Braddock, project manager of the Jordan Cove Energy Project, is now hoping to convince local, state and federal regulators to turn his application for a liquefied natural gas terminal on Coos Bay’s North Spit from import to export — four years after energy experts all over the country were scoffing at the idea that the United States would ever ship natural gas from its shores.

He’s also eaten through tens of millions of dollars in land purchases and studies to gain what approvals he could for the import terminal, to the ire of landowners and conservationists who fret about the environmental degradation and taking of private property that they say will come with the construction of a 223-mile pipeline across the Coast Range.

Ardent LNG opponents have called Braddock’s change of heart a “classic bait-and-switch,” accusing him of knowing for years that he’d never be able to finance an import terminal on the coast. They allege that he clung to the weak argument that the United States needed to import gas to drive down costs for consumers here and reduce the country’s demand on foreign oil so that he and the pipeline’s developers could get approval for the project from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Read more at The Register-Guard.