Energy
US LNG uncertainty is a reminder of lost Canadian opportunities
From Resource Works
Canada has missed opportunities to supply Europe with LNG due to political missteps and regulatory barriers, despite having the resources and potential.
For almost three years now, Europe has not been able to figure out how it will replace the cheap, plentiful supply of Russian gas it once enjoyed. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU member states have made drastic moves to curtail their reliance on Russian energy, specifically Russian gas.
In an ideal world, the diversification of the EU’s energy supply would have been Canada’s golden opportunity to use its vast LNG capabilities to fill the gap.
Canada has all the right resources at its disposal to become one of the EU’s premier energy sources, with enormous natural gas reserves lying in the ground and shores upon three of the world’s four oceans. The problem is that Canada lacks both the right infrastructure and the necessary political will to get it built.
The fact that Canada is not a favored supplier of LNG to Europe is the consequence of political missteps and a lack of vision at the highest levels of government. It was reported by the Financial Times that outgoing United States President Joe Biden’s freeze on new LNG export permits and clashes with activists have created uncertainty over future supply growth.
Missteps and onerous regulatory barriers have kept Canada shackled and unable to reach its full potential, leaving us on the sidelines as other countries take the place that should have been Canada’s as an energy supplier for the democratic world.
To this day, European leaders like Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Polish President Andrzej Duda have indicated their openness to adding Canadian LNG to their domestic supply.
However, no plans for supplying Canadian LNG to Europe have come to fruition. The absence of any commitment from the federal government to take those possibilities seriously is the result of decisions that now look like major mistakes in hindsight.
Two of these are cancelled energy projects on the Atlantic coast: the Energy East oil pipeline and the proposed expansion of an LNG terminal in New Brunswick.
Canada’s Pacific coast is now a hub of LNG development, with three planned facilities well underway, and there are hungry markets in Asia ready to receive their products. It is a shame that the Atlantic coast is being left behind during Canada’s burgeoning LNG renaissance. The economic situation in the Maritimes has long been challenging, leading to emigration to the Western provinces and stagnation back at home.
LNG projects in British Columbia have proven to be job machines and drivers of economic revitalization in formerly impoverished regions that were gutted when fishing, mining, and forestry went downhill in the 1980s.
The potential to both help Atlantic Canada level back up economically while becoming the bridge for energy exports to Europe was halted by the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline and a proposed LNG terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Proposed by TransCanada (since renamed to TC Energy) to the National Energy Board in 2014, Energy East would have been a 4,600-kilometer pipeline with the capacity to transport over a million barrels of crude oil from Alberta to refineries in New Brunswick and Quebec. While it is true that Europe is more interested in LNG than crude oil, the completion of one great project encourages more and could have gotten the ball rolling on further energy infrastructure.
Had Energy East been constructed, it would have served as a symbol to investors and energy industry players that Canada was serious about west-to-east projects. Unfortunately, in 2017, TransCanada withdrew from the project due to regulatory disagreements and uncertainty.
In 2019, the federal government passed Bill C-69, AKA the “no more pipelines” law, leading to even more complex and restrictive regulations for new energy projects. When there should have been momentum on energy infrastructure building, there came only more cascading bad news.
A proposed expansion of Repsol’s LNG terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick, another potential gateway for Canadian energy to get through to Europe, was abandoned due to the projected high costs and poor business case.
The idea of LNG on the East Coast making for a poor business case has been repeated by the federal government many times. However, in documents accessed by The Logic, it was revealed that Global Affairs Canada has, in fact, stated the opposite, and that there was great potential to increase rail and pipeline networks on the Atlantic.
Furthermore, Canada is capable of shipping LNG from the Western provinces to the East Coast because of our access to the vast pipeline networks of the United States.
As a result of these regrettable decisions, Canadians can only watch as lost opportunities to provide LNG to the democratic world are filled by other countries. Every downturn or disruption in the energy exports of other countries is a sore reminder of Canada’s lost opportunities.
Canada needs more vision, certainty, and drive when it comes to building the future of Canadian energy. In the words of Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey, “We will be all in on oil and gas for decades and decades to come…because the world needs us to be.”
From the Canadian Energy Centre
‘We are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world’
To the naked eye, it looks about as exciting as baking soda or table salt.
But to the scientists in the University of Calgary chemistry lab who have spent more than a decade working on it, this white powder is nothing short of amazing.
That’s because the material they invented is garnering global attention as a new solution to help address climate change.
