This EA evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with a proposal by Emera CNG, LLC that would include Emera's CNG plant facilities to receive, dehydrate, and compress gas to fill pressure vessels with an open International Organization for Standardization (ISO) container frame mounted on trailers.  Emera plans to truck the trailers a distance of a quarter mile from its proposed CNG facility to a berth at the Port of Palm Beach, where the trailers will be loaded onto a roll-on/roll-off ocean going carrier.  Emera plans to receive natural gas at its planned compression facility from the Riviera Lateral, a pipeline owned and operated by Peninsula Pipeline Company.  Although this would be the principal source of natural gas to Emera’s CNG facility for export, during periods of maintenance at Emera’s facility, or at the Port of Palm Beach, Emera may obtain CNG from other sources and/or export CNG from other general-use Florida port facilities.  The proposed Emera facility will initially be capable of loading 8 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/day) of CNG into ISO containers and, after full build-out, would be capable to load up to 25 MMcf/day.

For the initial phase of the project, Emera intends to send these CNG ISO containers from Florida to Freeport, Grand Bahama Island, where the trailers will be unloaded, the CNG decompressed, and injected into a pipeline for transport to electric generation plants owned and operated by Grand Bahama Power Company (GBPC). 

DOE is authorizing the exportation of CNG and is not providing funding or financial assistance for the Emera Project.