Weblog: The place’s the enterprise case for hydrogen?

By KAREN OGEN-TOEWS

CEO, First Nations LNG Alliance

So Prime Minister Trudeau says there has “by no means been a powerful enterprise case” for liquified pure fuel exports from Canada’s East Coast to Europe.

“There must be a enterprise case,” he added. “It must make sense for Germany to be receiving LNG straight from the East Coast.”

Throwing frigid water on such exports, he’s as an alternative pushing future manufacturing and export of hydrogen from Canada to Europe.

“We should look to sources like hydrogen which might and might be clear and renewable. We may be the dependable provider of fresh power a net-zero world wants.”

OK, so what’s the “enterprise case” that Ottawa sees and invokes for hydrogen exports?

There isn’t one.

There may be, true, a federal “Hydrogen Technique” — however all it affords is “an bold framework for actions that can cement hydrogen as a device to realize our purpose of net-zero emissions by 2050 and place Canada as a world, industrial chief of fresh renewable fuels.”

That isn’t a enterprise case.

However, hey, Canada did announce plans for a ‘Style of Kanada’ social-media blitz to promote Germans our maple syrup, blueberry jam, poutine gravy combine and Moosehead canned lager.

One of many PM’s cavils on East Coast LNG-for-export is that this: “There has by no means been a powerful enterprise case due to the gap from the fuel fields, due to the necessity to transport that fuel over lengthy distances earlier than liquefaction.”

In that case, we all know the place to level fingers: First, the Quebec authorities blocked any LNG improvement or any pipeline to feed it. Then the federal authorities leaped absolutely onside with Quebec, additionally rejecting the GNL-Québec undertaking and its pipeline on environmental grounds.

Ottawa’s present reply: We must always ship extra pure fuel to the U.S., which then turns it into LNG and sells it abroad. As Stewart Muir of Useful resource Works factors out, which means promoting our fuel to the U.S. at $3 a unit, and the U.S. reselling it at $10. Or extra.

We thus lose jobs and billions of {dollars}. Yet one more be aware from Muir: “The dimensions of this misplaced alternative is just staggering. At as we speak’s excessive LNG costs, one massive LNG plant on the east coast of Canada, of the scale of Kitimat’s LNG Canada undertaking being constructed now, would add $250,000,000 a day to the nation’s GDP.”

The massive losers embrace First Nations, who’ve been more and more looking for fairness positions in fuel, LNG and different useful resource developments. Amongst them is the Miawpukek First Nation, which seeks to extend fairness participation within the proposed LNG Newfoundland & Labrador undertaking. That goals to faucet “vital stranded pure fuel” within the offshore Jeanne d’ Arc Basin.

In the meantime, in BC, the Haisla Nation works towards its Cedar LNG undertaking and the Nisga’a Nation on its Ksi Lisims LNG undertaking. Good initiatives each, with huge advantages for Indigenous peoples, however on the improper coast to be of a lot assist to Europe.

The feds nonetheless converse of hopes (if faint) for East Coast LNG. Trudeau spoke of maybe easing regulatory processes to assist get LNG arrange on the East Coast and delivery to Germany.

However we keep in mind how Canadian regulators spent a full 43 months reviewing one LNG proposal in BC, whereas U.S. regulators took solely 14 months on a much bigger one.

It’s time for the feds to acknowledge and settle for the potential for LNG exports from each coasts, and to work with the trade — and First Nations — on an actual enterprise case, and plan.

(Posted right here 22 September 2022)