TransCanada Selected to Build Proposed Natural Gas Pipeline for Shell
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 @ 3:58 AM
Prince George, B.C.- TransCanada Corporation has been selected by Shell Canada Limited and its partners to design, build, own and operate the proposed Coastal GasLink project, an estimated $4-billion pipeline that will transport natural gas from the Montney gas-producing region near Dawson Creek to Shell’s proposed LNG Canada liquefied natural gas export facility near Kitimat.
"Our team has the expertise to design, build and safely operate pipeline systems” said Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer . “We look forward to having open and meaningful discussions with Aboriginal communities and key stakeholder groups, including local residents, elected officials and the Government of British Columbia, where we will listen to feedback, build on the positive and seek to address any potential concerns."
The project would see a 700 km pipeline, of large diameter pipe, built to carry in excess of 1.7 billion cubic feet of gas per day to the proposed new liquefaction plant. It is expected that at the height of the 2 to three year construction period, the project would create between 2000 and 2500 direct jobs. Pending regulatory approvals, the target date for operation is the end of the decade.
TransCanada already has 24,000 kilometres of pipelines in operation in Western Canada including 240 kilometres of pipelines in service in northeast BC, with another 125 kilometres of proposed additions either already having received regulatory approval or currently undergoing regulatory review.
The LNG Canada project is a joint venture led by Shell, with partners Korea Gas Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation and PetroChina Company Limited. Shell and TransCanada are working toward the final agreements on the Coastal GasLink project.
Comments
The problem with these oversees export plans is that we have no domestic plan to keep energy affordable here in BC when we are competing for world market prices. A few make out well, but the vast majority pay more through the inflation of the energy resource. This makes domestic industry less competitive and makes things like heating your home in the winter more expensive. Dutch disease does apply.
I absolutely oppose the Gateway pipeline because of the heavy tar being impossible to clean up, and the devastation the project generates from shovel to boat. I care about the Alberta and northern rivers environment too. The natural gas exports however would be much easier to mitigate the concerns in the event of disaster. Furthermore if this enables Japan to get off nuclear power than this project should be considered existential policy for BC. A disaster from Gateway would destroy our watersheds and ocean, but a disaster from a nuclear power source in Asia could contaminate our province for thousands of years… we are kind of held hostage to Japans kamakazi nuclear policy.
That said the provincial government should be negotiating for BC and if it was negotiating for BC they would ensure we have an export tax on all energy exports to return the revenue from inflation in society to the provincial economy.
In 20-years time all highway trucks, logging trucks, ect will all run on natural gas… what we do now will determine greatly the affordability and productivity of this province for generations to come.
Time Will Tell
I agree that the future of domestic resources are what need to be watched and protected. Governments all around the world are being sucked into letting the markets dictate the depleting of and exporting of all sorts of things. Now that china and india are and others are growing western like economies, there just will not be enough resources to sustain all that.
For sure we need to export some of what we have but how fast should we deplete our non renewable resources? The stories we are being told about the nearly endless amounts of oil that can be extracted from the tar sands are misleading. It is a boom and bust development. The bigger the exports of oil the bigger and faster the bust to all other canadian industries and transportation and manufacturing. The faster we expand the exports of oil the faster and higher our dollar goes up and the faster we become entirely committed and totally reliant on oil exports.
The great economic generator that the oilsands are, it is temporary and they cannot support the losses to all other industries and their displaced workers.
The huge bust this is leading to is when the highly profitable parts of the oilsands are gone and that is coming much sooner than anyone is telling us.
No country needs to adapt more extensively and quickly than canada does to converting its dependence on oil based products and using its domestic natural gas for transportation fuels. That needs to be priority number one. Priority number two is that we do not allow our natural gas to become so expensive that this option prevents a future beyond oil.
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