The National Energy Board has come out in favour of the expansion of the controversial Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil pipeline between Burnaby and Edmonton, Alberta.
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For the first time, the NEB is requiring the company to provide a plan, to be filed four months after the project’s start up, for offsetting all of the greenhouse gasses generated from the construction of the pipeline. “We need to put this decision back in the hands of the people affected”. She met with a White House environmental official and the head of the Center for American Progress, a prominent progressive think tank that opposed Keystone XL, but she told The Canadian Press she wasn’t focused on gaining approval for a future version of the pipeline.
“They are to review the situation, to add further consultation – particularly with indigenous communities – to see what the NEB might have missed”.
Environmental groups said they weren’t surprised by the decision.
The Trans Mountain Expansion will add 980 kilometers of new pipeline to its already existing infrastructure and is estimated to cost about $6.8 billion.
“We all know Canada has struggled with the whole pipeline approval process”, said Afolabi Ogunnaike, with global energy consultants Wood Mackenzie. It is one of several proposed crude oil projects, including the Keystone XL pipeline, that has faced strong opposition from environmental critics.
The NEB also didn’t consider climate change in its decision, though that was the major motivator of the many protests that have dogged this project, from protests on Burnaby Mountain in late 2014 to “kayaktivists” that approached the Westridge Marine Terminal and tried to stop an oil tanker in the past few days. Most of the charges are later dropped.
The NEB’s 533 report on Kinder Morgan’s proposal includes 157 conditions the project must adhere to if it is to go ahead.
“Taking into account all the evidence, considering all relevant factors, and given that there are considerable benefits nationally, regionally and to some degree locally, the board found that the benefits of the project would outweigh the residual burdens”, the board said in a statement.
The three members of the environmental panel announced Tuesday are Kim Baird, a former chief of the Tsawwassen First Nation, Annette Trimbee, president of the University of Winnipeg, and Tony Penikett, who was premier of Yukon for two terms. And it will look at upstream greenhouse gas emissions that are linked to the pipeline.
Their collective backgrounds say a lot about what the government is trying to accomplish with the panel.
Peter McCartney, a climate campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, said the project has no social license and will not be built.
The B.C. Supreme Court found in January the provincial government could not rely exclusively on the energy board’s review of Northern Gateway. Upon completion, it would triple the amount of bitumen transported to the Lower Mainland, increasing the number of oil tankers moving through Burrard Inlet from some 60 ships per year to more than 400.
Since 1956, vessels leaving the Trans Mountain pipeline’s export terminal have moved petroleum products through Port Metro Vancouver without a single crude oil spill.
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He called the panel review “little more than a smokescreen”.
