What's going on with Puerto Rico's LNG tanker 'Avenir accolade'?

The semipermanently moored vessel serves as the floating storage unit for a terminal that the energy company now in charge of Puerto Rico’s power plants uses to import LNG. On a summer afternoon, another tanker, the Avenir Accolade, sidled up beside the Coral Encanto, unloading a fresh shipment of the fuel. To Avilés, it’s a ticking time bomb.

Does Puerto Rico have a gas import terminal?

Gas disasters are the rise, and an import terminal in densely populated San Juan is operating without federal permits. New Fortress Energy's controversial LNG import facility is seen through trees in the nearby neighborhood of Cataño, Puerto Rico. This story is part of a three-part series on Puerto Rico’s energy transition.

Could new fortress get a gas terminal in San Juan?

Once Hurricane María made landfall in 2017 and laid waste to the aging grid system, New Fortress offered a novel legal argument for how it could quickly set up a gas terminal in San Juan to get the lights back on ― and secure itself a slice of the billions of dollars Congress would go on to allocate for Puerto Rico’s reconstruction.

Why did a New York Gas Company turn a tanker into a LNG port?

Here in Puerto Rico, a politically connected natural gas company from New York turned a tanker into a makeshift LNG port in the center of a hurricane-prone metropolis — and, perhaps counterintuitively, insisted to regulators that the improvised import terminal actually meant the whole operation should be free to skip the usual federal safety steps.

How does San Juan gas work?

From there, the gas is either distributed directly to the San Juan Power Plant next to the terminal, where it’s converted from its traveling state back into its usable form and then burned to produce electricity, or into trucks to be delivered elsewhere on the island.

Does Puerto Rico need more natural gas?

“This is very transparently a push for more natural gas.” Puerto Rico’s sprawling capital, where the vast majority of the territory’s 3.3 million people live, is no stranger to the threat that loosely regulated fossil fuel facilities pose.