NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – The Coast Guard likely would need more security manpower if a liquefied natural gas terminal is built in Long Island Sound, but opponents shouldn’t expect the maritime agency to pick sides in the fight, the region’s top Coast Guard official said.

Broadwater Energy wants to build a terminal that would supply 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day but environmentalists are opposing the application and some officials worry the terminal is too dangerous for the busy waterway between Connecticut and Long Island.

That leaves all eyes on Capt. Peter Boynton, who commands the Coast Guard’s Long Island Sound division. In two months, Boynton will release his security analysis, a document that is more than a year in the making and is shaping up to be the region’s largest ever.

“I’m still getting, some days, 100 letters from people expressing their concerns,” Boynton said. “I’m reading every one of them. Many of them ask me to vote no. I think they view this as an on-off switch or an up-or-down vote. I’m issuing a report. It’s really not a yes or no report.”

Natural gas is cooled and condensed into a liquid to make transportation easier. Under the Broadwater proposal, the terminal would receive LNG shipments by boat, then pump the gas into the existing pipeline between Long Island and Connecticut.

As a baseline for their security analysis, Coast Guard analysts in Connecticut and Washington are using a 2004 government-funded report by the Sandia National Laboratories. That report said that most risks at the typical LNG facility can be managed or reduced.

“What I want to know is, how does the conclusion of that study apply, not to average weather but the weather we expect in Long Island Sound?” Boynton said. “How do the conclusions apply, not to the average-size tanker but to the actual tanker we expect to see if this facility is approved?”

Boynton, who spoke in an interview this week, is scheduled to give a news conference Friday to discuss the LNG proposal.

He said the LNG issue isn’t as simple as some make it out to be.

“We have very significant movements of all type of petroleum products, chemicals. Those are movements our economy relies on,” Boynton said. “It’s not the case that right now we have no risk, so why should we allow something that potentially has risk to enter the Sound?”

And if the region’s economy needs natural gas and it doesn’t arrive by ship, Boynton said, companies likely will bring it in thousands of tanker trucks on the highways.

“It’s all trade-offs,” he said.

AP-ES-02-03-06 0203EST