An altered state

BY JIM HINEY

     The push to increase the amount of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, imported to the United States is a volatile issue, but the level of its volatility depends on who you ask and where. A confluence of events both economic and technological have ensured that the United States will turn to LNG to feed a growing demand for natural gas that is fast outpacing the country's ability to supply its own needs.
     Domestic natural gas production has leveled off and is expected to decline in coming years, as is the supply piped in from Canada, which now accounts for 15 percent of the domestic use. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that the country could face a natural gas shortfall of about 5 trillion cubic feet per year by 2020.
     Imported LNG currently meets about 2 percent of the country's natural gas needs and experts predict it could expand its market share to 10 percent by the year 2020. LNG imports can potentially assure a consistent and plentiful supply of natural gas in an economy driven by supply and demand, thus keeping down the price consumers pay.
     In some people's minds, the possible benefit to their wallets is outweighed by the thought of large volumes of LNG aboard ships and in storage facilities near populated areas.
     Opponents speak of LNG as a new and potentially horrific terrorist target in our security-conscious post-9/11 world, not to mention the fact that it will make us dependent on one more foreign-supplied fossil fuel.
     Their argument is bolstered by a report by scientists at Scandia National Laboratory that says in a worst-case scenario an attack on an LNG tanker could destroy virtually everything within about a half square mile and injure any exposed bystanders within 1.5 square miles.
     Supporters claim LNG is no more dangerous - and in most cases much less dangerous - than other hazardous materials now routinely shipped to and through this country. The Port of Houston sees more hazardous cargo shipments, including oil, gasoline and various nasty chemicals, every day than any other port in the nation. These cargos are much more likely terrorist targets, argue those in the LNG industry.
     Texas figures prominently in the debate because it will be the home of the first new LNG import facility built in the United States in the past 25 years. Developers of another seven planned or proposed facilities in Texas and two dozen along the rest of the country's three coasts "circled like vultures," as one LNG opponent put it, over the permitting process, waiting to see what standards the federal government would require for siting the terminal on Quintana Island and the amount of public outcry it caused.
     Local protests thwarted similar terminals proposed in Eureka, Calif., Harpswell, Maine, and Mobile Bay, Ala., but were not much of an issue for a plant that will be constructed at the entrance to the Freeport Ship Channel amidst existing petrochemical facilities owned by corporate giants Dow and Conoco-Phillips.
     "There are only 37 permanent residents on Quintana Island," says Sharron Stewart, one of the most ardent environmental activists on the upper Texas Coast. "If you wanted to pick the number one area where the local residents have little ability to organize or fight, it would be Quintana."
     Quintana may represent a microcosm of the general public malaise over LNG in Texas and Louisiana. The area is attractive to LNG developers in part because, as an official with the Quintana project group puts it, "there is a more favorable climate in terms of public sentiment."
     LNG is simply the liquid form of natural gas, primarily comprising methane, already used across the world for fuel. Millions of Americans heat their homes with it, dry their clothes using natural gas powered dryers and heat hot water with it.
     It is a clear, odorless, non-corrosive and non-toxic cryogenic liquid. You can be in a room with LNG vapor and not suffer any ill effects as long as there is sufficient air to breathe. Natural gas kills when it displaces enough oxygen to cause suffocation.
     Commercially, natural gas fuels the newest generation of power plants, fuels manufacturing facilities and is used as feed stock, or the raw material, for a number of petrochemicals.
     LNG is simply a convenient package for transporting natural gas from the primary producing countries — Algeria, Indonesia and Qatar are the major suppliers — and for storing excess domestic supplies to meet peak utility customer demands. Natural gas chilled to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit condenses into a liquid and takes up just one-six hundredth of the space that the gaseous form needs.
     Natural gas comprises about one-fourth of all energy consumed in the United States each year. Texas uses more natural gas daily than any other state and more than the countries of England and Japan, points out Texas Railroad Commissioner Charles R. Matthews. Currently, Texas is in a better position than many states because it still produces more natural gas than it uses.
     "We will produce about 6 trillion cubic feet of gas this year and we'll use about 3.9 trillion cubic feet. We'll export the other 2 trillion cubic feet," says Matthews, one of three commissioners who head the Texas Railroad Commission — the state's oldest regulatory agency and the one charged with overseeing Texas' oil and gas industry.
     Matthews calls LNG "more of a national issue than a state issue when it comes to its use as a fuel. Texas will benefit in that the facilities on shore will pay a certain level of ad valorem tax, so there will be a benefit to those communities where they are located."
     Quintana stands to increase its tax revenues by 1,000 percent after the terminal there is completed, according to figures released by Freeport LNG, the group that will build and operate it.
     An economic boon for one small community, however, may come at the expense of the country's economic well-being.
     "LNG is not the right direction for America's future," says Tim Riley, a California-based attorney who has set up one of the largest anti-LNG sites on the Internet and produced the documentary film, The Risks and Danger of LNG. "We as a nation rely too heavily on importing foreign fossil fuel, which makes us dependent and vulnerable to market manipulation by foreign nations. Importing LNG — another foreign fossil fuel — is going to make that dependence and vulnerability even greater. It is time to wean ourselves from imported fossil fuel. It is time to refocus our finances and energies on America."
     Riley also pins his opposition to LNG on its potential danger — an issue that fills much of his Web site and one he feels the LNG industry has tried to downplay to Americans.
     "We created our comprehensive LNG Web site and LNG documentary film to alert and inform communities worldwide about the actual risks and danger of LNG, which are minimized by the LNG industry," Riley contends.
     Nonsense, believes Jeff Beale, president of Maryland-based CH IV International, which takes its name from the chemical formula for methane. LNG as a liquid does not burn and is not transported under pressure, so it does not explode. The vapor created as LNG warms will burn, but only when it is combined in a very specific mixture with oxygen. Less than 5 percent or more than 15 percent of natural gas in the air and the mixture is incapable of igniting. Even a mixture within that narrow range won't explode unless it is trapped in a confined space.
     "Terrorists have indicated that they are pretty smart," says Beale, who has been in the natural gas industry for 30 years. "If they are pretty smart, they are going to avoid LNG because it is not a good terrorist target. It is a good scare tactic for people who don't want LNG facilities in their state, but it is not a very good terrorist target."
     Jim Kruse, National Sea Grant ports and harbors specialist, surmises that the LNG safety issue is "one of those arguments where you have to decide if you want to see the glass as half full or half empty."
     If increased LNG importation is a part of the country's energy future, Kruse can think of few places better suited than Texas to handle the challenge.
     "I think in some ways Texas is probably one of the best prepared places because we are used to dealing with hazardous product all of the time," he says from his office in Houston, home to the port that sees more hazardous cargo traffic than any other port in the nation. "Our refineries and petrochemical plants deal with materials that are highly explosive and highly hazardous to human health. We are used to dealing with those issues and we have the right mindset in terms of security and safety. If you are going to grade industry professionals on how prepared they are, Texas probably has the infrastructure and the personnel in place to handle it better than almost anyone else."