Known as Calgary Framework-20 (CALF-20 for short), it has “an exceptional capacity to absorb carbon dioxide” and was recognized in connection with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
A jar of CALF-20, a metal-organic framework (MOF) used in carbon capture. Photo courtesy UCalgary
“It’s basically a molecular sponge that can adsorb CO2 very efficiently,” said Dr. George Shimizu, a UCalgary chemistry professor who leads the research group that first developed CALF-20 in 2013.
The team has been refining its effectiveness ever since.
“CALF-20 is a very exciting compound to work on because it has been a great example of translating basic science into something that works to solve a problem in the real world,” Shimizu said.
Advancing CCS
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not a new science in Alberta. Since 2015, operating projects in the province have removed 15 million tonnes of CO2 that would have otherwise been emitted to the atmosphere.
Alberta has nearly 60 proposed facilities for new CCS networks including the Pathways oil sands project, according to the Regina-based International CCS Knowledge Centre.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three of Shimizu’s colleagues in Japan, Australia and the United States, for developing the earliest versions of materials like CALF-20 between 1989 and 2003.
Custom-built molecules
CALF-20 is in a class called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — custom-built molecules that are particularly good at capturing and storing specific substances.
MOFs are leading to new technologies for harvesting water from air in the desert, storing toxic gases, and capturing CO2 from industrial exhaust or directly from the atmosphere.
CALF-20 is one of the few MOF compounds that has advanced to commercial use.
“There has been so much discussion about all the possible uses of MOFs, but there has been a lot of hype versus reality, and CALF-20 is the first to be proven stable and effective enough to be used at an industrial scale,” Shimizu said.
It has been licensed to companies capturing carbon across a range of industries, with the raw material now being produced by the tonne by chemical giant BASF.
CO2 pipeline at the Quest CCS project near Edmonton, Alta. Photo courtesy Shell Canada
Carbon capture filter gigafactory
Svante Inc. has demonstrated its CALF-20-based carbon capture system at a cement plant in British Columbia.
The company recently opened a “gigafactory” in Burnaby equipped to manufacture enough carbon capture and removal filters for up to 10 million tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to the emissions of more than 2.3 million cars.
The filters are designed to trap CO2 directly from industrial emissions and the atmosphere, the company says.
Svante chief operating officer Richard Laliberté called the Nobel committee’s recognition “a profound validation” for the entire field of carbon capture and removal.
CALF-20 expansion
Meanwhile, one of Shimizu’s former PhD students helped launch a spinoff company, Existent Sorbents, to further expand the applications of CALF-20.
Existent is working with oil sands producers, a major steel factory and a U.S.-based firm capturing emissions from other point sources, said CEO Adrien Côté.
“The first users of CALF-20 are leaders who took the risk of introducing new technology to industries that are shrewd about their top and bottom lines,” Côté said.
“It has been a long journey, but we are at the point where CALF-20 has proven to be resilient and able to survive in harsh real-world conditions, and we are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world.”
Billionaire Bill Gates — long one of the loudest voices warning of climate catastrophe — now says the world has bigger problems to worry about. In a 17-page memo released Tuesday, the Microsoft co-founder called for a “strategic pivot” away from the obsessive focus on reducing global temperatures, urging leaders instead to prioritize fighting poverty and eradicating disease in the developing world. “Climate change is a serious problem, but it’s not the end of humanity,” Gates wrote.
Gates, 70, argued that global leaders have lost perspective by treating climate change as an existential crisis while millions continue to suffer from preventable diseases like malaria. “If I had to choose between eradicating malaria and preventing a tenth of a degree of warming, I’d let the temperature go up 0.1 degree,” he told reporters ahead of next month’s U.N. climate conference in Brazil. “People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”
For decades, Gates has positioned himself as a leading advocate for global climate initiatives, investing billions in green energy projects and warning of the dangers of rising emissions. Yet his latest comments mark a striking reversal — and a rare admission that the world’s climate panic may have gone too far. “If you think climate is not important, you won’t agree with the memo,” Gates told journalists. “If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won’t agree with the memo. It’s a pragmatic view from someone trying to maximize the money and innovation that helps poor countries.”
The billionaire’s change in tone is sure to raise eyebrows ahead of the U.N. conference, where climate activists plan to push for new emissions targets and wealth transfers from developed nations. Critics have long accused Gates and other elites of hypocrisy for lecturing the public about fossil fuels while traveling the globe on private jets. Now, Gates himself appears to be distancing from the doomsday rhetoric he once helped spread, effectively admitting that humanity faces more immediate moral imperatives than the weather.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Stunning Climate Change pivot from Bill Gates. Poverty and disease should be top concern.
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