After helping to defeat a plan to build a liquid natural gas facility off the coast of Ventura County last spring, a team of attorneys, environmentalists and politicians is back at it, fighting against another LNG proposal.

At a news conference Monday, advocacy group Santa Barbara Channelkeeper announced that it was hiring the Environmental Defense Center, a public interest law firm, to work on its behalf in the ongoing state and federal review of the proposal by NorthernStar.

The company plans to convert Platform Grace into a terminal to offload hyper-cooled natural gas and pipe it onshore.

"We view the placement of an LNG terminal in the channel to be a significant and potentially devastating development," said Kira Redmond, executive director of the nonprofit Santa Barbara Channelkeeper.

Texas-based NorthernStar is proposing to take over Platform Grace, which is now owned by Venoco, and remove the oil rig superstructure. After 10 years of inactivity on the platform, Venoco recently began using it again to drill for oil but said it would sell the rig to NorthernStar if the LNG terminal were approved.

Using the base of the oil rig platform, NorthernStar plans to construct a terminal where tankers carrying liquid natural gas — most of it from Asia and Australia — could dock and unload the fuel, which would be converted to gas and piped onshore.

According to agencies reviewing the proposal — dubbed Clearwater Port — 139 tankers per year would offload at the terminal, yielding up to 1.4 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas.

There now are almost 40 proposals for LNG terminals in the U.S. Five LNG terminals are operating nationwide; the only offshore facility is in the Gulf of Mexico.

The flurry of interest has a lot to do with growing demand for natural gas in the U.S.

Parallel state and federal environmental reviews for some of the proposals could be completed as soon as June.

While proponents of the Clearwater Port plan see it as a potential source of clean energy, opponents say otherwise.

"This is not like the natural gas in your stove," said Redmond, who argued that the supercooled liquid form of the gas is extremely combustible.

Both Redmond and Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center, mentioned that the terminal could be ripe for a terrorist attack or other catastrophic event.

"An offshore project of this magnitude could affect nearly every facet of the region's on- and offshore environments," Krop said.

Tanker traffic would also be dangerous to migrating whales and would pump more greenhouse gases into the air, she said.

It was the latter point, to a large extent, that prompted the California Coastal Commission to reject BHP Billiton's offshore LNG proposal in May.

Krop also contends that Clearwater Port is not needed because California can meet its energy needs through more efficient and alternative sources.

NorthernStar's senior vice president for external affairs, Joe Desmond, said Clearwater Port is distinctly different from the rejected BHP proposal. Many of the concerns raised by Krop and Redmond are going to be looked at in the state and federal environmental review process, he said.

The company believes that the effects can be mitigated. Unlike BHP, NorthernStar is not asking that its emissions be excluded from state or local air pollution rules.

Desmond said there are other things that make NorthernStar's proposal different.

It's unfortunate they're lumped together," he said. Unlike BHP, "we're making use of existing infrastructure, which is consistent with the Coastal Act."

In addition, the terminal would not store gas, he said.

More importantly, Desmond said, the company would use "ambient air vaporizers" to bring the cooled fuel's temperature up for regasification. That process uses 80 percent energy, Desmond said.