Here we go again.
Just days before a federal panel is expected to release its findings on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, a second company filed an application Monday for a similar project.
Kinder Morgan’s long-awaited application is to twin an existing 1,100-kilometre line from Edmonton to Vancouver. It will likely prompt the same intense debate that characterized Enbridge’s rocky two-year ride through the hearing process.
The concept is the same. Pipe Alberta crude oil to the Pacific coast for shipment via tanker in order to diversify the currently limited market and vastly expand capacity.
But there are important differences. The Northern Gateway project has two flashpoints where opposition is focused. One is the pipeline route through rugged, remote wilderness. The other is the tanker route from Kitimat through Douglas Channel.
Kinder Morgan’s $5.6-billion Trans Mountain Expansion project will probably draw less heat over the pipeline route. Three-quarters of it follows an existing line that’s been in place for more than 60 years. The ground has already been broken. And most of the terrain is more accessible, important when assessing response times if the line were to be breached.
But it could prompt as much, if not more, controversy over the terminus. The line would end at the company’s Burnaby refinery on Burrard Inlet. And the project involves tripling the daily capacity, from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day. That would hike the number of tanker movements from about one a week to about one a day. They would all sail under Lion’s Gate Bridge, through the Gulf Islands, past Victoria and out to sea.
There are hundreds of times more people living much closer to that tanker route than Enbridge’s Kitimat one.
Trans Mountain Pipeline’s 15,000-page submission is officially a “facilities application” now filed with the National Energy Board. Without referring to the Enbridge application, company president Ian Anderson said lessons have been learned over the last 18 months.
They revolve around the need for outreach and local involvement and the critical importance of First Nations engagement. On that front, the Trans Mountain project has just one Alberta band standing in outright support.
The company has 46 other letters of understanding with bands, mostly in B.C. But Anderson says none of them represent explicit support for the project at this point.
And when it comes to getting the endorsement of the B.C. Liberal government, the company faces the same tricky prospect that Enbridge does — deciphering what Premier Christy Clark’s five conditions actually mean.
Those were announced midway through Enbridge’s hearings and seem to mean different things to different people.
B.C. requires world-leading safety standards (on land and at sea), environmental regulatory approvals and First Nations engagement. The fifth and most critical one is a “fair share” of any revenue for the risk incurred.
Enbridge’s response to that demand is to cite benefits such as the 3,000 jobs that would be created and tax revenue increases of up to $9 billion. But it seems clear that B.C. wants a straight cut of the revenue in some fashion, not just the increased taxation.
How Kinder Morgan would address the fifth condition remains to be seen.
The company statement said the application “addresses provincial interests and concerns, including the five requirements set out by the B.C. government … We are confident that the application demonstrates that we can fully address and satisfy these interests.”
But Anderson told reporters on a conference call that he is focused on the first four conditions. The fair share requirement is a “broader matter,” he said.
The production forecasts from the Alberta oilsands are so vast that the pipeline debate in B.C. is not an either-or proposition.
Anderson said there’s enough production looking out 10 years to supply all the projects being proposed today. “I don’t think it’s a matter of one or the other.”
The federal joint review panel report on Northern Gateway could come as early as this week. It will be the first major checkpoint on what the next-in-line proponent can expect.
