Study questions LNG site

GARY PARK

For Petroleum News

A scientific study has put another dent in British Columbia’s C$36 billion Pacific NorthWest LNG project by concluding the development would do great harm to the province’s second most productive salmon-producing river.

Locating a liquefaction plant and tanker terminal at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert would amount to putting an industrial operation in the “Grand Central station for salmon,” said Allen Gottsfeld, chief scientist for the Skeena Fisheries Commission, a consortium of First Nations fisheries management groups.

The study, published by PLOS (the non-profit Public Library of Science), said Pacific NorthWest infrastructure would endanger an abundant feeding ground for sockeye salmon juveniles, which it estimates are two to eight times more numerous in the part of the estuary targeted for development.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency is scheduled to release its findings on the project’s impact this fall.

So far eight First Nations have signed benefits and access agreements on the Lelu Island plant and its associated pipeline, but the project also faces a legal challenge from the Gitga’at First Nation.

Earlier this year, the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation rejected a C$1.15 billion benefits package from Pacific NorthWest, a consortium of Asian companies led by Malaysia’s Petronas.

A letter published in the academic journal Science earlier in August, with supporting data from research on the salmon population in the estuary, said there is a “troubling blind spot” in Canada’s environmental review process.

It claimed that industrial projects reduce the chances of preserving salmon and would, in turn, affect constitutionally protested aboriginal fishing rights far inland in British Columbia, including those of five First Nations that have not been consulted about Pacific NorthWest.

The letter-writer, Jonathan Moore, an associate professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Simon Fraser University, said that more than 40 salmon populations harvested by 10 First Nations rely on the Skeena River’s estuary habitat.

“This plant will affect fisheries and people as far as salmon can swim, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres upstream,” he said. “Those risks are not being considered right now.”

Moore said the scientists concluded that of all the plant sites examined, Lelu Island is the “worst place” to locate the facility.