanks. Despite the tanks' location a couple of hundred feet from the gulf, neither the state nor federal government must issue permits for their construction. "We don't have rules to address that specific type of situation," Edwards said. Neighbors are also irked that the facility will occupy part of the grounds of an abandoned missile tracking station. That puts the plant within sight of a nature boardwalk at Key Vista Park along the coast. "You won't see the beautiful vista anymore," said Schwartz, president of the 110-home Baillie's Bluff Civic Association. "You'll just see the nightmare." Federal regulators have issued a draft environmental report on the pipeline, which the agency is fine-tuning with public comments. The deadline to submit complaints to FERC is Oct. 24. Buccaneer originally scheduled the pipeline to open in April 2002 but announced last week it was pushing opening day back to mid-2003. It cited regulatory hurdles and the slowness of acquiring right of way. Schwartz said the pipeline proposal caught him and his neighbors off guard. Although it's been nearly two years since Buccaneer announced the $1.5-million project, many neighbors only got interested this summer. Schwartz said the neighborhood's table was full fighting other environmental threats such as the desalination plant. "It's just fatiguing. Buccaneer just got us when we were down," Schwartz said. "But we're not out."
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