Texas' Most Beloved Beach is at the End of the Natural Gas Pipeline
Shallow-water fishing trips, dolphin-cove sightseeing tours, bird-watching excursions, sunning and playing on South Padre's velvety sand beach—these are some of the eco-thrills that draw more than a million tourists each year to the poorest metro-region of the United States, making tourism and eco-tourism the biggest economic driver here at the Rio Grande Valley's southern edge.
Chances are that any San Antonio resident reading this story has visited South Padre at least once, and if you've been there once, you've probably returned. Unlike Corpus Christi and Galveston beaches, South Padre Island, its bays, and estuaries, remain relatively pristine and free from fossil fuel development—though possibly not for long. Populated with merely 3,000 permanent residents, SPI offers the notable first-world amenities of restaurants, bars, retail shops and night clubs—yards away from world-class sport fishing, bird-watching and beach-combing. About 10 miles away from SPI, sharing a coastline and an economy, sits Brownsville, the nation's poorest city of 200,000 residents.
But politicians and energy industrialists are bull-nosing energy development that will threaten this region's eco-economy, promising another that's led the world to the brink of ecological ruin: the production, sale and use of fossil fuels.
Energy companies are looking for Texas ports where rent is cheap and space is copious, hoping to set up Leviathan-like matrices of smokestacks, refrigeration chambers and sewers that will cool natural gas into a liquid for export to China and beyond. Because Brownsville's deep-water channel is edged by plenty of inexpensive land, four liquid natural gas (LNG) conglomerates are trying to set up shop in this coastal zone that lies as far south as Texas gets, in an ecosystem that's populated by brown pelicans, ocelots, sea turtles, dolphins and a host of other endangered and protected wildlife. There are now over 30 proposed LNG export terminals in the U.S., though the only one under construction is in Sabine Pass, Louisiana. In Texas, in addition to Brownsville, LNG terminals are being proposed in Freeport and Corpus Christi. All have to go through a lengthy review and permitting process by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the federal entity that offers the final decision on a company's ability to export LNG to countries that are part of the World Trade Organization. The four Brownsville facilities in the works—Texas LNG, Annova LNG, Gulf Coast LNG and NextDecade LLC—have yet to clear Department of Energy and other federal hurdles that will make them candidates for a FERC permit.
Read more: http://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/texas-most-beloved-beach-is-at-the-end-of-the-natural-gas-pipeline/Content?oid=2354133
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