Pipe Dream

There was a thing in the paper, the Coos Bay paper the other day about how the Jordan Cove LNG project is evolving, and that led to an interesting sidebar discussion the fruits of which I am figuring out how to share and with whom.
Background being that a couple years ago the fossil fuel industry went on one of its periodic rampages with the incredibly rising price of a barrel of light sweet crude (the greatest product name ever, n'est-ce pas?) and somebody, several sombodies, rich bastards no doubt, took a look at the geography of the west coast and came up with a brilliant pipe dream.
They proposed, and put up some dough to get going, building a natural gas pipeline from Coos Bay through to Nevada and building an import terminal at Coos Bay out on the North Spit of the bay, an area zoned for industrial development for many years, occasionally built on and never very successfully. The site has direct frontage on the ship channel only five or six miles from the ocean, railroad access through to the I-5 corridor and the UP freight system, and a port authority hungry to make up for the dead lumber business in the industrial base of the Coos Bay area, sorely beset and in need of transfusion. To the city fathers this looked very attractive.
The permit process began over vocal and vehement opposition from the NIMBY crowd led by one Wim Wenders, a local gasbag restauranteur and Holly Hall, a former somebody and wife of a prominent longshoreman. The woogie-woogie crowd chimed right in, but the permit application sailed on through and was granted at many federal and state levels. But about that time the deal changed with discovery of massive deposits of drillable natural gas on this continent so the goal of the project changed to export. We would now suck the gas from North America, concentrate it at Coos Bay, pipe it aboard some very large tankers, and all-fall-down-rich.

Ships can cross the Coos Bay Bar easier and safer than anyplace between San Francisco and the Straits of Juan de Fuca, whoever defuca he was

Unbeknownst and unrecognized, the bottom felll out of the world cargo shipping business. Keep this in mind, it comes into play shortly.
The pipeline was a separate deal, but its permits too keep being granted and it begins to look like this thing might actually come to pass, ugly and dangerous as it is. If you've ever been to High Island, Louisiana you will know just how ugly  the petro industry can be, but it makes money, big money, fuck-you money.
As I have noted before in these columns, the Panama Canal is changing, and world shipping will change with it. Shipowners are losing money on every mile they steam, but they keep going to keep market share and it will turn around eventually. But one thing that everybody in that world is looking at are the little economies like managing hull speeds for "gas mileage" rather than fast passages. Steam a little slower, arrive a little later, save 30% on fuel. There's enough idle tonnage that nobody notices the later arrivals, and nobody cares. It's a recession, after all.
So why would a container ship travel all the way up the Columbia river, 20 hours of steaming each way, if they didn't have to? Very few container ships even bother. Portland did about 75,000 containers last year, at 4k per ship thats only 20 or so ships all year.

I just saw this drawing in the Coos Bay paper last week. Come to find out, it takes a hella amount of electricity to compress gas snough to liquify, think of a giant air conditioner compressor, and how loud and obnoxious that is and how it racks up your light bill. But hey, no problem, we got assloads of fuel, natural gas up the yingyang at this point, so the energy poobahs are proposing a power generating facility to go along with the terminal. Sell the excess to Bonneville. Everybody makes out.
But look at the left side of the drawing.You will see a proposed container facility less then six miles from the ocean so if the corps of engineers has to dredge well, hey its a drop in the bucket, so why not go to 50 feet, only 3 feet more than it now is, and voila, POST PANAMAX-ready. Hot stuff.

You can see the edge of the container site from here, way over there past the North jetty. that little low row of pine trees is approximately the spot.

The usual fools are yelling about the change in plans regarding the power generator, but it is a clean generating process so fuck them. The truly fascinating thing is nobody's bitching about the container facility. All the poor longshoremen, men that made fabulous wages loading all our trees onto ships until the trees ran out, sending raw logs to Japan, can now run some cranes and sling some slings and generally fuck the dog on a new dock with a new scene.
Or do we pussy out? The question is do we really want Coos Bay to be like Brookings, all California retirees, or like Newport, all tourists from the valley? I think Coos Bay needs to have a soul and some ugly industry and say no thanks to the yuppies.
The really cool thing about this container facility is that it is not the product of some agency executive with a  hard-on, or a city father looking to get re-elected. Rather it is the result, from what I have heard from knowledgeable sources, of a proposal by the biggest player in the whole container cargo universe, the Maersk organization. If you want to see what they are working with look at the picture in the post before this one, the next down the page. That ship can't land in North America, it is too deep [EDIT: this information is 12 years old, harbors have been modified, there are much larger classes of container ships now]. But with very little work it would slip right into Coos Bay, unload 2 or 3 thousand TEU containers, not even the whole cargo but, say, a stack or two of priority goods and slip back out again with about a 12 hour turnaround pilot-to-pilot. And in a world where pennies add up, that aint hay.