Joel McKay: The real problem with energy corridors is the geography

An energy corridor from Alberta to the coast sounds good, until you look at a map of the routes to our coasts.

Where should the gas terminal go?

By: Joel McKay

This piece is in response to an article published at The Line’s main site.

Shortcuts do make for lengthy delays, but where I part ways with G. Kent Fellows is that national energy corridors are themselves shortcuts to very political and practical problems this country has ignored for decades.

I won’t claim to have the same type of experience on pipeline issues as Mr. Fellows, but I’m certainly no stranger either — first as a journalist who covered B.C.’s energy super cycle and proposed pipelines in the 2009–2012 era, and then as a communications director and eventual CEO of B.C.’s largest development trust based in Northern B.C., where Northern Gateway, Coastal GasLink, TMX, and other pipelines transited.

In that time, I learned a lot about pipelines, major projects, regulations, local politics, and the companies behind them. Among the bits of wisdom that stuck with me is that you can’t ignore the land and you can’t risk undermining the private sector to get around political problems.

National energy corridors run the risk of both.

There are only three practical spots in Canada to get Alberta’s oil to tide water: the west coast, northern Manitoba, and the New Brunswick coast. Despite a longer coastline than any nation on Earth, we’re limited in export points — you need an ice-free sheltered point, deep water, power, road and rail access for labour and materials, and, most importantly, proximity to a market that wants our commodity.

The west coast is ideal given proximity to Asian markets for natural gas and oil (the Port of Prince Rupert is typically three days faster transit time to Asia versus Los Angeles-Long Beach. New Brunswick, meanwhile, has an existing LNG import terminal and proximity to Europe and Africa, but misses out on quick access to Asia. Northern Manitoba, if you can ice-break through Hudson Bay, offers access to Europe.

The Prairie provinces, Ontario, or Quebec don’t pose major physical challenges (politics may prove different!). The land in those places is comparatively open, simple, and flat. The problem arises once you get west of the Rockies, in which you only have two practical routes — through the Thompson-Nicola to tidewater in Metro Vancouver (TMX), or within proximity to Highway 16 (Highway of Tears) to B.C.’s North Coast.

This poses some real problems. A national energy corridor would need a right of way wide enough to accommodate multiple pipelines to make it worthwhile (if it’s just one pipe, why a corridor?) And multiple pipelines would mean multiple petrochemicals and setbacks between each for construction, safety, environmental monitoring — think of the basic regulations in a municipality that require distances and depths between gas lines, water lines, storm lines, and sewer lines, but bigger.

The math is simple: this corridor would be wide. Good luck finding space for that in British Columbia where, if you’re not driving over a mountain, you’re crossing a river or a lake.

Let’s say you did find it from Jasper to Hope — what’s the cost of agricultural and residential land expropriation through the Fraser Valley to get to tidewater?

Let’s assume you solve that — where are you going to put the terminal along shallow/narrow Burrard Inlet where a wastewater treatment plant can’t get built for less than $4 billion?

For these reasons, in a practical matter, the south coast is out.

Let’s turn to the north coast.

The logical route is through the northern Rockies and Pine Pass, but your issue there is what B.C. has deemed sensitive mountain caribou habitat that has all but ended new industrial development — and is darn narrow to begin with.

To the west is the interior plateau, which is traversable and easier until you arrive at the Bulkley Valley. From there, there is nothing but mountains for 400 kilometres to the coast. About 150 kilometres short of the coast, you must avoid making the Bugs Bunny mistake and ensure you poke your head up from the dirt long enough to turn at the right spot to arrive at your export point. You have four deep-water terminus options, all of them separated by hundreds of kilometres and with varying degrees of infrastructure to support industrial capacity:

• Kitimat on the Douglas Channel (wide but windy)

• Prince Rupert (deep, sheltered but just inside of the aptly named Hecate Strait)

• Stewart (narrow road access at frequent risk of avalanche)

• Alice Arm/Kistault (gravel road access, not enough power)

This necessarily means any corridor to northern B.C. would have to stop somewhere around Smithers, at which point private-sector operators, or the government, would have to negotiate individual pipeline routes on a case-by-case basis dependent upon what product would be transferred, cost, etc.

Again, this is largely the same challenge as the south coast — the problem with getting pipelines built isn’t the areas east, but west.

This is to say nothing of the politics around these issues. In the lower mainland from Hope to tidewater, you transit the traditional territories of at least half a dozen nations with few if any treaties. Along the north coast, there are many more than that — especially in light of a federal and provincial legislative environment that aims to respect free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous peoples via the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The issue is somewhat similar in New Brunswick, where you’d have to halt the corridor somewhere short of the coast to determine whether the terminus point would be Bathurst or Saint John (my vote is Bathurst — it needs the injection).

And, to reiterate probably the most critical point: these projects should only go ahead on a profit-driven, private-sector basis. An energy corridor necessarily limits flexibility and makes it difficult to account for nuances between projects and their terminus needs, which means you might end up creating corridors to nowhere because the eventual agreed-upon corridor is so limited in scope that no investor would put their dollars behind it.

As a champion of B.C., where I believe these projects should go, it saddens me to concede there’s only one logical conclusion for a corridor — and one dark horse candidate.

The logical conclusion is northern Manitoba, where the Hudson’s Bay Company originally set up its first trading posts into the west via York Factory — they had their reasons we shouldn’t overlook. At the time, northern Manitoba offered tidewater access to Europe for the then-rich fur trade. It also provided the best access into fur-rich western Canada all the way to British Columbia (then New Caledonia), which is why the west was largely colonized from north to south in what are now the provinces. It just so happens these provincial norths are also some of the best production zones on Earth for what the world needs now — energy.

The dark horse? Through Northern Alberta, across the relatively flat northeast corner of Northern B.C. into Yukon and through to Alaska to terminate at Skagway, Valdez, or Anchorage, where petrochemicals are already exported and transit along the B.C. coast (just outside the tanker ban zone).

This option is being quietly discussed in Alberta and B.C., where developers have already familiarized themselves with the land well enough to search for alternatives in light of the issues I’ve illustrated above. That said, the politics are bad. Moving energy into the U.S. to be exported at their profit at a time when our country’s sovereignty is at stake is foolhardy, to say the least.

This is the geographic reality. Discussion around national energy corridors will not resolve the very real land-based challenges near terminus points without undermining the profitability of the projects they purport to facilitate.

Joel McKay is the city manager for Quesnel in northern B.C., and the current chair of the board of governors at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is the past CEO of Northern Development, British Columbia’s northern economic development trust.

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