US LNG uncertainty is a reminder of lost Canadian opportunities

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.”

Related Topics:#CanadaLNG #ResourceWorks USLNG

Up Next

East Anglia educated environmental scholar says it’s time to “Scrap Green Energy Handouts Once And For All”

Don't Miss

Ottawa’s emissions cap will impose massive costs with virtually no benefit

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Affordable housing out of reach everywhere in Canada

Business / 36 mins ago

Canada invests $34 million in Chinese drones now considered to be ‘high security risks’

Business / 4 hours ago

The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

Dan McTeague

Will this deal actually build a pipeline in Canada?

Published on December 7, 2025

Dan McTeague

By Dan McTeague

Will Carney’s new pipeline deal actually help get a pipeline built in Canada? As we said before, the devil is in the details.

While the establishment and mainstream media cheer on the new pipeline agreement, there are specific details you need to be aware of.

Dan McTeague explains in his latest video.

Energy

Canada following Europe’s stumble by ignoring energy reality

Published on December 7, 2025

Todayville

Family in Spain eating by candlelight during a blackout, April 2025

From Resource Works

By Stewart Muir

Canada’s own 2024 grid scare proves we’re on the same path unless we change course.

Europe’s green-energy unraveling is no longer a distant cautionary tale. It’s a mirror — and Canada is already seeing the first cracks.

A new Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the European story in stark detail: a continent that slashed emissions faster than anyone else, only to discover that doing so by tearing down firm power before its replacement existed comes with brutal consequences — collapsing industry, sky-high electricity prices, political fragmentation, and a public increasingly unwilling to subsidize wishful thinking.

The tragedy isn’t that Europe tried to decarbonize quickly.

The tragedy is how they did it: by insisting on an “or” transition — renewables or fossil fuels — instead of what every energy-literate nation outside Europe pursued: renewables and fossil fuels, working together while the system evolves.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Canada has already had its first European-style crisis. It happened in January 2024.

Canada’s early warning: the January 2024 electricity crunch

Most people have already forgotten it, because our political class desperately wanted you to. But in January 2024, Western Canada came within a whisker of a full-blown energy security breakdown. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and B.C. were stretched to their limit. The grid was under cascading stress. Contingency plans were activated. Alberta came terrifyingly close to rolling blackouts.

It wasn’t caused by climate change. It wasn’t caused by a mysterious cyberattack.

It was caused by the same structural brittleness now crippling Europe:

Insufficient firm power, after years of political messaging that we could “electrify everything” without adding real generating capacity.
Overreliance on intermittent sources not backed by storage or gas.
A planning system that punted risk into the future, betting the grid could be stretched indefinitely.

The January 2024 event was not a blip. It was a preview.

Our European moment in miniature.

But instead of treating it as the national wake-up call it should have been, B.C. did something telling — and deeply damaging.

The B.C. government’s response: attack the messenger

Just a couple of years ago, an economist publicly warned about the economic price of emerging system vulnerabilities due to a groaning stack of “clean economy” policies.

The B.C. government didn’t respond with data, evidence, or even curiosity. Instead, a cabinet minister used the safety of legislative privilege — that gold-plated shield against accountability — to launch nasty personal attacks on the economist who raised the concerns, which themselves had originated in the government’s own analysis.

No engagement.

No counter-analysis.

No willingness to consider the system risks.

Just slurs — the very definition of anti-intellectual governance.

It was a moment that told the whole story:

Too many policymakers in this province believe that energy systems obey politics, not physics.

Physics always gets the last word.

Europe shows us what political denial turns into

The WSJ reporting couldn’t be clearer about the consequences of that denial:

Germany: highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world.
U.K.: highest industrial electricity rates among major economies.
Industrial flight: chemical plants closing, data centres frozen, major players hinting at exiting Europe entirely.
Grid instability: wind farms paid tens of millions not to generate because the grid can’t handle it.
Public revolt: rising support for parties rejecting the entire green-transition agenda.
Policy whiplash: governments rushing to build gas plants they swore they’d never need.

Europe is now an object lesson in how good intentions, executed poorly, can produce the exact opposite of what was promised: higher prices, higher volatility, declining competitiveness, and a public ready to abandon climate policy altogether.

This is precisely what January 2024 warned us about — but on a continental scale.

The system cost we keep pretending doesn’t exist

Every serious energy expert knows the truth Europe is now living: intermittent renewables require massive amounts of redundant capacity, storage, and backup generation. That’s why the U.K. now needs 120 gigawatts of capacity to serve a demand previously met with 60–70 gigawatts, even though electricity use hasn’t meaningfully grown.

This is the math policymakers prefer not to show the public.

And it’s why B.C.’s refusal to have an honest conversation about firm power is so dangerous.

If we electrify everything without ensuring affordable and abundant natural gas generation, we’re not building a green future.

We’re building Europe, 10 years early.

The lesson for Canada — especially for B.C.

Here is what Europe and January 2024 together say, in one clear voice:

1. There is no energy transition without firm power.

Renewables are part of the system, but they don’t run the system. Natural gas does. Hydro does. Nuclear does. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with rolling blackouts.

2. Political denial makes crises worse.

When ministers attack economists instead of answering them, it signals that ideology is running the show. Europe learned the cost of that. We will too, unless we change course.

Europe lost the room. Once people see their bills double while factories close, the climate agenda becomes politically radioactive.

4. B.C. has an advantage Europe would kill for.

Europe dreams of having an abundant, local, low-carbon firm-power fuel like northeastern B.C.’s natural gas. We treat it like a political liability. That’s not strategy. It’s negligence.

5. The transition will fail if we don’t treat electricity like the national security asset it is.

Without energy, there is no industry.

Without industry, there is no prosperity.

Without prosperity, there is no climate policy that survives the next election cycle.

What we need now

Canada must embrace an “and” strategy:

Renewables and natural gas. Electrification and realism. Climate ambition and economic competitiveness.

January 2024 showed us the future in a flash. Europe shows us the end state if we keep ignoring the warning.

We can still choose something better. But only if we stop pretending that energy systems bend to political narratives — and start treating them with the seriousness they demand.

Resource Works News