With the B.C. provincial election coming to a close, it's getting really hard to take the rhetoric from the leading contenders.
Poll-leading NDP leader Adrian Dix is opposed to both the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and Kinder Morgan's TransMountain Expansion. Current premier Christy Clark, likely to soon be ex-premier, has spent the last year or more trying to do her best impression of a mafia wise guy, extorting whatever she can out of Alberta and the federal government.
The audacity of Clark's hypocrisy is galling. She's essentially dead set against Northern Gateway, but all for building scads of natural gas pipelines to every liquefied natural gas plant she can squeeze onto the left coast. Pipelines and tankers with heavy oil: bad; pipelines and tankers with LNG: good; is Clark's equation. That the pipeline construction is essentially identical except for the product carried doesn't matter to her. One is evil, the other is economic salvation in a province where a tiny beetle is destroying their primary industry.
Once this election is over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper may be left with no choice but to put British Columbia in its place. British Columbia is in confederation because of the railroad. The distinction between railroads and pipelines is really not that great, especially because, if the oil pipelines are not built, all that oil will simply be shipped by rail and there is not a damned thing either Dix or Clark can do about it.
We've already seen this occur in North Dakota. I was shocked to hear last week that North Dakota's pipelines are no longer running at full capacity, despite the fact in recent months the state set yet another production record of 780,000 barrels per day. There is now enough rail capacity to ship nearly every drop of that by rail, and that capacity is continuing to expand.
When the Keystone XL project was first proposed, it was to ship Fort McMurray oil. But then to get backing from some American states, an on-ramp was added to take North Dakota Bakken oil. Since Keystone XL has been in continual quagmire, the oil industry did an end-run around the pipeline issue and switched to rail. At this point, will the onramp even be needed?
I've said it before, Northern Gateway is Harper's railroad, a nation-building exercise in the same way the CPR was John A. Macdonald's. If it wasn't for the oilsands taking over as Canada's economic engine after auto making faltered, our nation would be in a real economic pickle. We must find ways to get additional oilsands production to market. If we "shut down" the oilsands, we shut down Canada. There is no obvious alternative economic driver of the scale of the oilsands that we can turn to in order to keep this country afloat.
In a few short years, the existing pipeline capacity will be full. Without Keystone XL, Northern Gateway and TMX, there are going to be a lot of Newfies going back to the Rock with pink slips. The newly dubbed "Energy East" option of converting another TransCanada gas pipeline to oil service for Eastern Canada will also be needed, but is still a long way from reality.
Decisive action needs to be taken on the pipeline front by the Canadian government, and soon, or we will end up in dire economic circumstances as a result. Canada would not be here without rail lines. We also cannot survive as a nation without pipelines.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