ABCs of LNG

     Over millennia, organic matter deposited and buried in the Earth decomposes under pressure and heat to form hydrocarbons — so called because they consist of varying combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms. Hydrocarbons generally take the form of oil and gas, usually occurring together in deep rock formations but sometimes they are found separately.
     The main component of natural gas is methane, created when one carbon atom joins with four hydrogen atoms, expressed chemically as CH4. Natural gas produced from wells also contains a variety of other hydrocarbon molecules, including ethane, used for manufacturing things like anti-freeze; propane, used to fire backyard grills; and butane, commonly used as fuel for lighters.
     Other, non-hydrocarbon molecules, come to the surface mixed with natural gas as well. These include nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds and water.
     LNG is commonly confused with other forms of natural gas, primarily compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
     Liquefied petroleum gas, often incorrectly called propane, is a mixture of mostly propane and butane in a liquid state at room temperatures when under moderate pressure — around 200 pounds per square inch (psi).
     In North America, propane is the primary gas in LPG, but in Europe propane sometimes accounts for less than 50 percent of the mixture.
     LPG has been used in Europe for many years as fuel for light duty vehicles and has been much used worldwide for cooking and heating. It is highly flammable and must be stored away from ignition sources and in a well-ventilated area, so that any leak can disperse safely.
     CNG is pipeline-quality natural gas that is pressurized and stored in tanks at pressures up to 3,600 psi. It, too, is often used as vehicle fuel.
     The process of turning natural gas into LNG — called liquefaction — traces its roots back to work done by the 19th century British scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday experimented with liquefying various types of gases, including natural gas.
     Hydrocarbon gases condense into liquids at varying temperatures, with heavier hydrocarbons liquefying at higher temperatures. Butane, comprising three more carbon atoms and six more hydrogen atoms per molecule than methane, will condense to liquid at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
     Advances in refrigeration techniques led to the first commercial LNG liquefaction plant being built in Cleveland in 1941. Three years later, the plant was the scene of the worst LNG accident in history. Almost 130 people died when LNG leaked from a holding tank owned by the East Ohio Gas Company, sending a vapor cloud into the surrounding neighborhoods and sewer system before it found a source of ignition, burning everything within a square mile of the plant.
     Despite the accident, the Ohio plant proved that large quantities of natural gas could be converted to LNG and kept in liquid form for extended periods of time, raising the possibility that it could also be economically transported over great distances.
     In January 1959, a converted World War II liberty ship named Methane Pioneer carried an LNG cargo from Lake Charles, La., to the United Kingdom, marking the first trans-oceanic trip of an LNG tanker.
     Within five years, major reserves of natural gas were found in Algeria and it soon became the world's first true LNG exporter.
     Fears that the United States was facing a natural gas shortage prompted the federal government to pass legislation resulting in construction of four marine LNG import terminals in the United States between 1970 and 1980. The terminals at Everett, Mass., Cove Point, Md., Elba Island, Ga., and Lake Charles, La., remain the only LNG receiving facilities constructed in the country, but that will change when the Freeport terminal is completed, which is projected to be in 2007.
     At their peak, in 1979, the original four terminals received 253 billion cubic feet of LNG, or about 1.3 percent of the country's gas demand. Discovery of new natural gas reserves in North America combined with disputes over the prices charged by Algeria led to a steep decline in LNG imports to the United States. By 1980, the terminals at Cove Point and Elba Island closed. The other two terminals remained open but were little used for the better part of two decades.
     Another series of events revived America's interest in LNG in the late 1990s. The country realized an increased demand for natural gas, particularly to fuel new power plants, and natural gas prices here were rising. In 1999, the first LNG liquefaction plant in the Western Hemisphere went online in Trinidad — the source for the LNG that will enter the United States through the new Freeport terminal.
     The increased LNG activity led the federal government to approve re-opening the Elba Island terminal in 2001 and the Cove Point terminal in 2003, and caught the interest of the energy industry. Currently there are seven more approved terminals and another 30 planned or proposed terminals or expansions to existing terminals seeking approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
     These three dozen projects are just the ones with paperwork on file at the FERC and do not include the "70 or so proposals being discussed around the country," says Matthews. "But I and others believe that in the end you will see about five or six new facilities being approved around the country by about 2010.
     "These are expensive propositions," he continues, adding that an onshore facility can cost between $500 million and $1 billion. "The people proposing these terminals are trying to get under contract gas from the country they want to import from at some reasonable terms. They are also trying to get together a list of customers to purchase it. They have to get both of those before they can get financing, and it is difficult right now to tell who will get those things together."
     Worldwide, there are 17 LNG export terminals, 40 import terminals and more than 140 LNG ships. There are about 200 peakshaving and LNG storage facilities across the globe — more than half of these in the United States. Peakshaving facilities are basically natural gas savings accounts.
     Utility companies liquefy and store natural gas during times of normal or below normal demand. During peak demand times — usually during cold winter months — the companies use the saved LNG to fill natural gas needs. There are 113 active LNG facilities across the country, most of those located in the northeast.
     Getting LNG to the United States requires energy companies to make significant investments in each link of what is referred to as the "value chain." The value chain is the totality of activities that get natural gas from underground geologic formations to the consumer's home, and includes exploration and production, liquefaction, shipping, receiving/regasification and sending the gas through the nation's pipeline system to consumers.
     Exploration and production means finding natural gas, either by itself or in formations containing crude oil as well, pumping it out of the Earth and into a liquefaction plant.
     As already noted, liquefaction is the process of cooling natural gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it condenses from a gas to a liquid. But natural gas contains both hydrocarbons and contaminants that liquefy at much higher temperatures and would freeze long before the methane reached its condensation point. The first step in the liquefaction process, then, is removing almost everything but the methane from the mixture.
     Cooling natural gas to such a low temperature is a "fairly energy-intensive process," says Jim Kelly, LNG consultant for CH IV International. "It takes a tremendous amount of refrigeration. Once you get it down to the right temperature, it will stay liquid at atmospheric pressure."
     The newly created LNG is stored in highly insulated, double-walled tanks. From there, LNG is pumped into specially built, equally insulated ships that are on average 900 feet long, 140 feet wide, can be as tall as a 12-story building and carry about 3 billion cubic feet of LNG.
     Traditional LNG tankers are easy to spot because most sport the top half of several spherical tanks above their decks.
     Import terminals come in two forms — onshore and offshore. At onshore facilities, the tanker pumps its cargo into heavily insulated tanks much like those used at the export facility. The tanks feed LNG through pipelines where it is pressurized and warmed using any one of a number of heating treatments, including seawater. The pressurized vapor is then ready to enter the country's existing natural gas pipeline system.
     At offshore ports, the tankers do one of two things: They regasify the LNG onboard and pump it into an underwater pipeline via a buoy, or they unload their LNG onto a floating regasification unit, which sends the vaporized gas ashore via a pipeline.
     Between the time the natural gas is liquefied at the export terminal and regasified at the import terminal, small amounts of heat penetrate into the LNG holding tanks and cause some of the liquid to boil off and become vapor. The vapor is an expected and needed part of LNG storage. The vapor creates pressure that must be vented off the tanks. As it is vented, it takes the heat with it, leaving the rest of the LNG as a liquid with little need for additional refrigeration in a process refered to as "autorefrigeration."
     Both aboard ship and at onshore facilities, the vented gas is captured and either used as fuel or put back through the liquefaction process and returned to the holding tanks.
     Getting a permit to build an LNG import terminal means wading through a bureaucratic alphabet soup. The FERC has primary responsibility for permitting the facilities, but the U.S. Coast Guard is charged with assuring that safety and security measures are in place for all marine-associated activities, including onshore and offshore import terminals located within the country's territorial waters and the LNG tankers that call on those ports.
     The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Minerals Management Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy all have some form of environmental or safety jurisdiction over LNG terminals — and we have not gotten to the state level yet, where there is usually a counterpart agency for each federal office involved.
     The FERC has pledged through its chairman, Pat Wood III, to expedite permitting of new import terminals, but the process can still take up to two years. Building the facilities can take up to three more years. Current and predicted economics makes the five-year investment worthwhile.
     "It costs about $1 per thousand cubic feet of gas to build a liquefaction plant," says Bill Henry, vice president of Freeport LNG. "Depending upon how far you have to ship the gas in tankers, the transportation cost can vary between 50 cents or 60 cents to $1.50 per thousand cubic feet. The regasification costs 50 cents to 60 cents, so you need to get about $3 per thousand cubic feet just to pay the cost. The price for natural gas has been in the $5 to $7 range for a period of time now."

