Canada Expects to Announce Environmental Pipeline Review Process Soon
The
Canadian government expects to announce "very soon" the new transitional rules
that will apply to the environmental review of pipeline projects that are
currently being evaluated, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr said on January
25.
Carr declined to say whether Trans Canada Corp's Energy East pipeline to the
East Coast was dead in light of the opposition announced on January 22 by the
mayors of Montreal and surrounding communities.
"It's going to take a lot of good will, good process and good science to build
the kind of public confidence that Canadians want about these major projects,"
Carr told reporters.
"We're concerned about a process that will give Canadians confidence that
science has been applied to this process, that people who are affected by it
directly or indirectly have had a chance to express themselves recently over a
reasonable time period, and we believe that that is the way to proceed under the
current environment and that's the best chance we have of getting a result."
The
energy industry and business leaders view pipelines as critical to getting oil
from landlocked Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries or to export markets, and
point out they have a better safety record than oil-by-rail.
The
twinning of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline to the Pacific Coast through
British Columbia is the other major pipeline project being considered.
What has been unclear is whether the new rules under which the National Energy
Board would evaluate the two pipelines will introduce only minor changes or
whether they might lead to so many conditions being applied as to make them
unfeasible.