British Columbians should be concerned that a massive expansion of liquefied natural gas projects will lead to soaring costs for home heating, says Calvin Sandborn, legal director of the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre.
“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.
The Environmental Law Centre, acting for the Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research, is asking for a joint federal-provincial assessment of more than a dozen LNG proposals. They include numerous pipelines needed to connect the Peace River area with the coast and thousands of new gas wells that would be required in the northeast of the province.
“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.”
In Australia, lack of upfront planning led to redundant infrastructure, along with unnecessary environmental damage, that threatened the economic viability of the industry, Sandborn said.
“B.C. needs to step back, look at the big picture and determine what all this massive development will mean for the province.”
