Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012: Rev. Carlson, health insurance costs and home insulation

Fred you raise an interesting question.  For starters  Maine’s per capita health expenditures are $8,521 vs $5,434 in Arizona which represents a 36% difference between the states.  I suspect the remainder of the difference has to to do with Maine’s regulatory framework compared to Arizona’s, but I don’t have the time to do the in-depth comparisons of regulations for this post.

Glennice Cline – 
It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man. Psalms 118:8.

Far too many people get disillusioned with God because of the actions, words, or improper witness of humans. If we were more worried about God becoming disillusioned with us, maybe things would be different.

Ms. Van dyke – there are way more material and important things to focus your energy on. But if you must writing into the BDN editorials will do absolutely nothing to solve your dilemma. You will have to contact the networks or some entity actually responsible for the broadcast.

Ms. Lucas – Maine needs to stop beating up capital. No infrastructure, no investment equals no jobs and no revenue. This area is an industrial area and the tank should be welcomed

Glennice Cline,

Amen, good letter. We all have free will to do good or evil, and sadly there are those who pretend to be good people but in actuality are a tumor causing untold harm. Don’t let evil corruption get in the way of your salvation; Satan loves it when you curse God for what he does.

Gabbling MCs., erratic arm-waving, finger pointing, cavorting commentators, sadly, is today’s broadcasting, Elizabeth.  In most cases, that is.   There are some exceptions, albeit few.

Understandably, you lean forward attempting to catch a few words and then you’re suddenly shocked back into your chair as the commercials thunder into your room, decimating your hearing. 

My escape is to use the captions.  Half deaf, my ears cruelly siphon any moderation existent in the female commentator’s voice replacing it with a shriek.  Most cable or dish programs are out of sync, words following the sound, or, vice versa.   Weather shows are ballet at its primitive worse. Political commentators rattle like a Kalashnikov rifle. Twenty-Four-Hour news stations must cram all of their news into 30-second “holes.”

As a newspaper delivery boy I got into the habit of reading all of the dailies and evening papers as I dropped them off.  Today, I still maintain the habit of reading the newspapers and magazines, and finding considerably more to enjoy than I do off the tube.

Jeannie Lucas hits the nail on the head when she urges her fellow townspeople to attend the March 10 annual town meeting in Searsport and vote for a moratorium on Big Tank. Townspeople need time to get the facts about something imposed by executives in boardrooms in Houston and Denver that would threaten local public safety and guarantee local economic devastation while giving back almost nothing in return. Even the real reason for building this unnecessary monster  is unclear. It’s doubtful it’s really about guaranteeing propane delivery to Maine’s small and dwindling population of homeowners who use this fuel. It’s certainly not because the grinning PR folks at DCP Midstream are sincere when they say they want to be our friends and neighbors.

The refrigerated liquefied propane tank proposed for Searsport is more than two and a half times taller and proportionately wider than the largest existing bulk storage tank at Mack Point. At 22.7 million gallons capacity and the height of a 14-story building, few if any other man-made objects in the state of Maine would occupy quite as much space as this behemoth. It is totally out of scale with what is in fact a relatively small port facility whose operations have regrettably expanded out to its modest boundaries and already closely adjoin not only residential and commercial neighborhoods but also a chemical plant. 

Mack Point was developed near the beginning of the last century for the essential but very limited purpose of taking advantage of newly developed coal fields in Virginia to provide a marine coaling station for the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad. Over the past century, the port at Searsport has gradually shifted operations to near full physical capacity as it has come to function primarily as a marine entry point for those bulk commodities, primarily petroleum products, that supply the energy and transportation needs of Maine people in the central, eastern and northern portions of the state.

This is almost entirely a utility port to supply the region’s needs for heating oil, gasoline, ethanol, diesel fuel, asphalt and road salt. Some heavier distillates, petcoke, wood pulp, kaolin clay, gypsum and chemicals are among the bulk commodities imported through Mack Point that supply what heavy industry exists in the region. Throw in a few wind turbine blades imported from Brazil and that’s it. Except for an occasional cargo of paper, relatively little is ever exported from here.

The refrigerated tank proposed for Mack Point rises to the same degree of public safety concern as the handful of huge LNG gasification and storage facilities proposed in recent years elsewhere  along the Maine coast (including at Sears Island). Such was the perceived hazard that subsequently and most wisely all were rejected. The only major difference in the conflagration posed by an LPG tank failure is the liquefied propane sitting inside at an artificially induced minus 44 degrees F. contains roughly twice the potential energy as a comparable volume of the liquefied methane that makes up LNG. The potential thermal and blast energy of a conflagration involving a fully loaded LPG tank the size being proposed is, by various calculations, between 26 and 35 times greater than that of the 20-kiloton nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

DCP Midstream Partners LLC, wholly owned jointly by ConocoPhillips and Spectra Energy (Duke Energy’s gas spinoff), proposes to spend $40 million to build its terminal operations at Mack Point. The company hasn’t explained why it wishes to substitute Searsport as the site of its port and storage operations for backup supplies of foreign propane for Maine and New England. At present, these operations are in a big industrial zone on the waterfront at Providence, R.I., but just last summer DCP confidently paid a $3 million penalty fee to its own parent company, Spectra Energy, in order to shorten its lease contract for use of the Rhode Island tank facility, cutting back the termination date by two years to June 30, 2012.

All this trouble and expense for the approximately one in 20 households in sparsely populated Maine that in using expensive propane as their primary heating fuel  account for two thirds of the state’s total use? DCP seldom seems to issue a statement about its intentions for the Searsport project without combining spin if not outright deception. Indeed, the company whose very acronym of a name suggests ticker tape code for the word “deception,” actually claims it wishes to spend so much money, presumably at least $43 million, for the very purpose of assuring Mainers of an unbroken supply of propane from abroad should there be a wintertime interruption in domestic and Canadian supplies. 

That’s strange.  In just the past five years the energy picture in North America has undergone a technological revolution. New horizontal boring techniques and the development of controversial fracking to release vast quantities of heretofore unrecoverable gas and petroleum in shale formations have this past year returned the United States to being a net exporter of petroleum products — for the first time in 62 years!

We now have so much natural gas being produced that propane use is declining as homeowners in areas increasingly serviced by pipelines convert their heating systems to take advantage of this significantly cheaper fuel. At the same time, so much additional propane is being produced, both as a contaminant to be removed to purify natural gas for use and as one of the byproducts of petroleum fractionating, that the industry is now sending it out of the country, NOT importing it.

The National Petroleum Council is a quasi-government agency serving the American oil and gas industry. In a working paper on industry developments published just four months ago, the NPC observed the dramatic turnaround in domestic production of petroleum products in general and in NGLs (natural gas liquids including propane, butane and ethane) specifically. The paper focuses in part on extraction operations in the Marcellus  Shale Basin, which extends eastward from Ohio across Pennsylvania and New York State, an area not traditionally serviced by pipeline gathering networks, refineries and distribution facilities.  “Tremendous growth in natural gas production in North America,” the paper goes on to note, “has resulted in significant NGL production growth…NGL production in the Marcellus will create additional challenges since the Northeast region lacks infrastructure to bring the NGLs to market.”

The petroleum industry paper comments on the decline in domestic  propane use, tying it directly to the now strongly competitive price and availablity of natural gas, and concludes, “The propane export market should therefore be robust.”

Do I need to draw anyone a picture?