Good news in two ways: First, the announcement of the conditional award of $620 million in contract work to First Nations businesses along Coastal GasLink’s natural-gas pipeline route in BC.
And second: our own news release on the announcement: “Pipeline pacts for First Nations ‘terrific’.” Quotes from Karen Ogen-Toews were used in media, and she was interviewed by columnist Les Leyne of the Times Colonist newspaper in Victoria.
Here’s our news release, and you’ll see below it a list of media stories that carried some or all of it.
And here’s the official news release from Coastal GasLink and TransCanada. It notes that, in addition to the $620 million, the Project anticipates another $400 million in additional contract and employment opportunities for Indigenous and local BC communities during pipeline construction.
(All $1.2 billion is conditional on a positive Final Investment Decision on LNG Canada’s $40-billion project at Kitimat.)
CAREERS, NOT JUST JOBS
Resource developers often tell the world how many “jobs” will be created by their latest proposal.
But the Alliance and its members are more interested in First Nations access to “careers”, not just short-term positions building a project.
Careers, and the training needed to help First Nations get into them, was an important subject discussed in regional engagement meetings hosted by the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources in 2017.
Those meetings led to our Joint Engagement Report with the ministry this year. And, in turn, that led to two recent blogs on our website:
First: LNG and careers, not just jobs. And second, a blog that mentioned another subject at the regional meetings: LNG: First Nations skin in the game.
OUR ENERGY TRANSITION
A new report worth reading: The Generation Energy Council’s report on Canada’s Energy Transition: Getting to Our Energy Future, Together.
It’s from Natural Resources Canada, which heard from 380,000 people who shared their collective vision for Canada’s energy future. In October 2017, this dialogue culminated in the Generation Energy Forum in Winnipeg, with more than 650 experts, stakeholders, Indigenous and community leaders from across Canada and around the globe.
The report includes some goals for our LNG: “Reducing the cost of and improving access to clean grids for natural gas extraction and LNG delivery, so that lower carbon Canadian LNG can displace higher carbon LNG supplies from elsewhere in the world.”
Our LNG industry is hard at work on ‘all of the above.’ As sustainability expert Rob Seeley notes in The Vancouver Sun:
“LNG facilities that meet B.C.’s performance requirements will be the cleanest in the world from a GHG-emissions perspective. They will produce roughly 50-per-cent fewer emissions than the average LNG facility operating in the world today, and 30-per-cent fewer GHG emissions than the best LNG facilities currently in operation.”
FRACKING FACTS
We had a good meeting with the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, to view their new presentation on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for natural gas.
We learned new things about the safety of drilling and fracking, the protection of our water, and new drilling technology (such as the technology-loaded operator’s “chair”, a remote-control terminal from which an operator in Calgary can manage the drilling and fracking of a gas well in northeastern BC, with absolute precision).
We also learned that some 200,000 wells have been drilled and fracked in Canada — and there has been no damage to our BC groundwater.
And this slide naturally caught our eye:
We’ll feature more items on fracking down the road on our social media channels: Twitter and Facebook.
ALLIANCE JOB VACANCY
The First Nations LNG Alliance has an opening for an executive assistant, a term position until March 31, 2019.
Applications must be in by noon on Friday July 11.
If you know of anyone who might be interested, please spread the word.
ALSO IN THE NEWS
- Canada makes bid for LNG export position
- Shell introduces new tech to minimize methane leakage at the Groundbirch project in northeast BC
- TransCanada conditionally selects Coastal GasLink pipeline construction contractors
- Quebec bans fracking for natural gas, preferring to import fracked gas from the US
- LNG Canada at Kitimat would produce less than half of the emissions of other LNG facilities around the world
