The latest chapter in Canada’s quest to become a full-blown oil superpower unfolded this month in a village gym on the British Columbia coast.
Here, several hundred people gathered for hearings on whether a pipeline should be laid from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific in order to deliver oil to Asia, chiefly energy-hungry China. The stakes are particularly high for the village of Kitamaat and its neighbors, because the pipeline would terminate here and a port would be built to handle 220 tankers a year and 525,000 barrels of oil a day.
However, the planned Northern Gateway Pipeline is just one aspect of an epic battle over Canada’s oil ambitions — a battle that already has a supporting role in the US presidential election and which will help to shape North America’s future energy relationship with China.
It actually is a tale of two pipelines — the one that is supposed to end at Kitamaat Village and another that would have gone from Alberta to the Texas coast, but was blocked by the Obama administration citing environmental grounds.
Those same environmental issues are certain to haunt Northern Gateway as the joint review panel of energy and environmental officials canvasses opinion along the 1,177km route of the pipeline to be built by Enbridge, a Canadian company.
The fear of oil spills is especially acute in this pristine corner of northwest British Columbia, with its snowcapped mountains and deep ocean inlets. People here still remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 and oil is still leaking from the Queen of the North, a ferry that sank off nearby Hartley Bay six years ago.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada’s national interest makes the US$5.5 billion pipeline essential. He was “profoundly disappointed” that US President Barack Obama rejected the Texas Keystone XL option, but also spoke of the need to diversify Canada’s oil industry. Ninety-seven percent of Canadian oil exports now go to the US.
“I think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wake-up call, the degree to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the United States and especially decisions that may be made for very bad political reasons,” he told Canadian TV.
US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich quickly picked up the theme, saying that Harper, “who, by the way, is conservative and pro-American ... has said he’s going cut a deal with the Chinese ... We’ll get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity.”
However, the environmental objections that pushed Obama to block the pipeline to Texas apply equally to the Pacific pipeline and the review panel says more than 4,000 people have signed up to testify.
The atmosphere has turned acrimonious, with Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver claiming in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” are out to thwart Canada’s economic ascent.
He said they were bent on bogging down the panel’s work.
Environmentalists and First Nations (a Canadian synonym for native tribes) could delay approval all the way to the Supreme Court, and First Nations hold title to some of the land the pipeline would cross, meaning the government would have to move with extreme sensitivity.
Alberta has the world’s third-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela: more than 170 billion barrels.
Daily production of 1.5 million barrels from the oil sands is expected to increase to 3.7 million in 2025, which the oil industry sees as a pressing reason to build the pipelines.
However, critics dislike the whole concept of tapping the oil sands, saying it requires huge amounts of energy and water, increases greenhouse gas emissions and threatens rivers and forests. Some projects are massive open-pit mines, and the process of separating oil from sand can generate lake-sized pools of toxic sludge.
Meanwhile, China’s growing economy is hungry for Canadian oil. Chinese state-owned companies have invested more than US$16 billion in Canadian energy in the past two years, state-controlled Sinopec has a stake in the pipeline, and if it is built, Chinese investment in Alberta oil sands is sure to boom.
“They [the Chinese] wonder why it’s not being built already,” said Wenran Jiang (姜聞然), an energy expert and professor at the University of Alberta.
Harper is set to visit China next month. After Obama first delayed the Keystone pipeline in November last year, Harper told Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) at the Pacific Rim summit in Hawaii that Canada would like to sell more oil to China and the Canadian prime minister filled in Obama on what he said.
However, oil analysts say Alberta has enough oil to meet both countries’ needs and the pipeline’s capacity of 525,000 barrels a day would amount to less than 6 percent of China’s current needs.
Pipelines are rarely rejected in Canada, but Murray Minchin, an environmentalist who lives near Kitamaat Village, says this time he and other opponents are determined to block construction.
“They are ready to put themselves in front of something to stop the equipment,” Minchin said. “Even if it gets the green light it doesn’t mean it’s getting done.”
At the Kitamaat hearings, speakers ranged from Ellis Ross, chief of the Haisla First Nation in British Columbia, to Dieter Wagner, a German-born Canadian, retired scientist and veteran sailor who called the Douglas Channel “an insane route to take.”
Ross testified that the tanker port would go up just as marine life decimated by industrial pollution was making a comeback.
He held the audience spellbound as he described an extraordinary nighttime encounter last summer with a whale that was “logging” — the half-doze that passes for sleep in the cetacean world.
“Midnight I hear this whale and it’s right outside the soccer field. It’s waterfront, but I can hear this whale and I can’t understand why it’s so close, something’s got to be wrong,” he said. “So I walk down there with my daughter and I try to flash a light down there and quickly figured out it’s not in trouble, it’s sleeping. It’s resting right outside our soccer field.”
“You can’t imagine what that means to a First Nation that’s watched his territory get destroyed over 60 years. You can’t imagine the feeling,” he added.
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