Back in vogue

     In May of 2004, the Texas Senate passed a resolution urging the FERC to expedite permitting of LNG receiving terminals in the state, which is not only the biggest consumer of natural gas in the country but also the largest supplier to other states.
     Authored by Sen. Ken Armbrister (D-Victoria), chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, the resolution declared that Texas should lead the "race to secure the country's access to other nations' abundant and cheaper supplies of natural gas, the most environmentally friendly fuel."
     A year before that, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce that the country's limited capacity to import liquefied natural gas effectively restricts its access to the world's abundant supplies of gas, and the inability to increase imports was largely responsible for the marked rise in natural gas prices at the time.
     He pushed the idea of increasing the country's LNG importing capability as a way of ensuring not only a stable natural gas supply, but also one that is economically priced.
     It is evident that LNG is back in a big way, despite never really being gone in the first place.
     "Europe and Japan have been doing LNG business for past 40 years. Japan gets essentially all of its gas in the form of LNG and has something like 23 terminals," says Henry. "It is relatively new here because we've been producing enough natural gas for our own needs until now."
     Technological advances have made the liquefaction, shipping and regasification processes more efficient and thus less expensive over the past 40 years. In addition, more countries are now exporting LNG and energy companies continually discover new reserves, greatly reducing the cost of importing LNG.
     "That's why LNG has become such an in-vogue thing right now," says Henry. "The price is right for it to work and the gas demand is there, so people are trying to find ways to fill the demand."
     The confluence of an economically priced supply and a growing demand have made for what amounts to a liquid gold rush, as is evidenced by the three dozen proposed or approved LNG facilities now before the FERC.
     In Texas alone there are proposals on file for terminals in Port Arthur, Sabine Pass, Galveston and Port Lavaca, and three facilities in Corpus Christi.
     Most experts agree that not all of the proposed projects will be built. There may be a growing demand for natural gas in the United States, but not enough to justify what could be as many as 50 terminals.
     "I think what is really going on is that it takes so long to get a terminal permitted and it is so difficult to do it that we are seeing people take a shotgun approach," says Kruse. "They are throwing everything out there and hoping they can get a few to stick. I believe the few that stick will be about the right number to handle the demand."
     Safety and security concerns aside, the communities chosen as sites for LNG terminals will see sizeable economic impacts, especially if they are small towns like Quintana. The Freeport LNG terminal will cost between $500 million and $600 million and will employ an average of 500 workers each day — most from the Greater Houston area — during the three years it will take to build. Construction is slated to begin sometime during the first quarter of 2005, probably in January.
     Once it is open, the terminal will employ about 50 full-time workers to keep it operating.
     As part of an agreement with the city of Quintana, Freeport LNG will pay fees to the municipal government in lieu of property taxes. These fees will start at about $1.5 million annually after the plant is completed and in operation.
     That's not bad for a city with no schools, churches, libraries, police force, fire department or city courts and a current annual budget of about $200,000.
     Once Freeport LNG is fully operational, the lease and fees it will pay to the Port of Freeport will be $4 million to $5 million per year, which will almost double the port's annual income, says Henry.
     Freeport LNG is a two-year-old, privately held company with just one project — the LNG terminal on Quintana Island.
     Henry said the company chose the Quintana site for reasons that make the Texas and Louisiana coasts good prospects for more LNG terminals.
     "There is already a big pipeline infrastructure," he says. "The gas can get here and move into the established markets in Texas and Louisiana. You already have large, developed industrial parks along the Gulf Coast for the petrochemical business and you have good seaports. You need a place to bring these ships in — a deepwater port — and you have several of those here.
     "The Gulf Coast also does not have some of the permitting problems you find in places like California with earthquake zones."
     The Freeport LNG site is owned by the Port of Freeport and has been part of the port's industrial complex since the 1980s. The company is leasing the land from the port under a 30-year lease with the possibility of six 10-year year renewals.
     When it is completed the terminal will feature a single dock that can accommodate one tanker at a time. Most of the LNG ships in the trade today can carry 140,000 cubic meters of LNG, or about 1 million barrels of liquid, which is equivalent to about 3 billion cubic feet of gas.
     To get an idea of the volume of natural gas that can be derived from one tanker of LNG, Henry points out that the average home in Houston uses about 120,000 cubic feet of natural gas per year, or about 329 cubic feet per day. One tanker of LNG has the potential to meet the single-day gas needs of 9.1 million Houston homes.
     Unloading lines will carry LNG from the tanker to two LNG storage tanks — each capable of holding 1 million barrels of liquid, or one tanker load of LNG. The offloading process will take between 14 and 16 hours, says Henry. Ideally, a ship will arrive at the facility in the morning, unload overnight and leave the next day.
     From the tanks, the LNG will be sent through a pipeline and pressurized to about 1,250 psi. The LNG does not need to be under pressure to vaporize, explains Henry, but the end product natural gas must be up to pipeline pressure before it enters the normal pipeline network, and it is easier and less expensive to pressurize a liquid than it is a gas.
     Freeport LNG will employ a bit of new technology to turn the liquid into vapor. The facility will use warming towers, which Henry describes as looking much like the cooling towers that can be seen on some of Houston's office buildings, to heat water that will then pass over the LNG pipelines to vaporize the gas.
     When it leaves the warming towers, the now 50-degree Fahrenheit gas will exit the Quintana terminal and continue its pipeline journey 9.5 miles to Stratton Ridge, where a number of distribution pipelines meet.
     Freeport LNG's only two customers — Dow Chemical and Conoco-Phillips — will take their previously contracted volumes of gas from there.
     At peak production the terminal will be capable of regasifying about 1.5 billion cubic feet of LNG, or about half of a tanker load, per day. Plans call for the terminal to receive one ship every two days or three days, but it has sufficient storage capacity to go for up to six days without receiving a ship and still vaporize enough LNG to meet its clients' demands, says Henry.
     The product flowing through Freeport LNG will not belong to the company, explains Henry. Conoco-Phillips and Dow will buy the LNG and pay to have it shipped to the Quintana terminal.
     "We are the terminal operator and we charge a fee for our services," says Henry. "We'll take custody of the LNG, change it from a liquid to a vapor and redeliver it to them at Stratton Ridge in the pipelines there, and they take it to the market."
     Dow and Conoco-Phillips have already signed contracts to use all of Freeport LNG's capacity. Dow has an option to take up to 500 million cubic feet per day of the vaporized LNG and Conoco-Phillips bought the rights to the other 1 billion cubic feet per day.
     Some of the LNG will come from Trinidad and the ships frequenting Quintana will be the seafaring equivalent of a coal train that runs from the mine to a power plant and back.
     Trinidad is four to five days' shipping time from Freeport LNG, says Henry. There will be five or six ships dedicated to the route, ensuring that while one tanker is unloading there are full tankers on their way from Trinidad and empty tankers going back.
     If need be, the Quintana terminal has the potential to expand and double its capacity, says Henry, adding that future growth is a matter of economics.
     "You are not going to invest billions of dollars in an LNG process unless you have someplace to get the gas that has a lot of reserves," he says. "Trinidad has a lot of gas, something like 100 trillion to 150 trillion cubic feet of reserves. You can justify building an LNG plant because you have enough gas to supply the LNG trade for 20-30 years. Qatar is another place with lots of reserves but no local markets."
     Qatar is one of several African and Middle Eastern countries taking advantage of LNG to find markets for its stranded gas reserves. Stranded reserves are large quantities of gas in the ground that are not produced because there is no good way to get it to market.
     Crude oil comes to the Earth's surface as a liquid and is easily moved by truck, but the same is not true of natural gas. In its gaseous form, natural gas is still primarily moved through pipelines. If there is no market for the gas within a reasonable distance of the pipeline, then it is not economical to produce the gas for sale.
     Early oil producers viewed natural gas as a worthless annoyance and they simply flared it off — a practice that still happens in some third-world countries, but the practice is slowly changing.
     LNG provides a way for the stranded gas reserves to be turned into a liquid product that can be economically moved by truck to market, and as one gas producer put it, "It's only worth something if someone is willing to buy it."
     On the downside, America could find itself becoming increasingly dependent on natural gas supplies from the new and sometimes politically unstable players in the LNG marketplace as domestic demand grows. That, say critics, will only compound the country's foreign relations situation that is strained now by its dependence on foreign oil supplies from the often politically unstable Middle East.
     Domestically, the greatest political instability involving LNG comes from the tussle over who should decide where LNG facilities are located.
     State officials from across the country are fuming over a provision, slipped into the massive year-end, $388 million energy appropriations bill passed in early December, that says the federal government has sole jurisdiction over siting of new LNG import terminals.
     State regulators say the measure usurps the states' rights to block facilities that could harm the environment or pose safety and security risks.
     California's regulators are particularly upset because the provision comes after the state had gone to court to challenge the FERC's claim that it, and not the state, had the right to determine if an LNG facility would be built in Long Beach. The FERC has long contended that the Natural Gas Act of 1938 gives it sole authority over siting of LNG plants.
     The act was a landmark piece of legislation that established the Federal Power Commission (later the FERC) and charged the agency with regulating three specific areas of natural gas commercial activity: interstate transportation, sale for resale of natural gas, and physical assets used for the sale and transportation of natural gas.
     Congressional authors of a report accompanying the appropriations bill said the Natural Gas Act of 1938 "clearly preempts states on matters of approving and siting natural gas infrastructure associated with interstate and foreign commerce."
     By their very nature, LNG import terminals are engaged in foreign commerce and thus fall within the purview of the authority granted to the FERC, according to the report. The provision supports the FERC chairman's pledge to expedite LNG permit reviews, saying, "These facilities need one clear process for review, approval and siting decisions … a process that also looks at the national public interest, and not just the interests of one state."
     Matthews' approach to the provision is more relaxed than his California counterparts', saying, "I would have liked to have the states play a role in the siting — have the state government rather than the federal government decide where those facilities ought to be — but only because I believe the local communities have a lot of confidence in their state regulators. They know us better than they know the people in Washington, D.C."
     The saving grace is that most of the safety regulations governing LNG's ultimate product — natural gas — fall under the state's authority. Since 1917, natural gas in Texas pipelines has been regulated by the Texas Railroad Commission.
     "I'd prefer that the provision didn't pass, but we live in a democracy and the democratic process worked," says Matthews. "Congress decided that's what they wanted to have happen, so as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of the debate."
     Of the possible Texas LNG projects, the one proposed for Galveston's Pelican Island has created the most public discord because of its proximity to a city of 57,000 people. If built, the terminal will share Pelican Island with the Texas A&M University-Galveston campus and the popular Sea Wolf Park. The terminal would also be a scant three miles or so from downtown Galveston.
     The Freeport LNG site did not run into much vocal or organized opposition, a fact Henry readily admits was due in part to the town's small population, but was also the result of his company doing a good job in calming the residents' fears.
     "There are a few people in any of these types of projects who simply don't want anything built close to where they live," he says.

