LNG decision is our own fault

Re: “Petronas LNG megaproject planned for coast scrapped,” July 26. On July 15 I wrote on my blog:

“It’s hard to find anything so mishandled as the liquefied natural gas initiatives of Canadians; in this case, the British Columbia government. Sitting on trillions of cubic feet of reserves in northeast B.C., the B.C. government dilly-dallied while industry was getting the necessary approvals from the National Energy Board for exporting the gas. By the time the B.C. government had got around to a royalty/tax structure for the various projects lined up to go, it was too late. The Australian and American interests had outflanked them, and the rest is history.”

I went on to quote a new study by the International Energy Agency on global LNG in which Canada is hardly mentioned. Australia and the U.S. are mentioned because over the past several years they were “barging” ahead while B.C. was acting as if it had all the time in the world. Added to that is the fact that Qatar, the largest exporter of LNG, was getting back to producing more after a decade of suspending any expansion.

You can make all sorts of excuses, but the reason prices are what they are is because B.C. and Canada’s competition got ahead of us. We were not up to the task. We were slow to understand the global industry and the nature of the competition.

I wonder: Will we face this reality? Brian Peckford Nanaimo