An energy company plans to tunnel beneath the sea floor for 3 miles to bypass coral reefs and ease a small town’s safety concerns about its proposed Bahamas-to-Palm Beach County natural gas pipeline.
El Paso Corp.’s revamped proposal for the $350 million Seafarer pipeline no longer trenches the fuel-funneling steel tube across the county’s reef lines, which had been a huge hurdle for approval, county and federal environmental regulators said.
Instead, the Houston-based company, which hopes to start constructing the tunnel in 2006, intends to burrow at least 40 to 80 feet below the sea floor for most of the pipeline’s passage through county coastal waters into Riviera Beach.
Besides bypassing marine life-rich reefs, the tunneling avoids running the 26-inch-wide pipeline below the southern tip of Palm Beach Shores, where residents and town officials had feared it would deter tourism and pose a safety risk, El Paso officials said. And it keeps it off Peanut Island, where the county is sinking money into environmental enhancements, they noted.
The previous plan included those impacts while snaking the pipe across the surface of the reefs — the farthest 1.5 miles offshore — then dipping below the sea floor and surfacing twice briefly before arriving at the Florida Power & Light power plant at the Port of Palm Beach.
“They were running into regulatory roadblocks, justifiably so,” said Janet Phipps, a Palm Beach County environmental analyst.
FPL will be a user and distributor of the natural gas the pipeline conveys.
Army Corps of Engineers South Florida permit chief John Studt said his agency originally had a concern the reef crossing would lead to errors laying the pipe that could expand coral damages. The tunnel eliminates that potential problem, he said: “They have a very high degree of control over where they’re going, literally down to the millimeter.”
The tunnel would start about 500 feet east of the third reef line and head west to shore, shifting the pipeline’s sea-bottom route from the Bahamas underground. The pipe would slip into a 10.5-foot-wide, 3-mile concrete tunnel designed to steer through the Palm Beach Inlet and Lake Worth Lagoon to the power plant.
The pipeline would surface at the plant and travel 6 miles or so over land, via utility line and railroad corridors, to the Florida Gas Transmission Pipeline that follows Florida’s Turnpike, El Paso said.
The new approach inflates the cost of the pipeline — stretching 128 miles in all from Grand Bahama Island to the turnpike — but “we didn’t think $30 million would be out of line with the overall cost of the project,” said Jack Lucido, El Paso’s executive project director.
El Paso, which would build, operate and maintain the pipeline, presented its revised plan at a public meeting Wednesday night at Palm Beach Shores Town Hall put on by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that gives final construction approval.
The meeting drew nearly 90 people, some sounding pleased at the change to a tunnel, others still alarmed the project had not gone away.
Tony Gigliotti, president of the Singer Island Civic Association, thanked El Paso and the energy commission for the repositioning and expressed support. “We need the energy,” he said.
But a Palm Beach town official protested, noting the tunnel path brings it closer to his community. “The town finds it to be unacceptable,” Assistant Town Manager Thomas Bradford said.
The energy commission is drafting an environmental impact statement and gathering public comment. It cannot approve the project until the Army Corps of Engineers and Florida Department of Environmental Protection issue permits.
El Paso hopes the energy commission will sign off by July and plans to have the pipeline ready for service in 2008, Lucido said.
County environmental officials, and the energy commission, have at least one lingering environmental concern, the tunnel’s proposed 25-foot-deep exit pit east of the third reef. That football-field-long cavity, which El Paso said must be dug to remove the boring machine and slant the pipeline upward to the sea floor, would cut into lower, less valuable hard bottom, the county said.
Even if El Paso obtains all needed government approvals, there’s no guarantee the pipeline will arrive in Palm Beach County.
FPL Group, which purchased the pipeline’s full gas transportation capacity, could decide it wants to funnel natural gas from the Bahamas to Broward County’s Port Everglades instead, El Paso spokesman Aaron Woods said. El Paso would then participate with FPL and a third partner, Tractebel North America, to bring Tractebel’s proposed Calypso natural gas pipeline to Broward under a deal the three businesses struck in December.
To drill the tunnel, El Paso would likely use an 80-foot-long boring machine with a rotating cutting head, Lucido said. The mechanical mole would grind through limestone, seashell and sand.
The borer would move about 65 feet in 24 hours along a rail line inside the tunnel and might complete the 3-mile route in about a year, Lucido said.
Workers moving behind the tubular borer would piece together 10-inch-thick ringlets of self-sealing concrete to form the tunnel’s permanent hardened exterior. Then seawater would pour into the completed tunnel, and the steel pipeline that conveys the gas would inch through toward Riviera Beach under the tug of steel cables.
El Paso’s is not the first tunneling approach for a natural gas pipeline in South Florida. A subsidiary of AES Corp. of Arlington, Va., wants to lay 54 miles of 24-inch-diameter pipe from Ocean Cay in the southern Biminis to Dania Beach. AES, too, proposes to build a continuous tunnel under all three coral reefs near shore for reef protection and has all its approvals to do so, federal officials said.
Neil Santaniello, The Sun-Sentinel