NIMBY

     Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2002, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced the government had information that the terrorist group al-Qaeda had chosen two targets in Texas for attack — President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford and the Port of Freeport, remembers Stewart.
     "When I heard the Port of Freeport, I thought they would hit the ammonia tanks at the BASF plant because it would cause a chain reaction that could cause a mess, with Dow Chemical right across the ship channel. At that time, I had no idea the LNG facility was being planned. We didn't find out about that until sometime in 2003."
     Stewart believes the LNG terminal is a more likely and more dangerous terrorist target because "it would be simple to hit a tanker or one of those tanks with a shoulder-fired missile. You can't completely secure the Port of Freeport or the ship channel."
     LNG facilities like the one at Quintana Island can potentially pose some environmental threats. Stewart and other environmentalists worry that the constant noise of a three-year-long construction project of that magnitude will adversely affect or permanently scare off birds that have traditionally rested on lands near the terminal site during their annual migrations.
     The Freeport facility will not use seawater to turn LNG into natural gas, but some other terminals will, prompting federal fisheries scientists to study the potential impacts from millions of gallons of suddenly chilled seawater per day being pumped into temperature-sensitive ecosystems.
     In an ironic Mother Nature-strikes-back quirk of fate, the Freeport LNG terminal will be located on one of the fastest, if not THE fastest, eroding shorelines on the Texas coast. Over the years the City of Quintana, Brazoria County and other governmental agencies have spent more than $1 million trying to preserve and restore the beaches and dunes there.
     Yet opposition to LNG terminals falls mainly into two categories underscored by one fear: Be it through an operational error or deliberate attack, LNG might become the fuel for a Hiroshima-like explosion.
     LNG's opponents are not swayed by the industry's often-stated safety record, which by most accounts is very impressive.
     Research by the Institute for Energy, Law and Enterprise (IELE) at the University of Houston Law Center found that in the 40-plus years LNG tankers have been in operation they have made more than 33,000 trips covering more than 60 million miles without major accidents or safety problems either in port or on the high seas.
     "LNG carriers frequently transit high traffic density areas," according to a 2003 IELE report. "For example in 2000, one cargo entered Tokyo Bay every 20 hours, on average, and one cargo a week entered Boston harbor. The LNG industry has had to meet stringent standards set by countries such as the U.S., Japan, Australia and European nations."
     There have been scant few incidents where an LNG tanker has lost any of its cargo and there have never been any reported shipboard fires or fatalities.
     The safety record of land-based facilities, while laudable, is not as death-free.
     By far the most infamous LNG accident was the deadly 1944 leak in Cleveland, but there have been other notable incidents, including:
• In October 1979, LNG leaked through an improperly tightened pump seal at the Cove Point, Md., import terminal. As it vaporized it traveled through 200 feet of electrical conduit and entered a substation. The substation had no gas detectors because no one expected that natural gas would ever enter the building. Confined in the enclosed substation and reaching the right atmospheric mixture, the natural gas was ignited by an arcing circuit breaker and exploded. The blast killed one worker, seriously injured another and caused $3 million in damage. It must be noted that the Cove Point facility was designed and constructed according to required specifications of the time. The accident prompted several major design changes that were incorporated into the facility when it was repaired and were implemented industry-wide.
• On Jan. 9, 2004, a steam boiler at an LNG liquefaction plant in Skikda, Algeria, exploded, triggering a second and more massive explosion and fire in a vapor cloud that had formed near the boiler. The substance that formed the vapor cloud has not yet been determined, but the accident killed 30 people, injured 70 and caused up to $1 billion damage — on top of the $300 million in LNG export revenues expected to be lost before the facility can be repaired.
     Beale cringes a bit when people try to hold up the Algerian accident as an example of what could happen at a domestic receiving facility.
     "The Algerian plant had tanks and a dock, but other than that there is no similarity to an import terminal, and the tank and the docks were not affected by what happened," he says. "Given the way the Algerians ran the plant, most people expected an accident like this. Most of us are amazed they operated that plant for 30 years without blowing it up.
     "I'm not in any way making light of what happened over there or of the people who died, but you can't relate what happened in Algeria to what we do in U.S," he says emphatically. "Algeria was a liquefaction plant, not an import terminal. The culprit was a steam boiler. You won't find boilers in an LNG import facility. You also won't find refrigerants at an import facility, which was the suspected gas that was leaking and caused the second explosion."
     In terms of sheer destruction and loss of human life, both of these incidents pale in comparison to the 1944 accident at the East Ohio Gas Company plant in Cleveland.
     The peakshaving facility had opened three years earlier with three ball-shaped LNG storage tanks. A fourth, cylindrical tank was added in 1944 to expand the plant's capacity. World War II was still raging at the time and the shortage of stainless steel alloys led to the new tank being constructed of steel that could not withstand the LNG's cryogenic temperature.
     On the afternoon of Oct. 20, vapor began leaking from beneath the tank. It wafted through neighboring streets and into the sewer system, seeping into basements. At about 2:40 p.m., the vapor cloud struck the right mixture with the surrounding air and found an ignition source — no one knows exactly what it was.
     An explosion rocked the area, leveling homes, blowing manhole covers into the air and breaking windows a mile away. The subsequent fire scorched one square mile of Cleveland.
     About 20 minutes later, the intense heat from the fire melted the supports on one of the nearby ball-shaped tanks. It collapsed, causing an explosion and fireball witnessed by people seven miles away.
     In all, 131 people died — some burned so badly they were never identified — and more than 200 people were injured. East Ohio Gas Company paid $3 million in damage claims to neighborhood residents and another $500,000 to the families of the 55 company employees who died.
     Critics most often point to the Cleveland accident as proof of the potential dangers the LNG industry poses. Industry insiders will never forget the accident, either, because it was a watershed event that changed and they say dramatically improved the way LNG is handled.
     The biggest lesson taught by the Cleveland disaster was that normal carbon steel will freeze and crack when exposed to cryogenic temperatures, as it did in tank number four.
     Since that time, all LNG tanks that come into contact with the liquid must be constructed of stainless steel or a steel alloy that is 9 percent nickel. Had tank number four been constructed properly, experts believe the accident would have never happened.
     At Freeport LNG, the storage tanks will be constructed "like big Thermos bottles," says Henry. Each tank will comprise an inner tank made of 9 percent nickel alloy steel surrounded by insulation four feet thick. A second steel tank will encase the first tank and insulation layer, and then the entire structure will be wrapped in four-foot-thick pre-stressed concrete.
     Each LNG storage tank must also be surrounded by berms that create a pit big enough to hold a volume of liquid equal to 110 percent of the tank's capacity in order to contain any leak and hold it until the vapor evaporates into the atmosphere.
     "All of the tank penetrations — the places where you place a pipe to put LNG in and take it out again — are through the top of the tank," says Henry, explaining how the Freeport LNG facility will meet or exceed current industry standards. "There are no holes or piping at all going through the sides of the tanks."
     The tanks will also be surrounded by an exclusion zone — a vast area of vacant land separating the tanks from any other structures. To determine the size of the exclusion zone, Freeport LNG had to run a computer model that assumed a tank had lost its top and was on fire, says Henry.
     "You calculate the vapor radiation zone and the thermal radiation zone for that case," he says. "You must ensure that the thermal radiation especially is maintained on the property. In our case, the exclusion zone is 960 feet from the center of the tank. You could stand at that point and you could feel the heat, but you wouldn't be burned."
     To further silence critics, Henry points out that there are about 120 LNG tanks in service in the United States — most of them used at peakshaving plants in the northeast and the Midwest — and all have operated without incident for years.
     "Just because people have handled LNG safely, that was in a different world. I'm not worried about the people who are handling the LNG," says Stewart. "I am worried about the devastation from terrorists and I find it absolutely incomprehensible that the companies involved would put us all at such risk to do something they could do safely offshore, when the only difference is money, and it is not that much money in the scheme of things."
     Offshore does not equal safety, counters Beale.
     "The only reason you go offshore, in my opinion, is to avoid the NIMBY (not in my backyard) issues," says Beale, who admits some of the clients he is working with on offshore terminals might not like his opinion. "There are so many more issues — technological, operational, meteorological and oceanographic to name a few — when you put a terminal floating on water or even fixed in water, but in water that is deepwater and subject to large ocean currents and waves. You are not near your markets and you've got to have a pipeline coming onshore. The reality of it is that the simplest, safest and most secure way to do it is to put it onshore and meet or exceed all of the design standards. The history of the industry shows that this is an extremely safe-to-handle operation. By having it fixed on the ground, you take away a lot of the variables that would introduce safety issues."
     As far as LNG being a terrorist target is concerned, Beale is as skeptical as Stewart is concerned. He cites a test he participated in several years ago designed to determine what would happen if someone detonated a pool of LNG.
     During the test, done in China Lake, Calif., researchers detonated an explosive charge in an empty pit and measured the pressure wave it created. They then filled the pit with LNG and detonated a duplicate charge. The pressure waves from the two explosions were the same, proving that the LNG added nothing to the explosion.
     "If you want to blow up an LNG ship, then you'd better have a lot of explosives, because the explosion you get will be exactly the same size as the explosive materials you use," he says. "You'll have one hell of a fire, but you will not have an explosion unless you used an explosive.
     "Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the living room, but look at Boston Harbor," he continues. "There they bring in smaller but far more dangerous gasoline ships."
     The U.S. Coast Guard is not interested in letting anyone prove whether Stewart or Beale is right. It has established extensive regulations and sophisticated monitoring systems around the nation aimed at preventing waterborne terrorism.
     From his command center in Houston, USCG Commander Tom Marian and his staff keep an eye on all vessel traffic in and around the Port of Houston complex. Marian is the commander of the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) for Houston/Galveston, a group he describes as "the eyes and ears of the Captain of the Port of Houston, Texas City and Galveston, both from a navigational safety perspective and from a port security standpoint."
     The captain of the port is the senior USCG officer, usually a captain, who is delegated the authority to control the movement of vessels on the navigable waterways of a given port. In the event of an emergency, he can shut down a port if he deems it necessary.
     The VTS' eyes and ears are a network of sensors and closed circuit television cameras that allow Marian and his staff to survey 73 miles of waterway, "from the city dock all the way down to the buoy outside of Galveston Bay," he says.
     "We will monitor about 230,000 vessel movements in a year. If you exclude the ferries, we monitor about 150,000 vessel movements between the ports of Galveston, Texas City and Houston," says Marian. "That includes tug and tows, passenger vessels that can carry more than 50 passengers, and commercial vessels that are greater than 40 meters in length."
     Sensor data and television images are transmitted to the unit's Vessel Traffic Center, a room reminiscent of an airport control tower. The staff on watch use video displays and computer monitors to track all vessel movements throughout the ports of Houston, Galveston and Texas City and, if necessary, take control of those movements.
     Until recently, the VTS oversaw ship movements primarily by talking directly to the ships' crew via radio, but the dawning of 2005 brought Marian's staff an important new tool. A regulation went into effect requiring that most large vessels carry an automatic identification system, or AIS.
     An AIS provides real-time information on a vessel's location, name, course and speed, and the type of cargo it is carrying. The system is very loosely akin to an aircraft transponder in that they both transmit information to controllers. The major difference between the two, says Marian, is that an aircraft transponder will send back information after it is electronically asked to do so. The AIS system continually broadcasts its information — updating it every two to 10 seconds. In essence, it is always talking.
     AIS systems are now required on tug vessels engaged in towing that are 26 feet or longer in length and 600 horsepower or greater, all passenger vessels that can carry more than 151 passengers, and all vessels engaged in commercial service that are heavier than 300 gross tons.
     The system is very sophisticated, says Marian, and has the capability of allowing the VTS and the ship's crew to send text messages back and forth. Although the system's primary intent is to aid navigational safety, its port security implications are clear. Crew aboard a commandeered vessel can silently call the USCG for help.
     The Houston/Galveston VTS is not responsible for monitoring vessel traffic in the Port of Freeport, but Marian says his AIS sensors can detect all of the movements in and out of the port and he can report suspicious activity to the captain of the port responsible for the Port of Freeport.
     The USCG is in the process of putting AIS sensors further out in the Gulf of Mexico in response to President Bush's requirement that it prevent threats from reaching the country's territorial waters. When installation is completed, the VTS will be able to monitor AIS-equipped vessels up to 200 miles from port.
     Added to that, the VTS has a new surface search radar that can lock onto a relatively small target and track it through the waterways, says Marian.
     At any given time there are vessels moving through the Port of Houston complex carrying dangerous cargos like LPG, ethyl chlorides, anhydrous ammonia, propylene oxide and other caustic and volatile substances.
     These ships carrying cargo deemed hazardous — designated as "certain dangerous cargo" or CDC — get special USCG attention. The vessels are specially color coded on the VTC's screens so they stand out to Marian's staff. The USCG also picks CDC vessels at random and provides armed escort.
     In the event of a heightened security alert, the USCG boards CDC vessels as well as provides armed escort.
     LNG is considered a CDC, but from Marian's perspective "it is a lot safer and a lot cleaner than the LPG and oil we move throughout the country. I see what oil can do when it spills out onto the water. The atmosphere's ability to absorb the energy of LNG is far better than the water's ability to dissipate the oil.
     "On a typical day we will see 350 tug movements and 10 to 30 of those will involve CDCs, which is greater than any other port in the U.S.," he says. "We will monitor 28 to 45 tank vessel movements per day, which is also number one in the U.S. We will oversee 20 to 26 cargo and container ship movements, all within 24 hours. One or two LNG movements within a day really isn't much at all when you look at the sheer volume of everything else that is moving."
     In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Among its provisions was a mandate that each port create an Area Maritime Security Committee.
     The committee comprises members of local law enforcement, industry and other port stakeholders. Members meet to discuss security protocols and regulations, but the committee's real strength is it builds strong relationships between the USCG and the port's stakeholders.
     "If I have a mariner who is navigating his light tug from one end of the waterway to the other to pick up a tow and he sees something that is an aberration, he will call the vessel traffic center in a second and report what he saw," says Marian. "That type of vigilance is priceless. We could bring on several hundred extra people and put them every 100 feet along the waterway and it still wouldn't be as effective as the alert mariner who knows the waterway like the back of his hand."
     As a case in point, Marian tells the story of a mariner who in March 2003 — shortly after Operation Iraqi Freedom began and the nation was at a heightened state of alert — was navigating his light tug near the critically important Hwy. 146 bridge when he saw suspicious activity on a small island formed around one of the bridge's pilings.
     "The captain called in and said he saw a guy on the island who had picked up a box and put it down next to the piling of the bridge footing," says Marian. "A small boat then picked up the individual and took him about 500 yards away, where they waited and watched the box. Both guys were wearing camouflage clothing as well.
     "We didn't know if they were waiting for a large vessel to come by or if they were waiting for a bunch of traffic on the bridge, so the Coast Guard shut down the vessel traffic and local law enforcement shut down the bridge. The Coast Guard boarded the boat and talked to the guys, and the LaPorte bomb squad responded. All of this was based on an alert mariner who saw something that didn't look right."
     As it turned out, the box contained only a dead pet cat that someone had tried to bury at sea by throwing it from the bridge.
     "For awhile, people were calling me up, meowing and hanging up," Marian laughs now. "The point is the system worked."
     The Freeport LNG site has met all FERC and USCG mandated security and planning requirements, says Henry. Most of those plans are sealed and Henry will not discuss specific security features of the terminal, aside from the obvious ones. The terminal will have fences surrounding it, security cameras and security personnel on duty all the time. In addition, the LNG tankers will be assisted into the port by tugs, which will stay with the tankers the entire time they are in port as an additional security measure.
     Marian underscores that there is no silver bullet in the world of port security. Government and industry can spend billions of dollars fortifying a port complex, but it will never be completely invulnerable to attack.
     "Accidents happen more often than terrorist events," he says, putting the potential risks in perspective. "Our primary mission is to deter people from engaging in terrorist type acts within this port complex and to, more importantly, safely move commerce in a port that moved more than a quarter of a billion tons of it in the last year to and from its destinations. If we do that, I think we have succeeded in our job."
     Stewart says that even without the threat of terrorism, she still does not like the idea of having an LNG import facility on shore near powder kegs like Dow and Conoco-Phillips and, more importantly, near people.
     "There is no doubt that LNG is needed," says Stewart. "There is so much money to be made on that facility, they could have put it offshore the way Texaco is doing in Louisiana, where it would be perfectly safe. Instead, they are putting it on the corner of the ship channel, on Quintana Island, where they will be unloading.
     "If you sunk one of those ships right there (at Freeport LNG), you are going to block the Port of Freeport, you are going to block all of the (Gulf Intracoastal Waterway's) traffic and it would take a very long time to undo the mess that would cause," she says. "I don't like the idea of bringing those ships in. I think it is a disaster asking to happen.
     "My feeling is that doing anything that is a bit disastrous, if you can do it offshore, it is better and safer. LNG is not as safe as industry claims. Anything that can go wrong, will. That being the state of the art of mankind, I still want it offshore."

