Home » Posts tagged 'lng' (Page 5)
Tag Archives: lng
No Wealth, No Justice in $1 Billion LNG Offer to First Nation Band
No Wealth, No Justice in $1 Billion LNG Offer to First Nation Band
Here’s why Lax Kw’alaams still side with the salmon.
Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian and writer known for his work among the poor and the excluded, is credited with coining a phrase that is as true as any you’ll ever hear: ”The opposite of poverty is not wealth — it is justice.”
It is a phrase that has also been attributed to Bryan Stevenson, founder of America’s Equal Justice Initiative and a man Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called, without qualification, ”America’s Nelson Mandela.”
Regardless of the provenance of the expression, it is the potency of the underlying idea that should be freighted into the unseemly scramble to unlock northern British Columbia’s dangerously exaggerated liquefied natural gas (LNG) bonanza, especially now that some coastal First Nations are bellying up to the pipe to get their overdue share of Canada’s resource riches.
To read reports emanating from the mouth of the Skeena River, the energy sector thinks it has finally cracked the nut on how to successfully partner with First Nations people who, inconveniently, stand afore a variety of proposed LNG plants and pipeline deals. These aboriginal people have rights along the planned pipeline routes, and also at tidewater, where Canada is trying to unstopper our oil and gas supplies so the Chinese can drain off our energy sovereignty like so much bilge water.
Industry’s latest poster child is the Lax Kw’alaams Band, whose main village at Port Simpson is situated on the coast north of Prince Rupert, where the waters of the Skeena and the Nass rivers mingle and nurse some of the finest wild salmon populations left on the planet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Squamish Mayor Says No to LNG Plant, with Strings Attached
Squamish Mayor Says No to LNG Plant, with Strings Attached
Terminal pumped by premier would process up to 2.1 million tonnes of gas a year.
The mayor of Squamish and her council will not support the proposed Eagle Mountain pipeline and Woodfibre LNG plant in the region unless 18 conditions are met, according to an April 30 letter to the provincial Environmental Assessment Office.
“Due to the significant outstanding information and the community concerns that have not been adequately addressed, and that there are no guarantees at this time that that they will be satisfactorily addressed, the current applications are not supportable by the District of Squamish,” said the letter, signed by Mayor Patricia Heintzman.
The Woodfibre LNG terminal, planned for the site of a former pulp and paper mill seven kilometres west-southwest of downtown Squamish, would have a 250,000 cubic metre storage capacity and process up to 2.1 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas a year.
Owner Pacific Oil and Gas Ltd. is part of Indonesian billionaire Sukanto Tanoto’s empire. Natural gas supplier FortisBC, which built a pipeline in 1990 for the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, proposes a 52-km long, 20-inch diameter gas pipeline from north of the Coquitlam watershed to Squamish that would feed the plant.
Squamish council is already in a legal battle with FortisBC, which filed a B.C. Supreme Court petition in March, hoping a judge will overturn council’s refusal to permit borehole testing for the pipeline.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Resource Dependence Could Prove Fatal For Canadian Economy
Resource Dependence Could Prove Fatal For Canadian Economy
Low oil prices are threatening the health of Canada’s oil and gas sector, which in turn, is causing turmoil in Canada’s economy as a whole.
The fall in oil prices are forcing billions of dollars in spending reductions for Canada’s oil and gas industry. In February, Royal Dutch Shell shelved plans for a tar sands project in Alberta that would have produced 200,000 barrels per day. Last year, Petronas put off plans to build a massive LNG export terminal on Canada’s west coast. Moody’s recently predicted that very few of the 18 proposed LNG projects in Canada will be constructed. Most will be cancelled. The oil industry is expected to lose 37 percent of its revenues in 2015, or a fall of CAD$43 billion.
That is bad news for Canada’s oil and gas sector. But even worse, Canada’s overdependence on oil and gas will threaten its broader economy now that the sector has gone bust. The severe drop in oil prices has made the Canadian dollar one of the worst performing currencies in the world over the past year. The loonie used to trade at parity to the U.S. dollar, and even appreciated to a stronger level a few years ago, but now a Canadian dollar only gets you less than 80 U.S. cents.
Related: Top 12 Media Myths On Oil Prices
While a weaker currency has complicating effects on the economy (it will also boost exports, for example), on balance low oil prices have been an unmitigated disaster for Canada’s economy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is The EU Finally Breaking Free Of Russia’s Energy Grip?
Is The EU Finally Breaking Free Of Russia’s Energy Grip?
Gazprom’s dominance over European energy supplies may be beginning to slip.
The collapse of oil prices has punished Gazprom’s revenues, but in a new development that is further damaging to the Russian state-owned company, the European Union is also beginning to shake itself of Russian gas.
Russian exports of natural gas through the Nord Stream pipeline – which runs from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea – have dropped by more than half in February from the same period last year, according to Reuters. Average daily deliveries have declined from 98 million cubic meters to 45 million cubic meters.
For 2014 on the whole, the European Union reduced Russian gas imports by 9 percent, the fourth consecutive year of declines.
