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Quebec nixes LNG venture; much enviro, First Nations opposition
Gary Park for Petroleum News
A groundswell of opposition from First Nations and environmentalists may have scuttled plans for a C$14 billion LNG project in Quebec, putting paid to yet another energy project in the anti-fossil fuel province.
Just four days after three Innu communities said they were ready to take measures, including legal action, to block GNL Quebec’s Energie Saguenay venture from being built on their territories, the Quebec government refused to approve the plans to liquefy natural gas from Western Canada for shipment to overseas markets.
The verdict rocked the Energie Saguenay applicants who had already received a federal license to export the equivalent of 1.8 billion cubic feet per day to Europe.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s government had initially been a proponent of the project, which it hoped would diversify the economy in a region largely reliant on aluminum and forest industries.
Final ratification withheld But the government withheld final ratification of the venture unless the proponents could demonstrate their proposal would accelerate the transition to greener forms of energy, lower greenhouse gas emissions and attract sufficient public backing.
Environment Minister Benoit Charette said an analysis by his ministry concluded that the Energie Saguenay project had no chance of meeting the first two criteria.
Ministry officials opted not to bother analyzing the third, partly because a petition against the project was signed by 120,000 Quebecers, along with 648 scientists, 250 health professionals and 40 economists.
In addition, more than 2,500 briefs were filed with the environment bureau opposing the venture.
Charette told a news conference that the “project has more disadvantages than advantages,” and would, if it proceeded, discourage natural gas buyers elsewhere from moving to cleaner energy sources.
He conceded the decision made it unlikely that a planned pipeline to carry gas from Western Canada to a liquefaction plant and tanker terminal at Port Saguenay on the St. Lawrence River would proceed.
Innu nation opposition The chances of the pipeline surviving were already in trouble when the three Innu nations spurned any attempt by GNL Quebec to continue negotiations.
Quebec’s government environmental bureau said in a 500-page report that LNG “would effectively serve as a substitute to polluting fuels already used in targeted export markets.”
Charles-Edouard Verreault, a vice chief of one First Nation, said it “would be impossible for GNL Quebec to meet its commitment in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
GNL Quebec said it would welcome the opportunity “to explain our commitments and demonstrate that Energie Saguenay would provide LNG with the lowest carbon footprint in the world, thus making it an important contribution to the fight against climate change.”
Verreault said the Innu nations is the “territory where our ancestors have been settled for centuries and where we hold ancestral rights and Innu titles.”
‘People-powered victory’ Julia Levin, a senior official at the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said the government rejection is a “people-powered victory” against the notion that hydraulic fractured gas should be used as a bridge fuel.
The ideas that Canada “can help global decarbonization by doubling down on fracked gas is a lie. It’s irresponsible for premiers in other provinces to continue to latch on to that lie.”
Levin said other provinces such as British Columbia, which continue to approve LNG projects makes it hard for those premiers “to not say they are climate deniers.”
Charette said he expects premiers in Western Canada, especially Alberta, will be disappointed by Quebec’s decision, but he stressed that Quebec is not the only jurisdiction in the world that is looking critically at natural resource projects.
“To our friends in Alberta we say let’s work together on other kinds of projects, on cleaner project,” he said.
Quebec had previously dealt a blow to TC Energy’s plans for the 1 million barrels per day Energy East pipeline to Canada’s Atlantic coast, the bulk of which was tagged for Europe and has declined to support Enbridge’s battle with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to complete an upgrading of its Line 5 to deliver crude bitumen to refineries in Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. Midwest.
- GARY PARK
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