Part of the mix

     "With LNG, the thing that makes you the most nervous is it concentrates enormous quantities of gas in one place," says Matthews. "Over the 60-year history of LNG, there have been not too many accidents, but there have been horrific accidents in the history of that fuel. We just need to make sure that those facilities are as safe as they can be so that people can feel comfortable having them located in their community."
     Terrorism is an absolute concern, but "in my view that concern will be met, at least today, by the companies themselves providing security," believes Matthews. "There is no way that the federal or state governments have the resources to maintain security of those facilities. It is a discussion I'd like to have with those companies after those facilities are built and in place to make sure there is a proper level of security around those facilities. In the post-9/11 world, we have a whole different set of concerns than we did before."
     Local residents also have a voice in whether LNG facilities are sited in their backyards.
     "All proposed facilities must go through an extensive public process," says Kruse. "If people are concerned about it, they need to participate in the hearings and meetings."
     Some people feel that simply speaking for or against siting of an LNG facility is not enough. The nation needs to look for a better alternative.
     "We must stop exporting American dollars for foreign fossil fuel and start spending our energy dollars in America," contends Riley, who says the only way LNG industry leaders can garner his support is to "take their multi-billion dollars away from their dangerous LNG imported fossil fuel proposals, and spend them on different types of energy projects that will utilize American know-how and put Americans to work creating safe and sustainable alternative renewable energy."
     Matthews agrees that the country need not turn to imported LNG to fuel its future, but for a different reason.
     "If Congress would allow us to drill in areas of the country that are now off limits, either on the federal lands in the Gulf Coast or on federal wildlife lands, the gas deposits through there would be able to supply all of the gas the country needs without importing any gas at all," he believes.
     Short of getting Congress to change its mind, Matthews maintains that LNG is just another type of asset in Texas' diversified energy portfolio.
     "In today's world, the demand for energy continues to increase. We are going to need everything we can come up with to provide enough energy for the country," he says. "We talk about wind turbines, we talk about solar panels, we talk about biomass, we talk about hydrogen for cars and now we talk about LNG facilities — all of that is in addition to our domestic production of oil and gas.
     "But," says Matthews, adding a note of caution, "we need to develop these resources in such a way that we protect the environment and public safety."

Coastal Legend: Charles Moss
The quality of faith

BY JIM HINEY

     Sharron Stewart still vividly remembers answering the door at her Lake Jackson home 25 years ago and finding Charles Moss standing on her porch. There was nothing unusual about his visit — the county's first-ever marine agent had forged a strong professional and personal relationship with one of the upper Texas coast's most respected environmental activists.
     Would she like to go with him and Ron Bisby, then the head of the local U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge, tomorrow and check the progress of a colony of nesting birds that had taken up residence on an abandoned oil platform near Cedar Lakes? Stewart gladly accepted his invitation.
     Stewart picks up the story as the trio was en route to the platform the next day.
     "We were coming down along the river and I could see the old wooden platform and I could see the bird colony. I was looking through binoculars and I said, ‘Charlie, there is a brown pelican.' He said, ‘There are no brown pelicans up here. We haven't had brown pelicans here since the mid-1950s.' I said, ‘Charlie, I see a brown pelican sitting on that old oil platform.'"
     Bisby took the binoculars from Stewart and confirmed that there was indeed a specimen of one of the state's most endangered bird species perched on the oil platform.
     "I got so excited, I was going crazy," says Stewart. "We got down there and sure enough, it was a brown pelican. I had seen the first brown pelican on the upper coast since 1956."
     The two friends were sitting together one day last year reliving that exhilarating experience when Moss made a confession. He had seen the bird first, just hours before he issued his invitation to Stewart.
     "Charlie had brought Ron and me out there to have the joy of discovering the brown pelican," says Stewart today in a tone of grateful amazement. "And do you know what? I didn't know for 25 years that we were not the first ones to see it.

