CALAIS, Maine - Calais LNG has withdrawn its permit application with state environmental regulators.
Unable to find new money after a primary investor pulled out, the developer blamed lingering impacts from the global financial meltdown.
Calais LNG was one of three terminals planned for the St. Croix River and Passamaquoddy Bay, on the Maine-New Brunswick border.
Following its demise, and the failure of an earlier competitor, Quoddy Bay LNG, a single project now represents the final hope for bringing a new source of natural gas directly to eastern Maine.
"We always believed we'd be the last man standing," said Dean Girdis, co-founder and president of Downeast LNG.
Downeast LNG has a site in Robbinston, downriver from Calais. It's slowly moving through the regulatory process and hopes to gain federal permits next year, and state permits in 2012.
Downeast LNG may consider itself, for the moment, as the last man standing; however, since all LNG vessels are banned by the Government of Canada from transiting into Passamaquoddy Bay, since US LNG import infrastructure is already a grossly-overbuilt and LNG import terminals operating at a small fraction of capacity, since the US is in a 100-year natural gas glut, and since there is no natural gas shortage of supply, even in Maine, Downeast LNG is a project with no purpose.
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