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Harper a Mac believer
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is confident the Mackenzie Gas Project will go ahead, but he offered nothing in the way of money for infrastructure to speed up the drawn-out approval process during a visit to the Northwest Territories on Aug. 28.
“I’m optimistic in the not-too-distant future that this project will come to fruition,” he told a news conference in Tuktoyaktuk.
“I actually am more optimistic about this project coming to fruition than I have been probably at any time in my life,” he said.
And when Canada does reach the go-ahead stage that will “lead to a whole series of infrastructure developments.”
Harper said the Mackenzie Gas Project means more to Canada that just a commercial gas project.
“It is ultimately about opening up a region of the country in a way that it has not been opened up before and of establishing our economic reach and sovereignty in a way that has never been done before,” he declared.
One of the biggest obstacles standing in the path of the MGP is an agreement between Harper’s government and the project partners on the fiscal terms for shipping gas from the Mackenzie Delta to southern Canadian and United States markets.
Harper offered nothing new on where those talks stand or whether a deal is possible before a final report on the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the MGP is released.
Complex regulations an issue Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the federal money being spent on the mapping program will not address the more fundamental issues standing in the way of Arctic oil and gas exploration.
He said the complex regulatory process in the North, especially in the Northwest Territories, has done more than anything else to restrain spending in the region.
“There is great interest in going north, but at this stage the policy and regulatory environments are slowing it down,” Alvarez said.
“Companies would be quite happy to invest in the North, but if you look at the amount of land sales and activity going on in northern British Columbia and Alberta, it simply stops at the 60th parallel.”
He noted that the MGP co-venturers have spent years and millions of dollars seeking regulatory approvals without getting a final verdict.
“We’ve had eight major oil pipeline projects announced since May 2001,” he said. “All of those have been approved by the regulators and are either in service or under construction. Over the same period we still don’t have a decision on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.”
Dave Nickerson, a former northern politician who sits on the boards of several mining companies, said geological mapping is welcome, “but a dysfunctional regulatory system if driving away investment in the North. So my top priority would be to deal with that.”
Alaska closing gap Northwest Territories Premier Floyd Roland, concerned that an Alaska gas pipeline is fast closing the gap on the MGP, said the Canadian and NWT governments may open the door to private-sector partners to build a toll highway up the Mackenzie Valley to trigger northern resource development and possibly lower costs for the Mackenzie pipeline.
“We’ve got to keep the momentum of the (Mackenzie) project going,” he told the Globe and Mail.
Industry Minister Jim Prentice hinted to reporters the Canadian government could have fiscal arrangements with the MGP partners in place by spring 2009.
Roland said the MGP remains ahead of the Alaska undertaking in terms of licensing and approval, but that lead is narrowing.
He said a toll highway could shrink the capital outlay, but noted that the MGP’s corporate partners are worried about the impact of any further regulatory delays now that the Canadian government has turned over responsibility for land and water-use permits to aboriginal communities under land claims settlements.
—Gary Park
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