FLORENCE (AP) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is worried a liquefied natural gas terminal and its proposed 36-inch pipeline that would run through Coos Bay could harm aquatic species.

The EPA also wants the developers to look for another place to dump 410,000 cubic yards of sediment that would be dredged every two years for the channel to the terminal.

The agency’s comments were submitted in response to the draft environmental impact statement prepared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

The study’s purpose is to ensure the proposed 229-mile pipeline and terminal, which includes a slip big enough to receive 80 ships carrying liquefied gas each year plus two storage tanks with a capacity of 160,000 cubic meters, does as little harm to the environment as possible by considering alternatives to a developer’s chosen route.

EPA’s Richard Parkin wrote that one of the pipeline’s proposed routes may be inconsistent with the federal Clean Water Act, which requires that the discharge of dredged or fill material into an aquatic ecosystem be banned if there is a better alternative.

Williams-Northwest Pipeline has proposed other routes that don’t threaten the eelgrass and other aquatic resources in the bay, said Dan Lattin, the company’s project manager.

Those include two overland routes. One bothers residents in Glasgow. Another affects fewer landowners but could lead to some eminent domain issues.

“We don’t have a preference ...,” Lattin said. “We try to make everybody happy, but most likely there’ll be some that don’t want it somewhere.”

The EPA also raised concerns about how Jordan Cove developers plan to dispose of dredging sediment. The plan is to use the same offshore area, north of the jetties, the Army Corps of Engineers uses for normal maintenance of the channel, company project manager Bob Braddock said.

“It’s a benign location,” Braddock said. “The sands shift around. It’s material that’s going to end up going out into the ocean anyway.”

Federal law requires alternative options be considered to make sure that the proposed plan is the best one, noted Parkin, the EPA’s acting director in the Office of Ecosystems, Tribal and Public Affairs.

Braddock said the federal energy commission’s impact statement is a summary of the more-detailed reports that the company has submitted to the agency, and that the EPA’s concerns, along with the consideration of different alternatives, are included in those documents.

“Our analysis of marine impacts encompasses hundreds of pages of research,” Braddock said. It’s reduced in the (draft environmental impact statement) to nothing more than a couple of paragraphs.”

Lakeside resident Ron Sadler, a retired  forestry planner for the Bureau of Land Management, said he considers the most significant portion of the EPA’s testimony to be the discussion of alternatives for getting natural gas to Oregon in the first place.

“If there are in fact reasonable alternatives to the big terminal, they have to analyze those with the same degree and intensity of Jordan Cove. Rather than doing that, FERC just discards them in about a sentence, and says these aren’t as good environmentally,” Sadler said. “FERC simply ignores those alternatives.”