The ball is in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s court. A three-person panel of the Calgary-based National Energy Board has approved twinning the American-owned Kinder Morgan pipeline. The board panel has stipulated some 157 conditions related to it but the key is getting the Canadian Cabinet to sign off on the approval. That is anticipated later this year.
The Kinder Morgan proposal—also known as the Trans Mountain Pipeline—has been opposed by the British Columbia provincial government and the major B.C. cities of Burnaby and Vancouver as well as indigenous peoples and environmental groups. The proposal is to twin the original pipeline that was built in 1953 and triple the throughput with high pressure for heated, diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands.
The federal cabinet can expect to be under intense pressure from environmentalists on one side and Alberta politicians on the other. The stipulation that Kinder Morgan carry $1.1 billion in liability coverage will hardly appease environmentalists. Alberta business and political interests can only see the serious problem they face in being unable to get the tar sands output to tide water where it can be put in tankers and sent to third world countries with lax environmental standards.
But, in addition to the pipeline concerns, environmentalists are also worried about the danger of tanker spills with the greatly increased traffic in the waters leading out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
But even if the Canadian cabinet refuses the Kinder Morgan go-ahead, there are still other options for the pipeline and tar sands interests to fight over. While the Northern Gateway proposal by Enbridge to Kitimat, B.C. has been mired in legal challenges since being approved by the Harper cabinet, it is still very much a tar sands company’s dream solution. Despite Justin Trudeau promising the banning of tanker traffic into the proposed Kitimat terminal, nothing has been heard on that promise from his transport minister.
The major betting has remained on the Energy East proposal by TransCanada Pipelines. This 4500 kilometre pipe would run all the way to the Irving Oil tanker terminal in the Bay of Fundy. This route has been knee-capped by the Quebec government that finally realized what that bitumen could do to the environment if there was a spill in the Quebec portion.
At the same time, New Brunswick environmental groups and agencies are realizing that doubling the oil tanker traffic into the Bay of Fundy might put marine income and tourism at risk.
But all this does not make us feel sorry for those business people who just want to make money out of Canada’s tar sands.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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