Canaport LNG project in full swing

More pieces have fallen into place for the Atlantic Canada liquefied natural gas project, with momentum on its side.

Canaport owners, Irving Oil of New Brunswick and Repsol of Spain, have awarded the contract to design and build an import terminal to a partnership led by engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.

Canaport also said it has completed an agreement to transport gas from the terminal to markets in Canada and the northeastern United States via the Brunswick pipeline, an expansion of the existing Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline that carries about 400 million cubic feet of gas from Nova Scotia’s Sable field to the northeastern U.S.

In addition, a contract for the terminal’s offshore facilities went to a consortium of Peter Kiewit Sons Co. of Newfoundland, Sandwell Engineering of Vancouver and Weeks Marine of New Jersey.

Terms of the contracts were not disclosed.

However, Emera of Nova Scotia said it plans to invest C$350 million to assume full ownership of the proposed 85-mile Brunswick pipeline to carry 850 million cubic feet per day of gas over 25 years.

Emera is a partner with Duke Energy and ExxonMobil in the Maritimes & Northeast system.

The Canaport terminal will handle LNG imported from Trinidad & Tobago.

While Canaport keeps rolling ahead, the clouds continue to gather over Anadarko’s Bear Head project in Nova Scotia.

Anadarko’s Chief Financial Officer Al Walker told an energy conference in Texas in late May that the clock is running down in the company’s search for an LNG supplier. If the company is unable to negotiate a supply arrangement in “coming months … then we will probably move to mothball (the Bear Head) facility unless somebody walked in with an extremely attractive price and wanted to buy it from us.”

Anadarko announced in March that it was slowing construction of the terminal after the hunt for a supplier failed to yield success by the late 2005 target date.

Company officials have said since then that they see Bear Head as a good project and their priority is to find long-term LNG supply, not a sale of the assets.

—Gary Park