A familiar drama is playing itself out on the Maine coast this year, set in two different communities so far but possibly in others as the year goes on. The story, of course, is where (or if) to locate a liquified natural gas facility in a Maine port. So far we’ve heard from Harpswell, which after a winter’s debate voted against such a project recently, and soon we’ll hear from Searsport, where an as-yet unnamed company has expressed interest in bringing LNG to Sears Island. This state-owned property has seen such dramas before, of course, and now it appears that the players, pro and con, will once again strut the stage with much sound and fury.
The 2004 debate over LNG will play out against a regional, international backdrop: within two months, as we report elsewhere in this issue, Irving Oil Corp. will likely break ground on an LNG facility in Saint John, New Brunswick, where Irving already maintains an oil refinery. The players being Irving, the Province of New Brunswick and the Canadian federal government, all of which have a long history of friendly cooperation, there seems little likelihood that opponents will stop this project.
If Saint John’s LNG project proceeds, LNG ships will steam through the Gulf of Maine, perhaps near parts of Maine, up the Bay of Fundy on their way to the new facility. If that’s how this drama unfolds, it will once again demonstrate that none of us, no matter how independent we like to think we are, no matter how determined to keep things we don’t like out of our backyards, has ultimate power over an industrial project that finds favor in the country next door.