     "Charlie is not the kind of person who needs to get credit," says Stewart, explaining why Moss let her report the sighting first. "That was just one example of how he works to get other people to do good things while making them think it was their idea. That is such a great talent."
     Moss' selfless act is the rule, rather than the exception, for a man who wove his deep religious faith with great love for his fellow humans and devotion to the environment to leave a lasting impression that reaches far beyond Brazoria County.
     "I have not found the outside of his footprint yet. It is very large," says Rich Tillman, the man who became Brazoria County's second marine agent when Moss retired in 1996.
     Among his credits, Moss taught more than 50,000 children about beach safety, marshes and other aspects of living in a coastal county, and his curriculums are still being used today; he started the annual practice of staking down old Christmas trees along Brazoria County beaches to create sand dunes; and he had a lot to do with creation of the state's highly successful Adopt-a-Beach program (Moss says he only consulted state leaders on it, but friends say it was his idea).
     His noted gift for oratory, honed through decades of preaching as an ordained Christian minister, is forever preserved through his two most famous pearls of wisdom: "Fear no crabs" and "Never swim in lumpy water."
     "Charles has a tremendous sense of humor," says Mel Russell, former Galveston County marine agent, describing his long-time friend. "He finds the humor in life's situations.
     "He also has a talent for communicating with people," Russell continues. "He always deals fairly with people. I've known Charles since the early 1970s and I've never heard him say a negative thing about any person he has been associated with."
     Never said a negative thing about anyone?
     Well, admits Russell, there was that time when he and Moss ended up on opposite sides of a shrimp fishing debate.
     When it came to the shrimp fishery, Russell represented a diverse constituency. Then as now, Galveston County boasted large fleets of both bay shrimpers and shrimpers who trawled the waters offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The two groups co-existed peacefully, but they harvested the same crop, so there was some measure of competition between them and Russell had to walk a fine line to serve both industries.
     Moss was not similarly torn between stakeholders. Brazoria County's shrimping fleet was mainly an offshore one.
     During the mid-1970s a change was proposed that would have effectively closed a productive portion of Galveston Bay to bay shrimpers, resulting in dire economic consequences for them.
     The offshore fleet, on the other hand, was in favor of the change because it would result in more shrimp moving to offshore waters — more shrimp for the offshore fleet to catch.
     TPWD scheduled hearings on the proposed change at several places around the area. Russell missed the hearing held in Galveston, but he got together a group of about 40 bay fishermen to testify against the proposal at a hearing in Brazoria County.
     Throughout the hearing, Moss sat with his gaze transfixed on his fellow county agent.
     "After it was over he came up to me and said, ‘Mel, don't bring those people into my county anymore. They smell bad,'" Russell says as he laughs heartily.
     "Charles has a flock mentality. Those fishermen in that county were his — they belonged to him just like they were members of his church. He guarded them like they were his own children. He was going to look after them like they were his own children and make sure they were successful economically and socially the best he could. He took it real personally if I went over there and messed with his county," Russell says as he laughs again.
     During the 12 years he was a Brazoria County commissioner, Ronnie Broaddus counted 37 miles of Gulf shoreline as part of his precinct. He loves the shoreline and wanted to preserve and protect it for future generations — it was the main reason he ran for office, he says.
     "The best ally I ever had was Charlie Moss," says Broaddus. "He knew what I wanted to do and he pointed me in the right direction. I really respect Charlie's opinion."
     By Broaddus' figures, Moss saved the county at least $750,000 during his tenure as county agent by finding inexpensive solutions to rather large problems. One incident in particular sticks in Broaddus' mind. It was the year thousands of dead fish washed ashore in Broaddus' precinct, covering most of the beaches in stinking, decaying bodies.
     Local residents wanted Broaddus to have county crews pick up the fish and haul them to the landfill. "I'm talking more than 30 miles of beach and every square foot was covered with dead fish," says Broaddus. "Can you imagine what it would take to pick up that many fish and take them to a landfill?"
     Broaddus called Moss, who told him the kill was caused by a red tide — the first Broaddus had experienced.
     "Charlie told me that there was no danger from the fish and we could just bury them in the sand dunes. He saved the county about $500,000 in cleanup," Broaddus says.
     Moss also motivated Broaddus to have crews plant salt cedars, a type of bushy tree, in the county right-of-way along County Road 257 — also known as the Blue Water Highway — that runs from near Freeport north to Galveston along the Gulf shoreline. Salt cedars, an exotic species, are reviled in most parts of the state and nation because they consume huge amounts of water from river systems and they accumulate salt in their tissues that they later release into the soil, making the ground unsuitable for many native species.
     The trees also develop extensive root systems and, when planted near other salt-tolerant vegetation, help hold the beach in place as well as provide plentiful bird habitats.
     "Those trees protected the beach and the houses behind the beach," says Broaddus. "Those people (who own the beach houses) don't know it, but if a hurricane comes through, Charlie Moss probably saved their houses. Whenever you see a salt cedar here, think of Charlie Moss."
     Stewart first met Moss at the behest of a friend, local realtor Dot Keith, just after Moss took the job as county marine agent. As Stewart recalls, it was a very cold, wet and gray wintry day when Keith called and asked Stewart to have lunch at a small restaurant near Oyster Creek.
     "Dot said, ‘I just sold a house to someone you have to meet because you are going to be best friends,'" Stewart recounts the conversation. "And you know, that lady was right. I'd say that Charlie has been my best friend. We have worked on all kinds of projects together."
     She chaired Moss' county advisory committee for 12 years and served as a member for many more, including during Ronald Reagan's presidential administration, when Congress repeatedly tried to cut the National Sea Grant Program out of the federal budget. Stewart went to Capitol Hill to help save the program.
     "Because of Charlie Moss, I could stand up and say, ‘I'm a constituent of Sea Grant and this is what Sea Grant does for me and people I know in the county where I live,' and I could tick off all of the things that Sea Grant did for local fishermen — the recreational and commercial fishermen — and for the local community, things they did through the school system," she says. "If it hadn't been for Charlie, and his convincing me of the value of Sea Grant, both as an applied science institution and one that directly deals with people, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
     "It's a shame we can't clone Charlie," bemoans Stewart. "He did it all, and he did it right."
     Charles Grover Moss was born in Oklahoma City on Christmas Day, 1930.
     "My mother's name was Mary," he says impishly, flashing the trademark grin and twinkle in his eyes that has not been dimmed by his recent bout with kidney disease.
     Was his father, by chance, named Joseph?
     "No, it starts going downhill from there," he chuckles. "I like to say that mama wasn't kinky, so it wasn't exactly an immaculate conception."
     Moss lived in Oklahoma City for the next 28 years and might have remained a Sooner had it not been for medical, or maybe Divine, intervention when he was 15.
     "The tortuous way I got into the Gulf of Mexico was through Rheumatic fever," he recalls. "The doctor told my parents to take me to the coast because it was at zero elevation and there was good salt air and sunshine. Heck, the general ambience of the Gulf Coast is healthful as far as I'm concerned."
     Moss' father had a friend who owned a fishing camp on Mustang Island, which at the time was a sleepy collection of little cabins, fishing shacks, and "mom-and-pop stay-overnight places," as Moss describes it. "It was by no means the shabbiest place to be.
     "I loved it, automatically. That place introduced me to saltwater. It was 13 years later before I could get back on my own, but I made it," he says, smiling broadly.
     For his first 21 years, Moss was the only child of Oklahoma County's public defender and his wife, a registered nurse. That changed with the arrival of Mark Moss, who Moss refers to as "an only brother."
     "The year I voted for Adlai Stevenson, he was born," says Moss. "That makes us two ‘only children.'"
     He attended Oklahoma City University, where he pursued both a degree in speech and art and a lovely art and journalism student named Theresa Wolf. They married in 1953 and over the next 10 years had four children: Janna Marie, Charles Grover Jr., Harold Keith and Walter Barth.
     After graduation, Moss entered the Disciples of Christ seminary. While at the seminary, Moss took a few pastoral calls to help defray expenses. "I took the calls at a small church in Oklahoma City and at Carnegie, Okla., whatever was available when the semester started," he says, before taking a detour from his life's story to tell a joke.
     "The dean called in a student preacher and said he would send the student to a real fiery place. ‘These people are known for chewing up preachers,' the dean said. ‘If you get fired, don't worry about it, just come back and we'll take care of you. Just go in and do your job,'" Moss begins before inserting himself in the story. "I took the call and the next semester they asked me back and I could hardly believe it, and the dean couldn't either. I met with the chairman of the board of the church and I said, ‘You have got to know that you have a reputation for being hard on preachers, but you've asked me back for the second term. What's that about?' The chairman of the board said, ‘Half the people don't want any preacher at all and the other half don't know what they want, and we figured you was about as close to that as anyone we've seen yet.'"
     The Texas Conference of Christian Churches came to Oklahoma looking for graduating seminarians in 1961. They needed mention only that there were churches along the Gulf Coast in search of pastors and Moss was theirs.
     For the next 10 years, Moss ministered at the First Christian Church in Port Lavaca, another Christian church in Ganado and several others in the area. During his travels, Moss and Theresa became friends with a couple who were Lutheran preachers, and through them became involved in the interdenominational community. The Moss' went to the Christian Faith in Life Community in Austin, where they developed a program to more fully weave the Christian faith into everyday life.
     "The theory was that the industrial complex could work better if it was a Christian community than it would if it was a productive force only," explains Moss. "If industry cared for their worker as much as they did their product, they would get a major advantage demonstrated economically."
     Taking time off from his church duties and buoyed by a $20,000 grant, Moss implemented his program at Mutual of New York's Corpus Christi office. The program had what Moss describes as "some small success." When the grant money dried up, Charles and Theresa had to decide where God was leading them.
     The couple decided to stay where they were. Moss took a job running Froggies, a fish processing plant in Seadrift and, crossing denominational borders again, preaching in a Methodist church. The latter job was simply the continuation of his life's mission to minister to as many people as he could reach. His job at Froggies proved to be a fortuitous introduction to the seafood industry that would lead him to a whole other flock to tend.
     Congress passed legislation in 1966 creating the National Sea Grant Program. By 1971, Texas A&M University was named one of the first four state Sea Grant College Programs, and its leaders were busy trying to establish the marine outreach activities mandated by the federal legislation. What eventually became a network of specialists and county marine agents began with a single county marine agent position being approved in Calhoun County.
     Joe Surovik was hired as the state's first county marine agent. Part of the plan was for each county marine agent to have an advisory committee whose membership included local stakeholders. As fate had it, the chairman of Surovik's advisory committee was Charles Moss.
     A man named Wallace Klussmann was director of Texas Sea Grant's extension and outreach efforts, called the Marine Advisory Service, in the early days. After getting Surovik's position approved, he focused on obtaining similar positions in Brazoria and Galveston counties. Klussmann hired Mel Russell with the intent of making him the Brazoria County agent, but the position in Galveston came online first, and Russell was installed there.
     Russell remembers being called to a meeting in Calhoun County to talk about the marine outreach program there. The meeting turned out to be his introduction to Moss.
     "We sat around inside of a net shop on bales of webbing and discussed something about the program," says Russell, who is now retired. "Charles Moss gave a rendition of the program in Calhoun County and did such an impressive job that almost immediately Wallace started eyeing him for a position with Sea Grant."
     Not long after that meeting, the Brazoria County marine agent's job gained final approval from the county commissioners' court. Russell was in his office when Klussmann called and asked if he thought Moss could be a county agent.
     "I told him I was very impressed with the man, his credentials and his ability to work with people," Russell recalls. "I told him I thought Charles would make a good marine agent for Brazoria County."
     Meanwhile, Surovik had told Moss about the opening for a marine agent. It sounded like a great opportunity, Moss says now, so he applied. Klussmann received a pile of applications from biologists for the Brazoria County job, but the fish house manager won out.
     "I guess Wallace wanted to go with experience," says Moss. "I was the only applicant who had ever bought and sold a box of shrimp, iced down a shrimp boat or run an operation."
     "He also had teaching experience from Sunday school," adds Theresa. "He was always involved in something that dealt with teaching people."
     As county marine agent, Moss worked with about 2,000 school students each year, teaching them about various aspects of the coastal environment. One of his proudest accomplishments, he says, was his mini-marsh.
     "If you go to work for the government, you go to work for Chicken Little — they are always saying, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling,' ‘We don't have any money. We can't take any kids out to a marsh,'" says Moss in a high-pitched, mocking voice. "I said, ‘That's a good deal. If you get 120 kids out in a marsh, you'll ruin it.' So I figured out a way to take a marsh to the school."
     Moss' mini-marsh comprised a summer wading pool; several gallon milk jugs of saltwater; small fish, crabs and shrimp — whatever he could beg off fishermen and from local fish houses; and "seaside creatures and big chunks of mud I'd go gather," says Moss.
     He'd take his marsh kit to Brazoria County schools, set it up in an open space and then delight students with lessons on what marshes mean to the general ecology.
     "They'd get to see first hand the real critters," Moss beams. "Some of the students didn't know that shrimp have heads."
     He also lobbied for and won a place for beach safety training during "Safety Town," a required course for every child planning to attend a Brazoria County school. Safety Town taught students about the fire and police departments and other aspects of how to remain safe.
     Moss' course taught that "the most dangerous critter on the beach is an automobile," he says. "It taught them a lot about water and how water moves so they understood undertow and what a wave does and how it acts."
     Before Moss' beach safety course, Brazoria County had been averaging about seven drownings each summer on its Gulf beaches. After the course began, drownings ceased for several years. Moss will not take credit for the drop in deaths, saying it might have just been good fortune.
     Good fortune, maybe, but Tillman says Moss deserves a lot of the credit because he has a way of teaching children that gets them to remember his lessons.
     "To teach kids to wear shoes at the beach to prevent getting cut, Charles' saying was, ‘Shoes don't bleed,'" says Tillman. "It worked because little kids hate the sight of blood."
     Tillman teaches the beach safety course these days with just as much enthusiasm but, he concedes, not as much oratorical skill as Moss, whose two most notable utterances were "moments of intuition," says their creator.
     "They were both very reasonable statements, I thought," Moss says. "‘Fear no crabs' is taken out of the Book of Deuteronomy, where they list the things that you can't eat. I'd be going around doing seafood preparation and selection programs and I'd face Deuteronomy, the 11th Chapter, so that's where fear no crabs came from. You don't have to fear the crab. The crab is fine. Fear the water he comes out of. If it's not fine, then the crab is not fine.
     "The lumpy water quote was another comment on water quality. It seems like (the Moss family) has always lived on the coast — since we moved to Texas anyway. We've become very familiar with the operation of sewage disposal units and septic tanks.
     "As much fun as it generated, I was never really into that statement," he confides.
     From time to time, Moss has been known to wax poetic, as he did so eloquently in the following verse dedicated to the blue crab:

