It's actually not a bad article, but clearly not a technical discourse.
The point is that that LNG production involves a certain amount of additional hazard compared to just storing imported LNG as you need various other hydrocarbons to do it which are quite volatile. Compared to the tonnage of LNG, it's pretty miniscule, but needs to be added into the safety assessment.
Now the issue being mentioned is a Vapour Cloud Explosion.
Until the Buncefield Explosion several years ago, it was generally assumed that spillage of vapourising HCs in the open couldn't generate a VCE of any great size.
However, in what was probably a unique set of circumstances (cold, misty/foggy day with very little wind), a very large spillage of gasoline left a blanket of gasoline vapour dense enough that when it went bang it went BANG 10 times bigger than the most conservative explosion tool that existed at the time. This explosion was heard many miles away, destroyed buildings 100m away from the perimeter and created a conflagration on the tank farm which took days to put out and destroyed many tanks and facilities. As it was a weekend, thankfully the nearby buildings were not occupied and no one died.
But how do you cope with this is a question no one can answer. You have to combine several things all at the same time - A very large leak of volatile HC plus no wind, plus a certain area in which to partly confine the vapour cloud. Any one not happening at the same time, no explosion.
Now the probability of that happening is very very low, so even though the resultant super large BANG can be very significant, the overall risk comes into the "tolerable" level. For any one plant the chance of it happening are very low, but add lots of plants around the world (say 100) into the matrix and yes, eventually one of them will go BANG. But the other 99 will live out their operating life with no BANG.
That's the price we pay for transporting volatile substances all around the world in absolutely huge volumes every year. Very few go bang. You can't eliminate risk other than not doing something. Just like the airline industry essentially accepts that every now and then one the planes will fall out of the sky and kill everyone on board, it happens so infrequently that it becomes an acceptable risk for most of the population. The alternatives have even greater risk. People get killed crossing the road, cars and motorcycles crash, ships sink. but they are all so rare that the overall risk is accepted.
The same applies to LNG plants. It all depends on your level of acceptable / tolerable risk. Everyone has a different view, but the government authorities generally set that risk at a certain level so that development and economic activity isn't unnecessarily constrained.
So are the concerns valid?
Yes, but IMHO, not enough to cause anything to change.
Creating and storing LNG is a hazardous activity.
Just don't live or work next to one would be my advice....
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