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Hess drops Fall River LNG bid

By ANIKA CLARK

aclark@s-t.com

Hess LNG has withdrawn applications for the proposed Weaver's Cove liquefied natural gas project in Fall River, ending a long and bitter battle over the proposal between the company, citizens and lawmakers.

"The decision was made several weeks ago," said Hess LNG President and CEO Gordon Shearer, who said the proposal had been in the works for roughly a decade. "It has become apparent that the market conditions both in North American markets and in the global gas markets have changed ... in a way that are very adverse to the project, and are not likely to reverse any time soon."

Lawmakers lauded the announcement, with U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., calling it a "big win for the people of Southeastern Massachusetts."

Hess LNG's withdrawal of plans to build an import and regasification terminal on the banks of the Taunton River "is an example of the value of complete cooperation among federal, state and local elected officials, state and local governments in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and most importantly, a determined group of citizens protecting their homes," Frank said in a prepared statement. "I believed that we had driven a stake through this vampire's heart several years ago, and I'm very pleased that it has finally laid down and died."

Joe Carvalho, a Fall River resident and president of the citizens group Coalition for Responsible Siting of LNG Facilities, said he was "ecstatic" over the news. Carvalho described Hess LNG's proposal as potentially dangerous to a densely populated area and said that, along with a public safety risk, it presented concerns for the environment and for the ability to attract other businesses to the area.

Weaver's Cove spokesmen have maintained the project was safe and would have helped lower energy costs in New England. Asked what role the lawmakers' opposition had in the company's withdrawal, Shearer said, "None whatsoever."

"If the opposition was a factor, we would have shut the project down years ago," he said.

Specifically, the company's news release Monday cited a "significant increase in natural gas production from shale resources in North America resulting in lower prices as well as the growth in demand for LNG in the rest of the world." These factors, according to the company, "make it unlikely the company can secure supplies of LNG on economic terms attractive enough to ensure the sustained profitability of the project.

Tri-Winning (Part 2) : Importing 3D Models into Silverlight 5 ...

3D Photorealism is nothing new. Plenty of companies have been substituting photos of their product line for creating photo-realistic 3D renditions instead (big cost savings — Apple is a great example of this). The only issue is that these products are typically displayed in 2D on a company website. This means real-time 3D manipulation is not possible outside of a QuickTime plug-in (which usually displays 2D images) or a 2D flipbook of 3D images where all positions are predefined. Enter Silverlight 5 and Babylon Toolkit. Instead of rendering out content as 2D images, the 3D file format (.obj in our case) can be maintained and manipulated during the web app’s runtime thanks to the new 3D features of Silverlight 5 and the extensibility of the Babylon Toolkit.

In our previous post we went through a high-level overview of how to manually implement 3D graphics in Silverlight 5 as well as a discussion about how to program against the GPU. We concluded that there are three ways to implement 3D effects in Silverlight 5.

1 – Plot all your vertices individually (by hand). 3 – Import a 3D model into your Silverlight application via a third-party API.

For this next example we will use a 3D modeling app named “ Modo ” to create a soccer ball model. This model will then be used as 3D content in our Silverlight App.

Back in the day I used to Modo quite a bit ( Here is the only thing I ever made that was worth looking at ). For those of you who don’t know Modo, it’s a next-gen 3D modeling, painting, animating and rendering package that is used by many professionals in the 3D industry including Pixar. ( Note : Any 3D application that is capable of producing the .OBJ file format will suffice for our purposes:

After you have created the model, you will need to download the Babylon Importer Toolkit (big thanks to David Catuhe ). The Babylon Toolkit gives us access to XNA-like functionality that would only be accessible in the full version of the XNA game studio. This means we don’t have to go about the process of plotting our vertices individually or even worrying about pixel shaders because Catuhe’s Babylon Toolkit provides abstractions on top of these granular aspects of Silverlight 3D.

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