Keane: Rio Grande LNG has set aside more than five times its plant size to protect wetlands, habitat

3 months ago 92

Judge Treviño, commissioners, thank you very much for allowing me the time to be here this morning. I know I don’t have very much time so I’m going to jump right into this.

The first thing that I wanted to start off with was safety. Safety is our number one concern with regards to community, with regards to our employees, and with regards to the environment. There’s a number of things that we’re doing. All people on site today and all people that will be working in operations have a mandate that if they see something unsafe, they have the obligation to stop work. So, if there’s a maintenance person or a person mowing the lawn, if they see something unsafe, they can stop work.

Additionally, all the tanks once are built are full containment tanks, meaning that if there was a rupture in the tank, there’s enough space within the outer tank to hold 100% of the capacity of that tank.

Additionally, LNG is not explosive. It’s not propane, it’s not butane. It’s not stored under pressure. It’s not volatile. It’s not flammable in its liquid form. It’s not corrosive, it’s not toxic. So, we have all of that and we’re building the facility to mitigate risk to the community, to mitigate risk to our employees and to the environment. When you look at LNG ships, these are some of the most robust machines on the planet.

The first LNG commercial shipping began in 1964. It took place with LNG being transported out of Lake Charles, Louisiana to the United Kingdom. In 60 years, there’s never been a single major loss of containment on an LNG ship. And there’s reasons for that. Number one, the crews are very highly trained, they’re very highly paid. Additionally, the LNG ships are all double hulled, meaning that there is six to eight feet of ballast water between the outer hull and the inner hull. And then there’s another barrier between the inner hull and the containment system on the ships themselves. So, it’s very difficult to have a major problem with an LNG ship. And again, LNG, when it’s on the ships, it’s not it’s not under pressure. So, it’s not explosive.

And finally, when we’re talking about LNG ships as they transit the Brownsville ship channel, they will be escorted by two tugs and both tugs will be tethered to the vessel. So, there’ll be a tug in the in the bow of that vessel with a link to the ship and a tug in the stern of the vessel with a link to the ship. These are 85 tons. These are larger than any tugs that are currently in the Port of Brownsville. So, these are extremely safe and robust machines.

Now when you talk about what we’re doing in the community, this is something I’m extremely proud of. We created our community advisory board in the fall of 2022. And I approached every single person that’s on this community advisory board I approached and so you don’t need to be a supporter of the project to be on the community advisory board. That’s not the purpose of the board. The purpose is to exchange information between the community and the project. Be able to get issues from the community so that we can better learn what we need to do and be able to disseminate information.

For example, the road closures that took place a few weeks ago on Highway 48 when we were installing new traffic lights. They were extremely important for the safety of people transiting on Highway 48 as well as for our employees. Today we have 33 members and I’m very happy to say that they range not only from CEOs and from all of the school superintendents from Brownsville, Harlingen, Los Fresnos, Point Isabel, IDEA and McAllen. So, we have extremely senior level people there. We have, I think, most of the city managers in and around the project. In addition, I thought that we needed other people to be on the community advisory board. We have a lot of senior folks. So, we approached Proyecto Juan Diego, Sister Liz agreed to join the community advisory board. So, we have a Catholic nun that’s part of this. And in addition, we also have the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas as a member of our community advisory board. And I think, from my perspective, and everything I know about LNG projects, I believe we’re the only LNG project in the United States that has indigenous representation on their community advisory board.

In addition to that, we’ve had a number of open houses. Since April of last year to April of this year, we did 26 open houses with an amazing 3,600 people attending. I don’t know if any other project in the world that’s had that many people in their community attend these open houses. Many of the attendees were students from the aforementioned school districts. We’ve had a lot of communications between students and our subject matter experts in these in these sessions. So, I’m extremely pleased with the turnout that we’ve received and the support that we’ve received from the community.

Finally, our community feedback system. We instituted that about 18 months ago. We’ve had 191 messages. Eighty one percent have been positive. Most most of the messages that we receive on our community feedback system are people looking for jobs, or people wanting to become suppliers to the project.

And I’ll talk a little bit about our supply chain. We had 147 people or companies supplying material to the project. Ninety-two of those were local, meaning 62 percent of all the vendors supplying material to the project were local, and they received $81 million of investment since July of last year through March of this year.

