Energy
LNG leader: Haisla Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith on the world’s first Indigenous project
Haisla Nation Chief Councillor Crystal Smith during a press conference announcing that the Cedar LNG project has been given environmental approval in Vancouver, Tuesday March 14, 2023. CP Images photo
From the Canadian Energy Centre
By Will Gibson‘Now we are working together to make our own opportunities as owners and developers of the resource’
Growing up in the 1980s, Crystal Smith felt supported and nourished by her community, the Haisla Nation along the shores of Kitimat, British Columbia. But at the same time, she also sensed the outside world had placed some limitations on her future.
“I enjoyed a wonderful childhood with a solid foundation and lots of love, especially from my grandma Cecilia Smith. She raised me because I lost my mother and stepdad at a young age. But it wasn’t popular to be Indigenous when I grew up,” says Smith.
“A lot of people would talk about how Indigenous people were not expected to be successful. That kind of talk really affected my confidence about what I could be.”
Smith, now the Haisla Nation’s elected chief councillor, never wants children in her community to feel those constraints.
Her community has seized on a major opportunity to build prosperity and resiliency for future generations. The Haisla Nation is a partner in the proposed $3.4 billion Cedar LNG project, the world’s first to have Indigenous ownership. A final go-ahead decision for the project to proceed is expected by the middle of this year.
Smith, who has served as board chair of the First Nations LNG Alliance since 2019, has already seen tangible changes in her community since the project was announced.
“It’s hard to put into words about the impact on the ground in terms of how this opportunity has affected our members in their lives,” she says.
“We were just interviewing candidates to serve as board directors on our economic development corporation and one candidate, who is from our community, just amazed me with how far he has come in terms of pursuing his education and how much his career has progressed.”
The town of Kitimat on British Columbia’s west coast. LNG Canada site in background. Photo courtesy District of Kitimat
Of her own career, Smith says she knew since college that her future was in serving the community. She started working in the Haisla band administration in 2009 and was first elected chief councillor in 2017.
“I was lucky because my family really pushed me to seek an education after high school, so I took the business program at Coast Mountain College. I also helped that I had mentors in my community, including my father Albert Robinson, who served as an elected Haisla councillor, and Ellis Ross (now an elected MLA in B.C), who was very inspiring in terms of his vision as chief councillor and encouraged me to take the step into elected office,” Smith says.
“When I came back to the community from school, I knew I would end up working in our band office. I wanted to see more opportunities for people in my community and LNG provides that.”
She already sees the benefits of the development, as well as the Haisla Nation’s participation in the LNG Canada project, within her own family including for her grandsons.
“Xavier is six and he goes to the same school I attended as a child. He gets to learn parts of our culture, our teachings, as well as the value and importance of family and community. There’s more of an emphasis on our language and culture in the curriculum, which really makes me happy. Luka, who just turned two, will also attend that school when he’s old enough,” Smith says.
“I want programs and services to meet our needs, not the level of government’s needs. And we need to make sure that it is sustainable not just for my grandsons or their peers but for seven generations beyond this one.”
Cedar LNG is coming closer and closer to fruition, with all permits in place and early construction underway.
An eight-kilometre pipeline will be built connecting the recently completed Coastal GasLink pipeline to deliver natural gas to the floating Cedar LNG terminal located along the Douglas Channel near Kitimat.
The facility will be capable of producing up to three million tonnes of liquefied natural gas every year, which will be transported by carriers through the Douglas Channel to Hecate Straight, using the existing deepwater shipping lane, to reach customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Powered entirely by renewable energy from BC Hydro, Cedar LNG will be one of the lowest carbon intensity LNG facilities in the world. Its so-called emissions intensity will be 0.08 per cent CO2 per tonne, compared to the global average of 0.35 per cent per tonne.
Up to 500 people will work on the project during the peak of construction. Approximately 100 people will be working at the facility full-time during operation, which is expected to start in the second half of 2028.
Smith says the benefits of the project will extend beyond the 2,000 members of the Haisla Nation.
“This work has really helped us reconnect with other Indigenous communities along pipelines and shipping routes,” she says.
“When I was growing up, our communities never had the opportunity to come together because we were separated by the territorial boundaries imposed by the Indian Act. And we were fighting each other for financial scraps from Indian Affairs.
“Now we are working together to make our own opportunities as owners and developers of the resource. That’s very empowering and the most important part. Participating in developing these resources provides independence. It’s the only solution for my nation and other Indigenous communities.”
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:
Popular links
- EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.
- My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.
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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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