Canada brushes off yet another country begging it for LNG
For the third time in 18 months, a foreign head of government has made a rare visit to Canada with the stated intention of buying billions of dollars in natural gas.
And for the third consecutive time, the official answer from the Trudeau government appears to be “no.”
This time around the visitor was Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was the first Greek leader to come to Canada in more than 40 years.
As per the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Mitsotakis was here on a goodwill visit to march in Montreal’s Greek Independence Day Parade, discuss “shared interests” and cut the ribbon on the purchase of some Canadian-made firefighting planes.
But it was during an interview with CTV that Mitsotakis said his country would “of course” like to start importing Canadian 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, a Harvard-educated investment banker who speaks perfect English.
Mitsotakis said Greece is putting the finishing touches on a major facility outside the city of Alexandroupolis to process incoming LNG tankers.
“In principle, yes, we are very interested in obtaining LNG at competitive prices,” said Mitsotakis, adding not only will Greece be pumping LNG to the rest of Europe, but its own demand for the fuel is skyrocketing as the country abandons coal.
Given that Europe’s energy has traditionally come from illiberal countries such as Russia or Middle Eastern autocracies, Mitsotakis said “Canada is a country (for) which we share so many values ... I think we see eye to eye on many of the challenges that we face.”
However, there was not one mention of gas or energy exports in Trudeau’s public comments alongside Mitsotakis — or in official government communications describing the visit at the start of the week.
In this, Mitsotakis follows in the footsteps of the Japanese prime minister and the German chancellor, both of whom returned home without official assurances that Ottawa shared their vision for sourcing bulk quantities of LNG from Canada.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida came to Canada in January 2023, making no secret of his “high expectations” that Canada would agree to an LNG export agreement.
The previous August, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz came to Canada with the specific intention of signalling his country’s desire for Canadian energy.
“Canada is our partner of choice,” Scholz said at the time. His pitch was similar to that of Mitsotakis, in that his country was desperate for natural gas and he’d prefer to buy it from a western liberal democracy such as Canada.
In Scholz’s case, Trudeau said at a news conference with the German leader that there was no “business case” for LNG exports to Europe, and then he took the chancellor to an empty field in Newfoundland he said would one day be the site of a Canadian facility to export carbon-neutral hydrogen.
A snubbed Germany instead signed a 15-year LNG export deal with Qatar, an autocratic country.
Canada is the world’s fifth-largest producer of natural gas. But, as is the case with Canadian oil, there are extremely limited facilities to sell it overseas.
There are no operating LNG export facilities on Canadian soil, meaning any Canadian LNG finding its way to Europe would need to be moved through a U.S. export terminal.
Although Kitimat, B.C., will open a major export facility in early 2025, plans to build an LNG pipeline to ports on the East Coast have fallen apart due to high costs.
On Monday, multiple conservative politicians were saying it wasn’t so much the logistical cost of laying down hundreds of kilometres of LNG pipeline, but the “onerous” regulatory procedures of doing so.
“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,” read a Monday statement by Alberta Energy Minister Brian Jean.
THERE WAS NOT ONE MENTION OF GAS OR ENERGY EXPORTS IN TRUDEAU’S PUBLIC COMMENTS.