Christy Clark's Giant Methane Fart - Part Deux

British Columbia premier Christy Clark has visions of our province becoming an energy superpower in its own right thanks to massive reserves of shale natural gas, methane, in northern B.C. just waiting to be fracked.

The stuff's not worth much in Canada.  North America has a glut of methane thanks to fracking in the U.S.   Asia, however, is still paying top dollar for natural gas so Clark sees an opportunity to market LNG, highly-compressed, liquified natural gas to the far side of the Pacific.

Not so fast, say the folks at the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre.   They warn this could backfire on the people of British Columbia, big time.

“Vancouver Island homeowners who heat with natural gas could be looking at quadruple the prices for natural gas. That’s what happened in Australia,” said Sandborn, lead author of a submission that will go today to the federal and B.C. environment ministers asking for an economic and environmental assessment of proposed LNG developments in B.C.

Taxpayers are at risk because industry subsidies may be needed to make it competitive with the rush of new natural gas suppliers entering the global market, Sandborn said. Moreover, if the industry collapses, contaminated sites may be left to the taxpayers to clean up, he added.

“There’s going to be a glut coming on to the market because companies are going around the world meeting with governments and then playing them off against each other,” he said.

“A number of the largest energy companies in the world, including Chevron, Shell, PetroChina, Petronas, Apache and British Gas, are scrambling to join the race to export LNG, with new developments almost weekly,” says the submission that will go to federal Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq and provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak.

“Unfortunately, each proposal is being developed and environmentally assessed in isolation from the others.”

That means no one is looking at the big picture even though there can be only so many pipeline corridors, the Kitimat airshed can only take so much pollution and there is only so much water to produce the natural gas, the report says.

“Constructing a number of different pipeline corridors across the province would put far more fish, grizzlies and caribou at risk than if a single, common corridor was used. The building of such redundant infrastructure could risk the future of the industry itself.”

The greatest pity is that British Columbia is saddled with a premier with the acumen of Ralph Klein after a night at the St. Louis Hotel  and none of the wisdom of Peter Lougheed.