New Tacoma ship terminal & tidal energy permits

Puget Sound Harbor Safety Committee meeting notes

Feb. 3., 2010, 10-12 a.m., South Federal Building

New container ship terminal in Tacoma (SSA Marine presention)

  • Puyallup Tribal Terminal
  • 3-4 berths (~850′ spacing, 51′ deep)
  • 200 acres
  • About the scale of Terminal 18
  • Market demand is too low to proceed
  • Permits should be in place in ~1 year
  • Construction will take at least 2 years
  • Port has already constructed one 1200′ berth
  • 50-80k cubic yards of soil is contaminated (used to be a Navy Dock; Lincoln ditch)

Puget Sound Tidal Energy (presentation by Craig Collar, Senior Manager; manages renewable energy projects)

  • Filed draft license application with FERC about 2 months ago
  • 80% comes from Columbia hydropower, Initiative 937 dictates added generation be new renewables
  • Only 2 of 7 initial sites are still of interest (dropped Speiden recently)
  • Focused mostly on Admiralty Inlet as pilot plant
  • Open Hydro turbine was developed in U.S. but is licensed by an Irish company
  • Nova Scotia Power just deployed second largest Open Hydro device in Bay of Fundy (largest is in Ireland)
  • Deployed at Falls of Inverness in Ireland (tug/barge held station in 10 knot currents)
  • Site is ~1/2 mile outside shipping station
  • At ~60m, this will be deepest deployment to date, globally.
  • FERC 10 year license should allow us to run/maintain 2 turbines for a test period of 3-5 years, allowing reasonable amount of time for installation and removal.  We need data on how much maintenance is needed.  We could re-license again as a pilot, or shift to a commercial permit and more turbines in a second phase (~5-10 turbines in second phase)?
  • Polyage studies indicate you’ll have to put order 100s of turbines into Admiralty inlet to appreciable affect the tidal exchange within Puget Sound.
  • We need about 140MW, about half of that has already been provided by wind.  (1MW powers about 700 homes)

Other business

  • Most other Harbor Safety Committees are funded by Coast Guard or State sources (e.g. CA)
  • New article on “Industry Standards of Care” in U.S. Coast Guard quarterly publication Proceedings.
  • Links to all U.S. Harbor Safety Committees are now on the Oil Spill Task Force web site.
  • Upcoming meetings in Long Beach, Portland…

Vessel Traffic Safety related to the BP pier expansion

  • Vessel Traffic Safety Risk Analysis model was developed and reported on by George Washington University (BP paid ~$1M for it, then asked for further analysis related to some U.S. Army Corp questions).
  • EIS draft may be available later this year (Olivia Romano, BP is supportive of a presentation to the Committee by someone from George Washington U team that developed basic model)
  • The data are all public, but the model is proprietary.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>