FLETCHER: ‘Fossil gas’ is the new ‘tar sands’ in BC environmentalism

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA – Things are finally looking up from my perspective as an old refinery operator who ended up in the science-challenged world of journalism. While the national media obsess over a potential new oil pipeline to the BC coast, Mark Carney’s sort-of-deal with Danielle Smith includes a little-noticed measure allowing Alberta to build more natural gas-fired power production to serve the new industry of artificial intelligence data centres. One suggested innovation is that stranded gas wells left behind in the shale gas revolution could be repurposed to power on-site data centres.Here in hippy-science BC, where the word “chemicals” has been redefined as anything artificial and therefore bad, natural gas is making a comeback. An early sign was when Energy Minister Adrian Dix quietly sent a letter to LNG Canada, confirming that their proposed phase-two expansion would be allowed to burn gas to power the main chilling and compression process, just like phase one does.In May, Vancouver city council voted narrowly to revoke its ban on natural gas for home heating in new construction.In a province that exports LNG, which has a vast network of natural gas distribution pipes to thousands of homes and businesses, hippy science led multiple municipal councils to the notion that we can’t use it to heat our own homes or bath water. The fact that virtue-signalling bans like this can’t possibly have a significant effect on continually rising global greenhouse gas emissions, driven largely by Asian industrial development, is not mentioned. That topic remains banned..A bare majority of Vancouver councillors was finally convinced that this ban would further increase the cost of new housing in a city where young people are fleeing because they can’t afford rent, much less buying a home. It’s an election year for BC local governments.Another quiet move came at BC Hydro, which has been forced into electricity imports in the past three years as a huge backlog of industrial power applications has been built up. That was a problem before Premier David Eby’s NDP government committed the utility to twin its main transmission line from the Peace dams to the northwest coast, to allow the next big LNG project to use huge amounts of hydro to process gas for shipping. Ksi Lisims LNG is marketed as the world’s lowest-carbon LNG source, majority owned by the Nisga’a Nation.BC Hydro has applied to the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC) to extend power purchase contracts with two of the last major gas-fired power plants in the province. These are Island Generation, built for a long-gone pulp mill near Campbell River, and McMahon Cogeneration, which powers the operation of the gas processing plant at Taylor, BC, on the banks of the Peace River, not far from the three dams.(Western Standard’s Nigel Hannaford and I both worked at the McMahon Plant going back to the 1970s, before the oil refinery part was disassembled and shipped off to Asia.)The BC Utilities Commission has been subject to political interference over the years, and apparently, it has been infiltrated by hippy science as well. The commission quietly announced in late May that “in future applications and filings to the BCUC, utilities are expected to use the term ‘fossil gas’ rather than ‘conventional natural gas’ to describe natural gas that is formed from fossils.”.This is simply wrong at a high school science level. The term “fossil fuels” is inaccurate. It was coined long ago to distinguish natural gas from coal gas, which was extracted to power early street lighting. Coal gas contained sulphur and other contaminants, and left behind slag that has taken decades to clean up from where it was dumped in the ocean here in Victoria and elsewhere. The BCUC was trying to distinguish between conventional gas and “renewable gas,” mostly biogas collected from landfills and the like. Both are almost entirely methane, but the notion that a significant part of BC and Alberta’s huge shale gas resource can be replaced by landfill gas is preposterous.BC Hydro is confined by a requirement that it be self-sufficient from renewable sources, a BC Liberal mandate it can’t meet, and the NDP’s “CleanBC” mandate that is also impractical.There are even media reports that BC Hydro is looking to outright buy the Island Generation plant to provide backup power for the hydro grid.BC Hydro shut down a similar backup plant for Metro Vancouver in 2016. Burrard Thermal in Port Moody dates back to the era of private BC Electric, and served as an emergency and peak-load source of reliable gas-fired power.It was an early victim of eco-fear, with politicians seeing plumes of water vapour from its boilers and mistaking them for deadly pollution.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: ‘Fossil gas’ is the new ‘tar sands’ in BC environmentalism

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