Energy
Canada wallows on LNG sidelines, paralyzed by Ottawa’s onerous regulatory system
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Mitsotakis said Greece has built a major facility outside the city of Alexandroupolis to process incoming LNG tankers. He said Greece will pump LNG to the rest of Europe and needs more at home as the country abandons coal.
When it comes to fossil fuels, the world wants what Canada’s got. The problem is, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn’t care.
Fresh proof came with the recent visit of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the first Greek leader to come to Canada in more than 40 years.
According to the office of the Prime Minister Trudeau, Mitsotakis was simply here to march in Montreal’s Greek Independence Day Parade, discuss “shared interests” and cut the ribbon as Greece purchased Canadian-made firefighting planes.
But, during an interview with CTV, Mitsotakis said his country would “of course” like to start importing Canadian liquified natural gas (LNG).
“We are a big entry point for LNG, not just for the Greek market, but also for the Balkans, for Eastern Europe. Theoretically, we could even supply Ukraine,” said Mitsotakis.
“In principle, yes, we are very interested in obtaining LNG at competitive prices.”
Mitsotakis said Greece has built a major facility outside the city of Alexandroupolis to process incoming LNG tankers. He said Greece will pump LNG to the rest of Europe and needs more at home as the country abandons coal.
Much of Europe’s energy has traditionally come from Russia or Middle Eastern autocracies. More than a decade ago, author Ezra Levant made the case for Canada’s “Ethical Oil” as a better alternative. Canada’s status as a democratic state that respects human rights and extracts oil with a minimal environmental footprint is as good as it gets. Mitsotakis, a Harvard-educated investment banker, understands that quite readily today.
“Canada is a country (for) which we share so many values,” said Mitsotakis. “I think we see eye-to-eye on many of the challenges that we face.”
Still, there was no mention of energy exports in Trudeau’s public comments regarding Mitsotakis, nor in official government communications about the visit.
Mitsotakis can take little consolation that his treatment is not unusual, as true as that may be. In the past 18 months, both the Japanese prime minister and the German chancellor returned home without official assurances that Ottawa was eager to offer bulk quantities of Canadian LNG.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida came to Canada in January, 2023 making no secret of his “high expectations” to reach an LNG export agreement with Canada.
In August 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz came to Canada hoping to reach an LNG deal. “Canada is our partner of choice,” Scholz said at the time.
Somehow, Trudeau said at a press conference with the German leader that there was no “business case” for LNG exports to Europe. Instead, he took the chancellor to an empty field in Newfoundland that was the chosen site for a future Canadian facility to export carbon-neutral hydrogen.
That will help Germany a little, but not nearly enough. The country turned to Qatar and signed a 15-year LNG export deal.
Canada is currently the world’s fifth largest producer of natural gas. But, as is the case with oil, facilities to sell it overseas are very limited. Canada has no LNG export facilities currently operating. Any LNG exports to Europe would have to go through a US export terminal.
Kitimat, BC will open a major export facility in early 2025, but plans to build an LNG pipeline to ports on the East Coast have fallen apart due to high costs.
On Monday, Alberta Energy Minister Brian Jean said “onerous” regulatory procedures were more to blame.
“With massive natural gas reserves, Canada can no longer wait on the LNG sidelines, burdened by an onerous regulatory system. Our allies and trading partners need us. We must have more LNG export facilities approved and built,” Jean said in a statement.
Jean is right. Canada has scuttled one opportunity after another during the Trudeau era, first by smothering pipeline development in onerous regulations. The Northern Gateway pipeline was the only one the nation banned, citing environmental concerns off the coast of northern B.C., despite the fact that 50 tankers passed the same waters every day with exports from Alaska.
Other proposals, such as the Energy East pipeline, were held up in red tape until its proponents decided the project wasn’t worth it. A 30,000-page application went for not, as did the hope that refineries in the Maritimes could refine Canadian products instead of those from the Middle East.
The trans mountain pipeline was also bound up until the government bought it, after which its progress still went painfully slowly. Years late and six times over-budget at a cost of $34 billion, the “long delayed” pipeline is finally ready for crude deliveries.
Bill C-69, dubbed by former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney as the “No More Pipelines Act”, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada last fall. The development is welcome but cannot restore lost time.
Canada remains poorly positioned to capitalize on another historic opportunity–the European thirst for oil as it tries to distance itself from Russia. Unfortunately, this problem seems more convenient to Ottawa than not. The Canadian government seems more interested in having zero carbon emissions even if that means zero economy. Too bad that makes zero sense.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein
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It’s said that in politics there’s no silver bullet that’ll make everything better.
But we do have 1 silver bullet in the chamber: the opportunity to unleash American energy, which Donald Trump has rightly vowed to do.
