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Promise and perils of Energy East pipeline Prime Minister Harper endorses pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick as a way to open additional markets for Canadian crude Gary Park For Petroleum News
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made a sharp swerve to the east in his desire to see new markets opened up for crude from the Alberta oil sands.
In a full-blown endorsement, he described TransCanada’s proposed 1.1 million barrels per day pipeline from Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick, as “an extremely exciting project.”
“We’re not just expanding our markets for energy projects, which we need to do,” Harper said. “But we are also at the same time making sure that Canadians themselves benefit from those projects and from that energy security.”
In taking that stand, he has become one of the strongest backers of the C$12 billion Energy East pipeline to fuel refineries in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, as well as possibly opening new export routes.
He has also demonstrated that he is open to more than just the plans by Enbridge and Kinder Morgan to build pipelines to tanker terminals on the British Columbia coast.
However, Harper cautioned that his government is not the pipeline proponent and that all big energy projects are subject to cabinet review.
New Brunswick Premier David Alward, who has been working for the past year to help land the pipeline and reduce his province’s 11 percent unemployment rate, was in no doubt that Harper understands what Energy East can mean for Canada’s economy.
“It was a significant day to hear the prime minister speak so strongly of the potential of the pipeline as a pan-Canadian project,” Alward said.
He is especially hopeful that the project could allow some of the 8,000 New Brunswickers working outside the province to return home.
Alward credited the fast evolution of Energy East on two factors – the Alberta government’s realization that they needed to find ways beyond simply exporting to the United States to achieve world prices for their crude and on the scrapping between Alberta and British Columbia over running pipelines from the oil sands to the Pacific Coast.
“Once they started to connect the dots, that’s when momentum really started to pick up,” he said.
Warning signs ahead Despite these ringing endorsements, First Nations and environmentalists are rallying to ensure they are consulted and to challenge the regulatory process for Energy East.
Chief Joanna Bernard of the Madawaska Fist Nation said Harper is not looking at all aspects of the project.
“We always feel the fix is in, but if we truly feel that this is not good then we’re going to be all against it,” she said.
Bernard said aboriginal communities will not accept development that poses undue environmental and safety risks, especially given a revised environmental process that has transferred the final decision-making from the National Energy Board to the federal cabinet.
Gretchen Fitzgerald, executive director of the Sierra Club’s Atlantic chapter, said “so much grandstanding and flag-waving” has already undermined her organization’s hopes of a “fair, arm’s length evaluation.”
Greenpeace Canada campaigner Mike Hudema said Canada should not try to “build a nation around a project that will poison water, violate (aboriginal) treaty rights and further accelerate a global climate crisis.”
TransCanada Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling said that like construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 19th Century and completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in the 1950s, Energy East is backed by a “strong belief that building critical infrastructure ties our country together.”
Irving president Paul Browning said Canada, with the world’s third largest basin of oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, is the only major global oil producer without a major deepwater port.
“We do feel that when the pipeline and marine terminal is put in place and Western Canadian crude has access to a port, there is going to be a substantial opportunity,” he said.
Girling acknowledged that public awareness around Energy East has increased since the rail disaster in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, placing added pressure on transporters of crude “to do everything we possibly can to ensure (such accidents) don’t happen in the future.”
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