Interest in Nova Scotia LNG facility goes up

A Nova Scotia company looking to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on Canada’s East Coast says it’s seeing an uptick in interest since an LNG megaproject slated for the West Coast was scrapped last week.

Paul Maclean with Bear Head LNG Corp., a subsidiary of Australia-based Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd., says after more than a year of wooing western Canadian shale gas producers, the Nova Scotia project is getting attention.

“We’ve been working with western basin producers over the last year-and-a-half presenting Bear Head as a complimentary option to what was proposed for the B.C. LNG project,” Maclean, strategic and regulatory affairs adviser, said in an interview. “It was sort of a plan B.”

But with Petronas and its partners pulling out of the $36-billion Pacific Northwest LNG project planned for British Columbia, Bear Head is hoping to become the top choice for producers looking to get landlocked natural gas to markets.

“We’re not really relishing the fact that Petronas has decided to withdraw their project by any means, but we are experiencing an increase in interest as a consequence of that decision, for sure,” Maclean said.

In a fiercely competitive energy market grappling with a global oversupply of natural gas and a prolonged period of depressed prices, the cancellation of the West Coast megaproject appears to give the East Coast terminal an edge.

The proposed $5-billion LNG export facility in Cape Breton already has construction and environmental permits as well as federal approval for a licence to export LNG and import natural gas from the United States.