Bill Virgin: Is this methanol plant ‘pause’ really code for ‘exit’?

The Friday afternoon news dump is a well-established, long-favored technique in business and politics alike for getting news out at a time when it won’t attract as much attention (if you can pull it off during the weekend, even better).

Perhaps it was coincidence that Northwest Innovation Works announced on a Friday afternoon that it’s asking for a “pause” in the city’s scoping process on a proposal for a $3.4-billion natural gas-to-liquid methanol plant at the Port of Tacoma.

The statement from Northwest Innovation Works says the Chinese consortium sponsoring the project was “taken aback” by the “the tone and substance of the vocal opposition that has emerged in Tacoma.” It will use the pause to “engage the Tacoma community in further dialogue. … We remain committed to Tacoma, and will restart the process after assessing the results of our engagement with the community.”

Northwest Innovation Works didn’t give a timeline for how long the pause will last, nor details about its strategy for winning the community over to endorse its proposal. Meanwhile, what doesn’t appear to have been paused is the opposition’s activism, with both a city initiative and state legislation proposed to make it much more difficult for the project to actually reach construction and operation.

Given those two factors, it’s fair to wonder aloud whether this really is a pause and an opportunity to regroup, or an effort to find a quiet and graceful exit from this mess. Project sponsors might figure that rather than spend thousands of dollars and months of time and still come up emptyhanded, better to concentrate on the two smaller methanol plants, at the ports of Kalama and St. Helens (Clatskanie, Ore.), that to date have generated much less controversy. The pause would allow Northwest Innovation Works and the Port of Tacoma to figure out how to unwind the lease. The effect would be somewhat akin to a restaurant posting a “Closed for Remodeling” sign on the door but never actually getting around to reopening.

Then again, the project sponsors may figure that a cooling-off period will cause the opposition to dissipate, or give it sufficient time to marshal arguments that will sway public opinion to its side. Given what you’ve seen so far, is that the outcome you’d bet on?

The pause will also give not just the participants but lots of outsiders time to figure out how this project went sideways.

Northwest Innovation Works, for example, might question the commitment of their partners at the port, whose enthusiasm for the project went from effusive when first announced to a more muted tone.

The mayor and City Council, whether through luck or sensing trouble was coming, played it a lot smarter by being noncommittal to the project. (That requires some fortitude of restraint, since what politician doesn’t like being affiliated with something that generates a lot of jobs.) The governor also was a backer of the methanol projects, but so far he has escaped most of the locals’ ire directed at port commissioners.

The project’s backers and sponsors also will want to mull how they missed the potential for backlash in a project that combined so many hot-button elements. They might well think some of those issues are extraneous and have some rationale for that view. The Chinese want to spend billions of dollars here on value-added manufacturing, rather than just hauling off a natural resource? Great! Saying no just means they’ll go somewhere else to get natural gas, which is not exactly in short supply.

But that still leaves plenty of other issues — water consumption, acquisition of electricity, air and water emissions, the safety of the plant — that caught the public’s attention. Perhaps the project backers and sponsors felt they had adequately addressed those subjects, but they misread public sentiment, and that’s a crucial element with issues such as this. All you need to do is read a day’s worth of coverage of the political scene to sense that the public, not just in Tacoma but everywhere, is in a foul mood these days, suspicious of everyone and everything.

If Northwest Innovation Works does decide to abandon its plans in Tacoma, that brings us back to an issue we kicked around in this space a few weeks ago — what’s the future of a traditionally industrial area such as the Tideflats? The port thought it had scored a win by landing a new industrial use for an established industrial site — the former Kaiser Aluminum smelter — generating jobs and revenue in the process.

Is the methanol plant a case of runaway NIMBY/BANANA sentiment (the latter acronym, in case you didn’t know, stands for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”) or, as opponents might argue, the wrong type of industrial project in the wrong place? Northwest Innovation Works may leave town, but those questions aren’t going anywhere.

Bill Virgin is editor and publisher of Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News. He can be reached at bill.virgin@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published February 27, 2016 at 2:35 PM with the headline "Bill Virgin: Is this methanol plant ‘pause’ really code for ‘exit’?."