Additionally, our workforce, we had 959,000 hours worked on the project since July of last year to the end of March. That represents, and this an error on this number. It’s actually 56%, not 53% of local workers. So, it’s not just a point in time. This is an average over time. It doesn’t just include all the employees that are working for Bechtel. It includes NextDecade’s employees on site, it includes Great Lakes Dredge and Dock that’s doing the dredging project for us, and it also includes Garney who was doing the sewer and water system for us.

And I also want to say that we hired a data analytics firm to actually gather this data for us. The firm is called High Totem. They’re an indigenous-led company with offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is where I originally met them and offices in Houston, Texas now.

And then finally on the community investment, about $350,000 from July of last year through the end of March this year into the community. Supporting issues like our LNG live demos, and supporting issues like Sea Turtle, Inc., working with Texas A&M Kingsville on the Texas Tortoise translocation project.

Now when you look at this, the left graph is what I’ve just covered in terms of local suppliers. What I think is interesting on this graph is the circle on the upper right. When you look at that out of the 92 local vendors that supplied material to the project, 73 were from Cameron County. I think that’s amazing. And when you look at the bottom bar graph, it’s not surprising to me that many of those vendors came from Brownsville or that they came from Harlingen. But it did surprise me that we had the third largest number of suppliers from Port Isabel.

And here on the workforce participation, again, 533,000 hours, 252,000 of those came from Cameron County, 238,000 of those came from Hidalgo and then on to Starr. When you look at the graph on the lower right, this surprised me as well. It didn’t surprise me that 144,000 of those hours were provided by workers from Brownsville. But the second largest community was Port Isabel at 36,000. I thought that was pretty interesting to myself, and the amount of support that we get from the local community, when you think about the number of people that live and work in Port Isabel that actually are working on the project.

And it’s also interesting, and I don’t want to take too much time to say this, but we ran into a person that works on South Padre Island, and she came up to me and said she was so pleased that her son who was 19 years old last year got a job with Bechtel working on site. One of the reasons why was because he was talking to her about the safety aspects of everything that we do on the project. And she said, I want my son to be able to go to work and be able to come home with all of his fingers, all of his toes, all of his eyes and his ears. And so she was very pleased with that and the fact that he started at 19. Today, he’s working hard he’s been promoted to foreman. So, she was very, very pleased about the opportunities that this is presenting to the local community.

My last slide, I think this is important. This gets lost in a lot of the media coverage of our project. We’ve spent tens of millions of dollars in acquiring over 4,000 acres of land, to support (Las) Lomas (Ecological Preserve), to support wetlands mitigation, and to also restore habitat for the ocelots and jaguarundi. And so, when you look at our plant site, we lease 984 acres from the Port of Brownsville. We’re actually only occupying 761 acres. So, we have acquired and put aside in perpetuity more than five times the plant size to protect wetlands and Lomas and habitat. And then the upper right shows what we’re doing today in terms of where our focus has been on investment in terms of the environment, and education and community development. So that’s my presentation, and I’m happy to take any questions.

Editor’s Note: The above commentary was provided by David Keane, senior vice president for policy and corporate affairs at NextDecade, at a public hearing held by Cameron County Commissioners Court on June 4, 2024. The hearing was held to discuss amending NextDecade’s tax abatement agreement with Cameron County.

Editor’s Note: The “Judge Treviño,” Keane referenced in his commentary is Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, Jr.

Editor’s Note: Here is an audio recording of David Keane’s remarks at the public hearing:

About David Keane

Senior Vice President, Policy & Corporate Affairs

David Keane joined NextDecade in March 2022 as the Senior Vice President, Policy & Corporate Affairs. David Keane has over 40 years of international business experience in the energy sector, recently retiring as President of Woodfibre LNG Limited. In his role as President of Woodfibre, Keane was accountable for the delivery of WLNG’s $2.0 billion liquefied natural gas export project in British Columbia, Canada, and was directly responsible for leading and building the LNG facility and creating the jobs, training and economic opportunities involved with the project. Prior to joining Woodfibre in October 2018, Keane served as the President and CEO of the British Columbia LNG Alliance, a trade association formed to promote the development of a robust LNG export industry in British Columbia that is safe and environmentally and socially responsible. Keane has held senior executive roles at BG Group plc serving as Vice President, Policy and Corporate Affairs for the Americas and Global LNG Region, and also served as Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Dynegy Europe. He is a retired helicopter pilot with the US Army. Keane is a cum laude graduate of Kansas State University and holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

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