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Out to block Northern Gateway
Gary Park For Petroleum News
The tentacles of the National Geographic have latched firmly on to the Canadian oil sands.
Two years after the magazine carried a photo spread of industrial tailings ponds — the oil sands sector’s black eye — to highlight the impact on traditional aboriginal lands and northern Alberta’s boreal forest, it has returned to the theme, this time concentrating on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project in an article titled “Pipeline Through Paradise.”
Northern Gateway proposes a pipeline to deliver 525,000 barrels per day of oil sands crude from Alberta to the deepwater British Columbia port at Kitimat, largely for export to Asian refineries, and a parallel line to import 193,000 bpd of diluents to improve the efficient pipeline transportation of heavy crude oil and bitumen.
Adding to the intense opposition to Northern Gateway, National Geographic said local First Nations and surrounding rain forests “have been caught up in a great geopolitical oil game. The Northern gateway isn’t just a pipeline. It’s Canada’s bid to become a global player in the petroleum market.”
The article said the “issue is no less critical for the Great Bear Rainforest, a wild stretch of western red cedar, hemlock and spruce forest that runs 250 miles down British Columbia’s coasts. Whales, wolves, bears, and humans thrive in the rich marine channels and forest of the Great Bear, whose boundaries have never been precisely defined.”
The magazine also lays out the 2006 sinking of B.C. Ferries Queen of the North (with the loss of two lives) and notes that oil is still leaking from the submerged vessel, suggesting that could also be the fate of tankers operating out of Kitimat.
Doug Neasloss, an aboriginal wildlife guide, is reported as saying that “we don’t want another Exxon Valdez on our shores.”
Enbridge supports protected area A spokesman for Enbridge voiced disappointment that National Geographic made little use of “extensive” information his company supplied, notably covering measures planned for pipeline safety and the navigation of coastal waters.
He said Enbridge endorses what seems to be the magazine’s objective of creating support for turning the Great Bear Rainforest into a protected area, which tankers between Kitimat and the Pacific Ocean “would not interfere with in any way,” given that Kitimat is outside the Great Bear area.
Enbridge has already promised to invest in new navigational aids along the B.C. coast, while the Canadian Coast Guard has promised to build several new maritime radar stations as part of the project.
Canada’s National Energy Board will embark on quasi-legal hearings next year and is expected to deliver its verdict in late 2012.
In the meantime, leaders of five First Nations, in a letter to the Edmonton Journal, asked Albertans to support their concerns about spills from a Northern Gateway pipeline, noting that 80 nations in British Columbia and others across Western Canada have voiced their opposition.
They said a pipeline and tankers “will expose indigenous and non-indigenous communities from the Pacific coast across to Alberta to the risk of pipeline and supertanker spills.”
Under international law, indigenous peoples have the right to say “no” to such developments on their territories, which include 25 percent of Northern Gateway’s route, they argued.
“Nobody should doubt the authenticity of our opposition,” the chiefs said.
“Our nations are the wall this pipeline will not break through,” said Chief Larry Nooski of Nadleh Whut’en.
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