Zelena Akcija, a Croatian NGO for environmental protection, on Friday filed a lawsuit at the Rijeka Administrative Court against the Ministry for Environment and Energy’s report on the environmental impact of the floating LNG terminal, the NGO said on Monday.

“We believe that, considering the shortcomings in the environmental impact assessment, and certain oversights and mistakes in procedure, the Administrative Court has to nullify the Ministry’s decision,” said Marija Mileta, member of the Zelena Akcija and a leader of the “Anti-LNG” campaign.

The Ministry had earlier this year declared that the LNG terminal meets environmental requirements.

She said the assessment mentioned the “phase construction of the liquified natural gas terminal”, meaning “two phases of the project”, where the floating terminal is the first phase, and the land terminal the second.

“However, despite the fact that the phases are two inextricably linked parts of a single intervention into the environment, the project itself is split into two smaller ones,” said Mileta in a press release.

The leader of the Zelena Akcija, Zeljka Leljak Gracin, said that, according to the interpretations of the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive, the splitting of one project into two, in order to create an illusion of a smaller impact on the environment, was illegal.

“It is necessary to do the environmental impact assessment for the entire project,” Leljak Gracin said.

Another shortcoming of the study is allowing the use of seawater for the gasification process, the NGO said, adding the study concluded was that no negative impact is expected.

“This assumption is simply shocking, considering the amount of trustworthy and relevant data which show the exact opposite,” Mileta said.

She said the good example of a similar situation was the lawsuit filed by Italian NGOs against the owners of LNG terminals near the northern Italian town of Porto Viro due to an ecological disaster. The court proved in 2016 there was a connection between the disaster and the release of chlorinated seawater from the terminal, but the heads of the terminal were acquitted because they went through the environmental impact assessment procedure and were granted permit to use the method.

“We hope that the Administrative Court will do the work that the Environment Ministry was incapable of doing, because it is obvious that environmental impact assessments only serve as justification for harmful projects,” Mileta said.

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