There are several reasons for this. First, the European economy is growing slowly, if at all. That keeps a lid on natural gas consumption. Second, the 28-member bloc is actually making substantial progress on energy efficiency. Third, Europe has experienced a mild winter, lessening demand for natural gas supplies.
Related: Moscow Slings Insults Following Canadian Sanctions
But the EU is also finding other sources of energy. Last year Lithuania began importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Norway, a development that has diminished Gazprom’s grip over the small Baltic country. Lithuania has even been willing to pay a 10 percent premium for Norwegian gas – a rate that Lithuanian officials noted was still less than what they paid for Russian gas in the past. “From now until forever, our access to LNG puts a cap on what Gazprom can charge us,” Lithuania’s energy minister Rokas Masiulis said in a Reuters interview in November 2014.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Tanking Asia Gas Prices Makes BC LNG ‘Not Viable,’ Expert Says
Tanking Asia Gas Prices Makes BC LNG ‘Not Viable,’ Expert Says
A liquified natural gas industry, as currently promoted by British Columbia’s Liberal government, is not viable at current natural gas prices, and the proposed industry tax regime actually “gives a subsidy to the LNG industry,” according to a royalty expert.
Jim Roy, a former royalty advisor to the Alberta government of Peter Lougheed and now a private Edmonton-based consultant, said the profitability of any liquefied natural gas industry in the province in truth depends on artificially high natural gas prices in China.
The natural gas price in B.C. needs to be less than half the price of natural gas in China for the nearly 24 proposed LNG projects in the province to be economic, but that differential is rapidly narrowing, Roy said.
Not one proposed LNG project in B.C. has made a final investment decision yet.
Since the advent of falling oil prices, the spot price for natural gas — the so-called Japanese Korea Marker — has plummeted. Global LNG prices are tied to oil prices.
When the B.C. government announced its liquefied natural gas push in 2012, the volatile Asian gas price was as high as $16 per million British Thermal Units (MMBtu), or more than triple North American prices.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
LNG Another Casualty Of Low Oil Prices
LNG Another Casualty Of Low Oil Prices
The oil industry is facing rising debt from collapsing oil prices, but there could be another sector that becomes a casualty of the low oil price environment: liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Much of the global LNG trade occurs in Asia, where buying and selling occurs according to long-term fixed contracts that are indexed to the price of oil. As a result, when oil prices were high, so were LNG prices. That is exactly why there has been a rush along the U.S. Gulf Coast to begin exporting cheap American natural gas to take advantage of high prices in Asia.
The practice of indexing LNG contracts to the price of oil was something that Japan, the world’s largest consumer of LNG, had hoped to change. High oil prices were inflicting an economic toll on Japan, which had radically increased energy imports after shuttering its nuclear reactors. However, oil-indexed contracts cut both ways. Now with oil prices hovering around $50 per barrel – less than half of what they were last summer – spot cargoes for LNG have seen their prices collapse as well. Japan is in no hurry to see the industry undergo dramatic reforms.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is The Canadian LNG Export Dream Dead?
Is The Canadian LNG Export Dream Dead?.
Lower oil prices have killed off major plans for liquefied natural gas exports from Canada’s west coast.
On December 2 the state-owned oil company of Malaysia, Petronas, decided to shelve plans to build an enormous LNG export terminal in British Columbia, citing the falling price of oil. It is common for LNG contracts to be priced using a formula linked to the price of crude oil, so declining oil prices pushes down prices for LNG.
Petronas’ Pacific NorthWest LNG, as it was known, was a proposed $32 billion export terminal that would send LNG to Asia. The decision highlights how competitive global LNG trade has become, despite growing demand. Greenfield projects, such as Pacific Northwest LNG, face steep startup costs that become prohibitive when oil prices fall.
Related: Russia-China Deal Could Kill U.S. LNG Exports
Although low oil prices may have been the icing on the cake, Canadian LNG projects were facing serious obstacles before oil prices plummeted. There is stiff competition from a slew of LNG projects already under construction in the U.S. and Australia, which will come online much earlier than anything from British Columbia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Resource Insights: Did Russia and China just sign a death warrant for U.S. LNG exports?
Resource Insights: Did Russia and China just sign a death warrant for U.S. LNG exports?.
Russia and China have signed two large natural gas deals in the last six months as Russia turns its attention eastward in reaction to sanctions and souring relations with Europe, currently Russia’s largest energy export market.
But the move has implications beyond Europe. In the department of everything is connected, U.S. natural gas producers may be seeing their dream of substantial liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports suffer fatal injury because of Russian exports to the Chinese market, a market that was expected to be the largest and most profitable for LNG exporters. Petroleum geologist and consultant Art Berman–who has been consistently skeptical of the viability of U.S. LNG exports–communicated in an email that Russian supply will force the price of LNG delivered to Asia down to between $10 and $11, too low for American LNG exports to be profitable.
Now, let’s back up a little. U.S. natural gas producers have been trying to sell the story of an American energy renaissance based on growing domestically produced gas supplies from deep shale deposits–now being exploited through a new form of hydraulic fracturing called high-volume slick-water hydraulic fracturing.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
