Canada could be missing out on one of the greatest and most lucrative opportunities in its history: exporting LNG to an embattled Europe

STEPHENVILLE, N.L. — It may effectively symbolize one of many largest missed alternatives in Canadian historical past: An embattled Europe is clamouring for pure fuel, and one of many world’s largest producers of the stuff can’t promote it to them.

The financial hit is overwhelming: At present costs, even only one Canadian port exporting liquid pure fuel could possibly be adding nine figures to the Canadian GDP every day. Politically, Canada could possibly be serving to to deal a physique blow to Russian hegemony over Western European power. As a substitute, on each fronts, Ottawa seems content material to observe from the sidelines.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is at present on a mad dash to safe alternate sources of fuel earlier than the onset of winter. In Toronto on Tuesday, Scholz said “Canada is our accomplice of alternative” in transitioning away from Russian power, including “we hope that Canadian LNG will play a significant position on this.”

The invitation was pooh pooh’ed nearly instantly by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who mentioned there has “never been a strong business case” for shifting Canadian LNG to Europe.

Oddly, Trudeau doesn’t share the identical sentiment in relation to hydrogen. Regardless of hydrogen having a dramatically smaller and less-developed European market, one of many signature options of Scholz’s go to was when Trudeau took him to Stephenville, Newfoundland to go to the proposed site of a wind-to-hydrogen facility. The hydrogen challenge hasn’t obtained regulatory approval and it’s still not entirely clear whether or not it would go ahead.

Canada ranks 15th in the world for confirmed pure fuel reserves and is the planet’s fifth largest producer of pure fuel. The issue is infrastructure.

There isn’t a single LNG export terminal in Canada. Each single litre of pure fuel that Canada manages to export all goes to america through pipeline.

This hasn’t been for lack of attempting. Pure Assets Canada notes that in recent times it has received proposals for 18 LNG export projects, together with 5 on the East Coast. Simply certainly one of them is beneath development, whereas one other is not quite poised to break ground.

Whereas it’s unlikely that every one 18 had been economically viable, Canada’s regulatory framework is infamous at scaring away power initiatives. Simply in February, a $10-billion LNG export facility deliberate for Saguenay, Que. was rejected by the Quebec and federal governments largely on the grounds that it could improve greenhouse-gas emissions.

Notably, each single one of many now-languishing East Coast initiatives had been within the planning levels as early as 2015, that means it’s not infeasible that in a much less Byzantine regulatory local weather no less than certainly one of them may have already been coming on-line.

In an interview this week, Enbridge CEO Al Monaco hinted at Canada’s notorious latticework of power trade purple tape when he mentioned the nation must “get out of our personal approach in relation to power and constructing infrastructure.”

And the odyssey doesn’t finish even for initiatives that handle to leap by way of Canada’s regulatory hoops. One want solely to take a look at the political nightmare that has accompanied the development of the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat, B.C. Upon its scheduled completion in 2025, it would change into Canada’s solely port serving LNG provider ships.

The development of the Coastal GasLink pipeline to service the terminal yielded coast-to-coast unlawful rail blockades in early 2020 that brought about hundreds of millions in economic damage to the Canadian financial system. Simply within the final 12 months, Coastal GasLink work camps have repeatedly been subjected to unlawful blockades and a violent attack by anti-pipeline activists.

This has all formed as much as be a uniquely Canadian story. In different LNG hubs such because the Australia and america, the previous couple of years have been outlined by a multi-billion-dollar power increase.

Australia spent the 2010s establishing nearly a dozen LNG export terminals to capitalize on an Asian push to undertake the gasoline as an alternative to coal. Within the first six months of 2022, LNG exports earned Australia the equal of $150 million per day .

The continental U.S. solely started exporting LNG in 2016. Now — with a handful of latest export services coming on-line in 2022 alone — they’re on observe to change into the world’s largest single exporter of the fuel.

It’s why, inside weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, america was in a position to reply by boosting its LNG exports to unprecedented ranges.

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