Supertanker terminals a worry in B.C.
Poll shows oil, gas development may likely ruin green paradise
VANCOUVER — British Columbia, the Canadian province whose official slogan to its own beauty is “Super, Natural,” is invoking another saying: “No more supertankers.”
That’s potentially big trouble in a nation where oil exports amount to $73 billion annually and the industry employs more than 550,000 workers. It’s also a bad omen for nations, notably China, that have invested billions in Canadian oil projects with expectations that they will one day be able to buy vast quantities of heavy Canadian crude.
To do that means not just pumping it from the vast oilsands — thought to hold as many as 170 billion barrels — lying mainly to the east in Alberta. It also means building pipelines to carry that heavy oil, known as bitumen, west to the coast. From there, fleets of supertankers will be needed to ship it across the Pacific to Asian markets that desperately want cheap oil.
Two such projects, representing about $11.4 billion in investments, are on the drawing boards. B.C. with its mountainous forests, national parks and salmon streams standing between the crude and the sea, wants no part of those pipelines — nor does it want its scenic bays to be turned into supertanker terminals.
In Vancouver, with a metroarea population of 2.5 million, the evergreen-rimmed, blue sprawl of English Bay laps up to the city centre and is already a port for supertankers taking crude from an existing pipeline known as the Trans Mountain conduit.
Sean Austin offered an opinion which has sounded often there — that enough is enough. “English Bay shouldn’t become a parking lot for supertankers,” Austin, a 41-year-old construction worker, said in an interview as the sun set over a seawall behind him.
An end to the pipeline projects would be devastating news to a number of Chinese companies including Sinopec and Cnooc Ltd. Collectively, they have invested $36.3 billion in Canadian oil and gas assets over the past two years — the largest foreign investment in Canada’s petroleum industry.
“The expectation for Chinese investors from the very beginning was that Canadian oil would physically be delivered to China,” Wenran Jiang, an adviser to the Alberta government on Asian investment, said in an interview.
“Chinese companies are heavily invested in the oilsands and they want to see these pipelines built.”
Austin’s view is backed up by a recent opinion poll that shows 60 per cent of B.C. voters fear continued oil and gas development will ruin their green paradise.
The two projects drawing their ire are Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline and the proposed expansion of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP’s Trans Mountain conduit.
Kinder Morgan has been conducting a “grassroots” campaign to meet with British Columbians that would be affected by its project, in what will amount to a two-year effort in advance of the company seeking regulatory approval in late 2013, Ian Anderson, president of Kinder Morgan’s Canadian unit, said.
There is “value-based opposition and opinion-based opposition, and where we have our work ahead of us is to understand where that opinion lacks information, lacks clarity, and informing that,” Anderson said.