Four Texas Sea Grant nominees selected for prestigious national fellowship

The National Sea Grant College Program has selected four Texas graduate students to spend a year in Washington, D.C., gaining first-hand experience in marine and coastal policy issues.
     Students apply for the Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship through one of the 30 Sea Grant programs, which select candidates to sponsor. The final decision is made by a review panel convened by the National Sea Grant Office. While the number of fellowships offered varies with the availability of positions, the Texas Sea Grant College Program typically has at least one accepted each year. This is the first time four Texas fellows have been chosen.
     "We had an excellent pool of applicants this year, and I am extremely proud that these four outstanding candidates were selected to be Knauss Fellows," says Robert Stickney, Texas Sea Grant director.
     This year's group includes the first Knauss Fellow assigned to work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Jean Ellis, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in geography at Texas A&M University and who holds a bachelor of science in environmental studies and biology and a master of science in geography from the University of Southern California. Ellis will be working at NASA's Sun-Earth Connection Division.
     "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work for NASA for a year — a position that would not have been possible without the Knauss Fellowship," says Ellis, who was born in Boston and attended high school in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. "In addition to the many professional benefits of the fellowship, I am looking forward to spending time with the Knauss alumni still in Washington, D.C., and my colleagues in the current class."
     Three other Texas graduate students will be spending a year working alongside researchers and administrators at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Dwight Gledhill, who is expected to receive a Ph.D. in oceanography from TAMU next year, will spend his internship at National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), Office of Research and Applications Division, Marine Ecosystem and Climate Branch.
     "It's very exciting," Gledhill says of the NESDIS internship. "They're trying to evaluate stresses to corals in the oceans, and trying to weave in remote sensing on that issue, and I hope to be working with them on that."
     Gledhill, who is originally from Connecticut, holds a bachelor of science degree in environmental earth science from Eastern Connecticut State University and a master of science in oceanography from TAMU.
     Chad McNutt is expected to complete his Ph.D. in 2005 from the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston. He previously received a bachelor of science degree in marine biology from Texas A&M University at Galveston. The native Texan will be working in the Office of the Undersecretary, who is the head of NOAA.
     "I'm very honored," McNutt says, adding that after his prior focus on research, working in administration will be an interesting change. "I appreciate the opportunity, and I'd like to thank Texas Sea Grant — without them I obviously wouldn't be here."
     Kate Willis has spent the past few years living abroad in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. She said she feels her international experience there will help with her internship at NOAA's Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Affairs.
     "The Office of International Affairs is the representative of NOAA's position on marine issues in any international arena, so by working in that office I will have the opportunity to assist them with that," Willis says. "I'm thrilled. International Affairs was one of my top choices, and after living in Canada for the past three and a half years, I've become more sensitive to the way the U.S. is perceived and the way the U.S. perceives other countries."
     Willis, who claims both New York City and Minnesota as home, received a bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University in American studies and a master's degree from TAMU in wildlife and fisheries sciences, which included independent research she conducted on Stellar sea lions in Alaska and British Columbia.
     The Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship was established by Congress in 1979 to give a unique educational experience to graduate students enrolled in marine or Great Lakes studies. The program is named in honor of one of Sea Grant's founders and a former NOAA administrator.

