The vibe in the public hearing room did have a Chris Christie kind of feel to it. I mean, we're not talking jamming up the George Washington Bridge access lanes hindering the endless flow of gum-chomping, fashion-victim club kids from the Palisades into the sophisticated New York City nightlife as political payback here.
No. We're talking about a different kind of flow coming from that hotbed of political intrigue that is Augusta, straight down Route 17 to the Jewel of the Midcoast.
We're talking dead dinosaurs from really deep under the Pennsylvania shale.
We're talking about natural gas.
It would appear that our friends on Wall Street, et al, and their friends in our government (read here: your elected officials. Yes both parties, apparently) really, really want there to be a new choice in fossil fuel for us to add to the menu of energy sources here in Maine.
The anchor customer that's going to bring natural gas to Rockland is an electrical and steam cogenerating plant, or a 'co-gen' plant, owned by Rockland Energy.
The pipeline required to deliver the natural gas to Rockland currently ends in Winslow some 40 miles away, as the crow flies.
It costs $1 million per mile to build a natural gas pipeline, but that's OK because the big pipeline player in this mix is none other than Houston based Kinder Morgan (NYSE KMI) with a market capitalization recently of $94.3 billion. In addition to that $40,000,000, the plant itself will cost an estimated $200,000,000 to build. When completed, it will both generate electricity to be sold to Central Maine Power and steam for heat to local buildings and industry.
When there's a $94.3 billion pipeline company involved, typically some thought and due diligence has gone into projects like this. Make no mistake about it, natural gas is going to be a fact of life all over the state of Maine. But the big question still remains, is natural gas right for us here in the Midcoast?
For some of us, the answer may be yes.
Natural gas in the Midcoast will be great for large users such as FMC and other larger industrial customers.
It will attract investment and other forms of infrastructure that will propel our regional and state economy forward.
Already, Rick Bates, the Rockport Town Manager, has begun a revolutionary municipal initiative to make super high speed broad band Internet access available within Rockport in the hopes that that kind of forward thinking will also attract economic energy here. Makes perfect sense.
Does natural gas make perfect sense for the average buyer of home heat? Absolutely not.
And this is true based on every single assertion the natural gas cabal makes about home heating. Let's break it down.
Cost
They said it would be cheaper. It isn't.
As a matter of fact the natural gas cabal claimed they'd lock in customer prices for 10 years. That took just a single season to unravel as within the past month the natural gas cabal petitioned the Maine Public Utilities Commission to increase rates and fees.
Fossil fuel energy prices are volatile. Natural gas is a fossil fuel. No matter how they dress it up as a new fuel, it's still dead dinosaurs and as such subject to the same price fluctuations. The only difference is with heating oil you have a choice of providers and therefore, competition. With the natural gas cabal, not so much.
The Green Factor
Natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas. Methane is more damaging to the environment than CO2. In the near future, heating oil will have so little sulfur due to new regulations that it will be actually cleaner to burn than natural gas.
While it's true that the American energy renaissance owes everything to new fracking technology, the fields that natural gas comes from are the ones that intrude on human domestic and farming activity. The fracking that yields all the new American oil is actually due to a revisiting of long dormant oil wells that are now being revived due to new extraction technologies.
The Truth Factor
Let's face it, the natural gas cabal has not exactly knocked the cover off the ball here. Polling of natural gas customers in the southern part of the state reveals a dissatisfied customer base that feels misled on issues that range from the cost of the fuel and conversion to the expected lifespan of the units they've purchased. The average lifespan of an oil boiler is near 30 years. With natural gas that number is less than half that.
You know what makes a bunch of sense right now? Waiting to see how this all shakes out. The first folks who ran out to buy a ball point pen when they first came out had a nasty case of buyers’ remorse a few short months later. Oh, sure... that guy looked pretty cool around the water cooler for a while but, we're not that guy.
Seth Silverton is an energy industry executive working with Pen Bay Oil and lives in Rockport.
