KITAMAAT VILLAGE, british columbia — The latest chapter in Canada’s quest to become a full-blown oil superpower unfolded this month in a village gym on the British Columbia coast.
Here, several hundred people gathered for hearings on whether a pipeline should be laid from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific in order to deliver oil to Asia, chiefly energy-hungry China. The stakes are particularly high for the village of Kitamaat and its neighbors because the pipeline would terminate here, and a port would be built to handle 220 tankers a year and 525,000 barrels of oil a day.
But the planned Northern Gateway Pipeline is just one aspect of an epic battle over Canada’s oil ambitions — a battle that already has a supporting role in the U.S. presidential election, and which will help shape North America’s future energy relationship with China.
It actually is a tale of two pipelines — the one that is supposed to end at Kitamaat Village, and another that would have gone from Alberta to the Texas coast but was blocked by the Obama administration, citing environmental grounds.
Those same environmental issues are certain to haunt Northern Gateway as the Joint Review Panel of energy and environmental officials canvasses opinion along the 731-mile route of the Northern Gateway pipeline to be built by Enbridge, a Canadian company.
The fear of oil spills is acute in this corner of northwest British Columbia, with its snowcapped mountains and deep ocean inlets. People here still remember Alaska’s Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, and oil is still leaking from the Queen of the North, a ferry that sank off nearby Hartley Bay six years ago.
The seas nearby, in the Douglas Channel, “are very treacherous waters,” said David Suzuki, a leading environmentalist. “You take a supertanker that takes miles in order to stop, (and) an accident is absolutely inevitable.”
A “wake-up call” for country
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada’s national interest makes the $5.5 billion pipeline essential. He was “profoundly disappointed” that U.S. President Barack Obama rejected the Texas Keystone XL option but also spoke of the need to diversify Canada’s oil industry. Ninety-seven percent of Canadian oil exports now go to the U.S.
“I think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wake-up call, the degree to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the United States, and especially decisions that may be made for very bad political reasons,” Harper told Canadian TV.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich quickly picked up the theme, saying that Harper, “who, by the way, is conservative and pro-American … has said he’s going cut a deal with the Chinese. … We’ll get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity.”
He charged that “An American president who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.”
But the environmental objections that pushed Obama to block the pipeline to Texas apply equally to the Pacific pipeline. The review panel says more than 4,000 people have signed up to testify.
The atmosphere has turned acrimonious, with Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver claiming in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” are out to thwart Canada’s economic ascent.
He said they were bent on bogging down the panel’s work. And in an unusually caustic mention of Canada’s southern neighbor, he added, “If all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: Sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
Opposition looms
Environmentalists and First Nations (a Canadian synonym for native tribes) could delay approval all the way to Canada’s Supreme Court, and First Nations still holds title to some of the land the pipeline would cross, meaning the government will have to move with extreme sensitivity.
Critics dislike the concept of tapping the oil sands, saying it requires huge amounts of energy and water, increases greenhouse-gas emissions and threatens rivers and forests. Some projects are massive open-pit mines, and the process of separating oil from sand can generate lake-size pools of toxic sludge.
Meanwhile, China’s growing economy is hungry for Canadian oil. Chinese state-owned companies have invested more than $16 billion in Canadian energy in the past two years, state-controlled Sinopec has a stake in the pipeline, and if it is built, Chinese investment in Alberta oil sands is sure to boom.
“They (the Chinese) wonder why it’s not being built already,” said Wenran Jiang, an energy expert and professor at the University of Alberta.
Harper is set to visit China next month. After Obama first delayed the Keystone pipeline in November, Harper told Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Pacific Rim summit in Hawaii that Canada would like to sell more oil to China, and the Canadian prime minister filled in Obama on what he said.
Jiang reads that to mean “China has become leverage.”
But oil analysts say Alberta has enough oil to meet both countries’ needs.
