Northern Gateway facing a filibuster

Testimony at regulatory hearings on pipeline could last 650 hours, with more than 4,000 groups, individuals registered to speak

Gary Park

For Petroleum News

The battle lines are taking shape in the regulatory showdown over Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, the essential link between the Alberta oil sands and markets in Asia and the U.S. Pacific Coast.

What they represent at this stage is an unprecedented public hearing, starting in January, before a Joint Review Panel of the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

If each of the more than 4,000 registrants — individuals and groups — takes their allocated 10 minutes to speak, that phase of the hearings would take at least 650 hours.

That mirrors the level and extent of the opposition to the C$5.5 billion project to export 525,000 barrels per day of oil sands crude and import 193,000 bpd of condensate on a parallel pipeline to dilute the raw bitumen and allow it to flow through the pipeline.

Enbridge has little doubt that the hearing process is being orchestrated by environmental watchdogs who are trying to overwhelm the procedure.

Company spokesman Paul Stanway said the intent has already been divulged by Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative’s registration drive, under the label “Mob the Mic!”

“That tells you pretty much all you need to know,” he said.

But Dogwood spokesman Eric Swanson said his group simply wants the voices of British Columbia residents — 75 percent of whom are opposed to the project, according to four polls commissioned by Dogwood since 2005 — to be heard.

He said a single spill from a tanker could wipe out a coastal economy.

Jolan Bailey, speaking for the environmental group ForestEthics, said it is clear the project has “struck a public nerve. This is really a wall of public opposition.”

Stanway said Enbridge welcomes public input, but is increasingly concerned that a startup date for Northern Gateway, which is already eight to 12 months behind schedule, could be pushed beyond 2017.

Concern over international groups

Stanway said there is no question that well-financed groups are focused on both projects. “What would be a concern is if this is a strategy being employed by political activists to try and undermine the regulatory process,” he said.

Concern has been raised that U.S.-based charitable foundations are making large financial contributions to so-called grassroots protests taking place in Western Canada.

A Vancouver researcher Vivian Kruse told Vancouver Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe she has determined over the past five years that “millions of dollars in foreign funding have given the Canadian environmental movement a level of influence that it would not otherwise have had.”

Kruse said funds from U.S. charitable foundations, in the name of protecting the environment, could be intended to protect U.S. market and trade interests.

She said an assortment of foundations working against Northern Gateway could be setting up an “ingenious trade barrier to block exports of Canadian oil to Asia.”

Enbridge Chief Executive Officer Pat Daniel, while confident the pipeline will be approved, said that “doesn’t mean to say it’s going to be easy.”

But he argued the two main criteria facing the Joint Review Panel are: Is the project in the national best interest (“not too many will argue against that”) and can it be built in an environmentally sound and effective way (“if Canadians can’t do it, who can?”)?

Daniel said that if U.S. opponents can “bring their big foundations up to Canada and fund First Nations opposition” they may find out that “most people think it’s more important to have security of supply and alternative markets.”