EASTPORT — Even on the most hectic of days, downtown Eastport doesn’t exactly bustle.

Situated at the tip of Moose Island, which separates Passamaquoddy Bay from Cobscook Bay, the city was once home to an active sardine fishing and canning industry. Now the handsome brick and granite buildings that line Water Street facing Passamaquoddy Bay house mostly antique shops and restaurants that cater to the seasonal tourist trade.

Looking out across the water from those restaurants, the diner might well have an excellent view of the inner end of busy Head Harbour Passage. The passage, which runs southwest between Deer Island to the north and Campobello Island to the south, is the deep water channel for shipping bound from the Bay of Fundy for both the Estes Head Cargo Terminal in Eastport, and the Bayside Marine Terminal located in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

Last year, 43 cargo ships docked at Estes Head, according to Roland “Skip” Rogers, general manager of Federal Marine Terminals, the company that operates the facility. Most of those ships loaded newsprint or other paper and forest products for export, or brought in machinery for the paper and forest industries. Bayside saw about 75 ships, primarily massive bulk carriers that loaded gypsum from a quarry gouged out of a hill on the Canadian shore.

The ships visiting the two terminals are big. The bulk carriers can be as large as 700 feet long. The ships visiting Estes Head range in length from 400-600 feet. But those ships would be dwarfed by the vessels that could more than double shipping traffic in Head Harbour Passage if plans to build a terminal for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Passamaquoddy Bay should be approved.

Three developers have introduced proposals for building LNG terminals in the bay. First off the mark was Quoddy Bay LLC, an Oklahoma-based developer that wants to build a facility at Split Rock on the Pleasant Point reservation of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. After a hard-fought referendum that split the community, the tribe voted to lease land for the terminal to the LLC and is participating in the project.

In December, Quoddy Bay LLC filed a preliminary application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval of a terminal where it would receive, store, vaporize, and send out via pipeline up to 2 billion cubic feet of LNG daily. The plan calls for as many as 180 tankers annually to deliver and unload their LNG cargoes to the terminal. Once offloaded, the LNG would either be regasified for delivery directly into the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline that runs through Maine from Canada, or stored temporarily in three 5.7 million cubic foot tanks to be built about a mile from the jetty in the town of Perry.

Quoddy Bay would build a 35-mile pipeline to connect its terminal with the Northeast and Maritime facilities.

Next up with a proposal, which has yet to be filed with the FERC, was Downeast LNG. That company wants to build a terminal with a 3,500-foot pier and two storage tanks on the southern shore of Mill Cove in Robbinston.

According to Downeast spokesman Dean Girdis, his company’s terminal would have a daily capacity of about a half-billion cubic feet of gas daily.

Downeast commissioned a study from the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center that concluded that construction of the proposed $400 million Robbinston facility would generate substantial economic benefits for the state, the town and for Washington County.

The third player is Calais LNG, which has proposed a 1 billion cubic foot per day facility at Red Beach near the boundary between Calais and Robbinston. The possibility of building a terminal at Lubec has also been raised.

The current generation of LNG tankers, which typically carry some 4.4 million cubic feet of natural gas, are about 935 feet long and displace nearly 98,000 tons. Tankers that can carry more than 12 million cubic feet of LNG and are more than 1,000 feet long are already under construction and even larger ships, with a capacity of as much as 7.6 million cubic feet of LNG are already on the drawing boards.

Although ships entering Passamaquoddy Bay must navigate some of the trickiest, most fog-shrouded waters in the world, there seems to be little concern within the maritime community about vessel safety issues. Over the past 40 years, since the first LNG tankers went into service, there have been tens of thousands of loaded voyages and not a single occurrence in which an LNG leak caused a fire or explosion.

Head Harbour Passage, though narrow, is well known to local pilots who guide shipping now. In a preliminary review of the proposal to bring LNG tankers to the bay, the Coast Guard has determined that each ship would have to be escorted by at least three, and possibly four, powerful, state-of-the-art tugboats. What’s more, Rogers said, modern LNG tankers are equipped with several devices

such as powerful bow thrusters that allow them to handle more precisely than the ships that now visit Passamaquoddy Bay.

While navigational safety may be a moot issue in the minds of professional mariners, if not of opponents of the idea of building an LNG terminal in Passamaquoddy Bay, the question of how the region’s fishing industry would be affected remains open.

At a meeting between members of the Cobscook Bay Fishermen’s Association and representatives of Downeast LNG, lobstermen who fish the Western Passage that runs between Deer Island on the east and Eastport and the Perry shore on the west, said they lose as much as 30 percent of their gear to shipping bound for the Bayside terminal and to aquaculture barges that transit the area.

Most lobstermen in the area fish the Western Passage right out to the international boundary that runs down the center during a season that runs from May through December. The area also sees considerable scallop and urchin fishing beginning in September and extending through the spring.

Another question is how a security exclusion zone around the LNG tankers and terminals might impact fishermen. According to information provided by the FERC, the Coast Guard prevents other ships from approaching LNG tankers, “while in transit or docked at a terminal.” What that means in Passamaquoddy Bay is less than clear.

In Boston Harbor, the Coast Guard prohibits any vessel from coming within 400 yards of an LNG tanker moored at a local gas terminal or within 500 yards of an anchored vessel. There is also a moving exclusionary zone that extends two miles ahead, one mile behind and 500 yards on either side of a moving LNG tanker. The Western Passage between Eastport and Deer Island is no more than 1,000 yards wide at its southern entrance, and the entire passage is slightly more than four miles long.

If the Coast Guard adopted the same exclusionary zone for Passamaquoddy Bay as it has for Boston, fishermen could be effectively barred from fishing whenever an inbound LNG tanker was in the area. A similar, if less severe, problem would exist farther up the bay. The Coast Guard won’t make recommendations about exclusionary zones until one or more of the developers begins work on a formal Environmental Impact Statement for a particular project.

Will Hopkins, executive director of the Cobscook Bay Resource Center, has moderated a series of meetings between fishermen and representatives of various LNG developers. According to Hopkins, the greatest likelihood for conflicts between the LNG tankers and lobster gear is in Canadian waters.

“There are a lot more lobstermen around Deer Island and Campobello than in Cobscook,” Hopkins said.

The Fundy North Fishermen’s Association, based on Deer Island, has already gone on record as being opposed to the construction of any LNG terminal in Passamaquoddy Bay.

---