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Mackenzie gets upbeat backing
The Canadian government believes the Mackenzie Gas Project will proceed, despite rising costs and unresolved negotiations on fiscal terms, said Jim Prentice, the federal cabinet minister assigned to the Mackenzie portfolio.
He told Reuters in an interview Dec. 3 that his optimism is based on the fact that “a lot of the work (on the regulatory front) that needed to be done has now been done.”
Prentice, currently environment minister, said he now expects to receive a long-delayed final report from a Joint Review Panel, assigned to deal with the environmental and social aspects of a pipeline from the Mackenzie Delta to southern markets, between March and May of 2009, at least six months behind the most recent schedule.
Pending completion of the panel’s environmental work, he said “the fiscal framework continues to be an outstanding issue.”
5-6 years ahead of Alaska But Prentice estimates the Mackenzie project is currently about five or six years ahead of a proposed gas pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope to the Lower 48, wider than the two-year gap projected in 2005.
He said the reason is that in “typical Canadian fashion we’ve kind of, step by step, incrementally, moved the thing ahead at a very steady pace.”
While conceding everyone would be happier if the regulatory process had advanced at a faster rate, the work is “being completed … in a professional way.”
Asked to speculate on when gas could be delivered from the Canadian Arctic, Prentice said that if the regulatory process is wrapped up and corporate sanctioning decisions are made in 2009 the answer then is how quickly the Mackenzie consortium, led by Imperial Oil, can move to the next stage.
The corporate partners have adopted a low profile during the attempts to resolve regulatory and fiscal matters and have declined to update cost estimates since releasing a figure of C$16.2 billion in 2007.
—Petroleum News
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