Editor:
Re: Nick Vermeulen’s letter, LNG can be a win-win (Coast Reporter, Sept. 12), he spends a lot of time trying to convince us that the issue is “safety at sea setbacks.”
His initial mistake however is to refer to LNG as “clean.” To suggest that it can offset the coal burned in China to a cleaner burning natural gas, is a deception. That’s like saying firearms don’t kill. Why, because each statement only tells part of the story.
Agreed, coal does produce soot creating all sorts of problems, but to suggest that LNG is clean does us all a disservice.
When the decision was made to use food crops to produce ethanol, we failed to take into consideration reduced food production. This effort to convince us to switch to LNG has also failed to take into consideration the ramifications.
Production of LNG relies heavily on fracking. This process requires drilling and the injection of large quantities of water/hazardous chemicals under pressure to fracture the rock and allow the gas to be extracted. Some of the hazardous solution is recovered and stored in those infamous tailing ponds. Unrecovered liquids can migrate and pollute underground aquifers or your well. How many of us have seen videos showing flaming water taps?
Then there’s the huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more detrimental than CO2, which leaks from those wells. Add in the huge quantities of energy required to pipeline the gas to liquefaction plants, cool it to a liquid and then ship it overseas. It could take the entire power production of the proposed Site C dam to operate just two or three LNG plants. So while burning coal initially creates more greenhouse gases, the entire process of extracting, processing and burning natural gas makes it far dirtier than coal. Nick only provides the facts necessary to support his arguments, don’t be fooled.
Ted Taylor, Madeira Park