- The single most important thing government can do to make our lives better—something that will lead to a better economy, a lower cost of living, more job opportunities, a lower deficit, greater security, and a better environment—is unleash abundant, affordable, American energy.
- If we unleash abundant, affordable, American oil, natural gas, and coal production from the anti-energy policies holding it back, we can go from crippling inflation—substantially driven by energy costs—to affordable food, housing, transportation, and heating bills.
- Unleashing American energy will take us from nationwide electricity shortages to affordable, reliable power for all—and from losing good job opportunities to China, which we’ve allowed to outcompete us on energy costs, to creating millions of new well-paying jobs here at home.
- Unleashing American energy will take us from begging OPEC+ for oil, depending on Russia for uranium, and being at China’s mercy for critical minerals, to producing an abundant and secure supply of these crucial commodities at home.
- Many Americans are hesitant to embrace policies that unleash abundant, affordable energy because they think it will harm environmental progress—progress in air and water quality, safety from climate, and enjoyment of nature. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- Environmental progress isn’t in conflict with abundant, affordable energy; it requires abundant, affordable energy—to afford pollution controls, to clean up natural environmental hazards, and to protect ourselves from the always-dynamic and dangerous climate.
- Thanks to abundant, affordable energy, America has been wealthy enough to innovate and adopt pollution controls that make our air far cleaner—which is why America was able to increase its fossil fuel use 25% since 1970 while reducing air pollution 78%.¹
- Thanks to abundant, affordable energy, America has been able to clean up natural environmental hazards such as undrinkable water, which requires affordable, reliable energy to purify, or mosquito-infested swamps, which require abundant, affordable energy to drain.
- Thanks to abundant, affordable energy, we can protect ourselves from the always-dangerous climate by powering heating and A/C systems, storm warning and evacuation systems, and irrigation systems; witness the 98% drop in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century.²
- Thanks to abundant, affordable energy we have the wealth we need to enjoy and preserve the most valuable and beautiful parts of nature—which is why America is able to be both the world’s economic superpower and a place of unsurpassed access to the great outdoors.
- The key to supporting America’s energy abundance and environmental progress is maintaining steadfast support of individual and economic freedom, including the protection of property rights.
- Property rights allow our energy companies to produce and innovate as they judge best. The shale revolution happened here because we alone protect underground property rights. Producers used this freedom to figure out how to extract abundant oil and gas from once-useless rocks.
- Property rights allow us to care for our environment on our own property—and people tend to care best for what they own. And property rights are the basis for laws protecting our air and water from dangerous levels of pollution.
- America has shown time and again that pro-freedom energy and environmental policies drive energy and environmental progress. And we can do it again, if we reverse the anti-freedom policies of the past several decades and embrace the following “energy freedom” policies.
- To aid America in unleashing American energy, I’ve created the Energy Freedom Plan—a comprehensive plan that includes hundreds of high-leverage policy changes for every aspect of energy, from drilling to pipelines to electricity to nuclear to rare earth elements.
- The Energy Freedom Plan is based on 5 game-changing goals:
- Unleash responsible development
- End preferences for unreliable electricity
- Set environmental standards using cost-benefit analysis
- Address climate danger through resilience and innovation
- Unleash nuclear energy
- Unleash responsible development
Anti-development policies prevent the drilling, mining, transporting, and building all energy needs to reach its potential—from natural gas to nuclear to solar.
Liberating responsible development will create unprecedented US energy abundance.
- End preferences for unreliable electricity
Our grid is being ruined by systemic preferences for unreliable electricity, which cause prices to rise and reliability to decline.
Ending these preferences and prioritizing reliability is needed to make power cheap and reliable again.
- Set environmental standards using cost-benefit analysis
The EPA harms prosperity and health via emissions standards that impose huge costs for little or no benefit.
Real cost-benefit analysis, including objective health science will promote prosperity and environmental quality.
- Address climate danger through resilience and innovation, not punishing America
“Climate policy”” that singles out US emissions makes us poorer and less resilient while global emissions go up.
Becoming more resilient and unleashing innovation are the keys to climate safety.
- Unleash nuclear energy from pseudo-scientific restrictions
The strangulation of nuclear has made it 10 times more expensive than it needs to be.
Unleashing nuclear, including getting rid of pseudoscientific policies like LNT and ALARA, will make possible a nuclear renaissance.
- This week I will be releasing the FULL Energy Freedom Plan, including over 100 SPECIFIC game-changing policies that can unleash American energy like never before.
To make sure you see the whole plan, follow me @AlexEpstein and especially subscribe to alexepstein.substack.com.
Questions about this article? Ask AlexAI, my chatbot for energy and climate answers:
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For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data.
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