- Cindie Powell

Sea Science

by
Cindie Powell

     Asian invaders musseling in on Gulf habitats
     If the invasive Asian green mussel should make its way to Texas as expected, it will be right at home in the state's bays and estuaries, according to biologist Dr. David Hicks.
     A study conducted by the University of Texas at Brownsville researcher shows that the environmental conditions along the Texas coast are amenable to Perna viridis, a non-native mussel species that is causing fouling problems in the raw water systems at power plants and desalination plants along the Gulf Coast of Florida — and that has been found on the Atlantic coast from Florida to northern Georgia.
     "One of the main things we're doing with this research project is to try to predict where this animal may spread in North America — what habitats are potentially colonizable," he says. "In particular, we're interested in whether they will be able to colonize areas of high industrial use like Mobile Bay or the Houston Ship Channel." Under a grant from the Aquatic Nuisance Species Program of the National Sea Grant College Program, Hicks conducted laboratory research on P. viridis' temperature tolerances. Combining his data with existing temperature data from the nation's coastal regions using a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database, he and graduate student Samuel Amoako-Atta of the Center for Coastal Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi have developed a map of the continental United States that indicates hospitable and inhospitable areas based on consecutive days of temperatures that are within and outside of the Asian green mussel's tolerances.
     The entire Texas Gulf Coast is within the mussel's temperature limits, and the mussel's salinity tolerances are compatible with all but the most hypersaline parts of the lower Laguna Madre and Baffin Bay. And the animals spread quickly — Hicks notes that every time he's made a presentation on P. viridis, he's had to update his map on their current distribution in North America to show additional locations.
     The bivalves were first spotted in Tampa Bay in July 1999, when the Tampa Electric Company noticed a previously unknown mussel fouling their plants' intake screens and pipes. They contacted the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., for an identification, and discovered they had the dubious distinction of being the first foothold of the Asian green mussel in the United States.
     The native range of P. viridis is in Southeast Asia, from the Persian Gulf to the Philippines and Hong Kong. They first appeared in the New World in Trinidad/Tobago in the early 1990s, and moved on to Venezuela, to Jamaica, and then to Florida.
     "It's most likely they were moved from Southeast Asia to the Western Hemisphere through ballast water (as larvae) or by some kind of fouling — they've been found on anchor chains and the hulls of international vessels. It could be either one of those ways, but somehow tied to shipping," Hicks says. "Certainly the main vector for them to move anywhere on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts is barge traffic in the Intracoastal Waterway. They'll be all over barges if they're not already — that's just prime habitat for them."
     The mussels have other, more unusual, vectors as well. Debi Ingrao, Senior Biologist at Mote Marine Laboratory, describes a sawfish with a net wrapped around its bill — a net that had Asian green mussels attached.
     "The sawfish was collected in Shark River, which is in the west coast part of the Everglades," Ingrao says. "The net had been there about a year, but it doesn't technically count as a population (specific to the area), because you don't know where that sawfish had been, although he could have spread the mussels to that area."
     Official records of the spread of the Asian green mussel may not yet include the Everglades, but the mussel has been found in the Gulf as far south as Marco Island, just south of Naples, Fla. The animal has made much less progress northward, against the prevailing Gulf currents, extending only to Anclote Key, just north of Tampa Bay.
     But the accidental introduction of the mussel — primarily through human activity in shipping and recreational boating — could land the bivalve on Texas' shores at any time, as it has on the Atlantic coast.
     "It jumped coasts through another accidental introduction, and it extends from the Mosquito Lagoon (just north of Titusville, Fla.) north up to the Georgia/South Carolina border," says Jon Fajans, Biological Scientist at the University of Florida. "There's a larger population in Savannah, but they've been found on jetties as far north as Tybee Island, which is just south of the South Carolina border."
     They are less tolerant of winter temperatures, however, and the population in Georgia dies off in winter and then re-establishes itself in the summer from southern populations, Fajans says. He adds that populations around plant effluents — which is generally warmer water — can survive a winter die-off and become the launching platform for a summer population explosion, as has happened in Tokyo Bay.
     Hicks describes the Georgia coast as a "thermally marginal habitat" for the Asian green mussel: "They'll do all right there at times, but occasionally they'll get knocked further south."
     Hicks' map of P. viridis' thermal limits is based on four years' worth of seawater surface temperature data compared to his lab results showing the mussels' thermal tolerances of between 12 and 32 degrees Celsius (from about 54 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit) — and showing that almost everywhere along the Gulf of Mexico is within their range.
     The Asian green mussel has the rapid growth characteristic of many tropical species. Their maximum life span is about three years, but by the end of two years they can grow to be six and a half inches long.
     Their reproductive rate is even more prodigious. They are old enough to reproduce by two to three months after settlement — that is, after they have attached to a hard surface, be it the hull of a barge or a jetty in a bay — and larger, older individuals can release millions of eggs or sperm during each spawn.
     "Being a tropical animal, their cues to spawning are a little bit different than temperate species like the blue mussel, where you can almost predict their spawning to the day based on big seasonal swings in temperature," Hicks says. "Tropical species don't have such environmental cues, so it can be anything that sets them off — reduced salinity, a change in temperature, or being exposed out of the water for any length of time. Any sort of environmental anomaly will cause them to spawn.
     "So they tend to be gravid throughout the year — they just charge up-spawn, charge up-spawn. And as barges move from one body of water to another fairly quickly, then all the animals that are attached to the hull will spawn and leave mussels everywhere they go."
     The fertilized eggs quickly develop into free-swimming larvae that can drift in the water column for two to four weeks, but they can delay settlement for an additional three weeks if a suitable substrate is not found. Once a suitable surface is found, they attach with a cluster of yellow-gold threads called a byssus and then develop into the familiar mussel shape.
     "Water often travels around in discrete masses, so the mass of water that contains all these larvae comes and hits the shore, and within an instant they all grab on and you have a huge population," Hicks says, describing the uniformity of size within the population as they all recruit at the same time as resembling "donuts in a box."
     In fact, combining their rapid growth and reproduction with their tolerances to the Gulf coast's temperature and salinity — their salinity tolerances range from 15 to 45 parts per thousand — the only thing that really limits their presence in the Gulf is their ability to find something onto which they can attach. And in addition to human activity being responsible for their spreading, it also provides prime habitat in the form of artificial substrates such as channel markers and pier pilings.
     Mote Marine Laboratory's Ingrao notes that oyster habitat restoration efforts in Florida are providing additional substrate habitats for the Asian green mussel. In a project in Tampa Bay a few years ago, old oyster shells were put out so new oysters could settle to build up the oyster reefs. It resulted in one report from an individual who "could reach down almost to his shoulders before he could find the oyster reef through the green mussels," she says.
     Ingrao says she's also seen the mussels on other organic hard surfaces, including mangrove roots, grass beds, and hermit crab and horseshoe crab shells.
     "If it doesn't move fast enough or burrow under the sediment to scrape things off, they'll attach," she says.
     Hicks was one of the researchers who conducted Texas Sea Grant-funded population studies of the related brown mussel, Perna perna, when it appeared on the Texas coast in the 1990s. Like its cousin the Asian green mussel, the brown mussel is a newcomer to the Gulf of Mexico. The species was first reported in the Gulf in 1990 on the Port Aransas jetty, and within four years it had established colonies as far south as Veracruz, Mexico. Indigenous to the southern African coast, brown mussels also inhabit the Atlantic coast in South America, although scientists speculate that the latter may be an introduced population.
     "Between 1992 and 1996 they had this huge population explosion (in Texas)," Hicks says. "We thought, ‘Well, this thing's here to stay, and it looks pretty bad.'"
     But the research showed that the warmer temperatures that will make Texas' bays and estuaries so appealing to the Asian green mussel made it less hospitable to the brown mussel.
     "When I started looking at the environmental limit data, I found that they were not tolerant of higher temperatures at all. When you look carefully at the map, they're a subtropically distributed species, and actually temperate in some areas that are known to be in their indigenous range.
     "When we looked at the thermal tolerance data, it showed clearly that 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) was very stressful for that animal, and those are common summer temperatures in Texas, especially in bay environments.
     "What we noticed just looking at the population dynamics was that the populations were highly ephemeral in bays — they would be there one season and not the next, there would be loads of them there and then they were all gone."
     By 1997, the huge masses of brown mussels had pretty much disappeared, he says. As recently as earlier this fall, a check of the Port Mansfield jetties showed only about 30 mussels per square meter in some areas.
     "Earlier we were finding as many as 12,000 to 28,000 per square meter," he says.
     "They're everywhere and then, ‘whoosh,' they're gone. So I started looking at the coastal temperature data, and the summer (June to September) seawater temperature averaged 29 degrees Celsius in 1997 and 30 degrees Celsius in 1998. It just wiped them out."
     He says remnants of the population are still in the area, including on offshore petroleum platforms where they enjoy more stable temperatures.
     "They're still here. The populations are very small and isolated," he says. "I suspect that, since there are still some of them around, that they will have the capacity to come back. These things recruit in such high numbers that it just basically takes the right timing of the season and the currents to put them onto the shore again. As the coastal populations get wiped out they can always recruit from these offshore populations.
     "It was a window of four or five years that they were so abundant, and I suspect that they will come back like that again, but it will only be temporary — they'll come back and they'll be able to stay in high numbers for a period of time, and then those high summer temperatures will knock them out again."
     Those high temperatures are not likely to be a problem for the more estuarine-comfortable Asian green mussel if it finds its way to the Texas coast, and Hicks believes it is less a question of "if" than "when." When that happens, power plant managers on the Texas coast will be faced with the problems currently challenging managers in coastal Florida as they struggle to deal with P. viridis. The mussels can block the flow of water, causing mechanical damage to pumps, reduce heat transfer efficiency, clog condenser tubes, and increase the rate of corrosion in the tubes.
     Fajans said the plant managers in Tampa Bay have had to establish a permanent program for mussel remediation.
     "They have a permanent crew set up and they rotate through the three power plants in Tampa Bay," he says. "They're constantly working to clean it out. And there are tremendous problems