And it’s a threat to the province’s climate commitments.

A chorus of North American fossil fuel boosters is once again pushing for more pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, this time purportedly to help Europe quit the 40 percent of its gas it imports from Russia. For example, Deborah Yedlin, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Canada’s fossil-fuel capital Calgary, declared,

“We must resurrect [LNG] projects—on the east and west coasts. It is a moral imperative.”

But like previous arguments for completing the mostly languishing LNG proposals on Cascadia’s West Coast, in British Columbia, these new ones do not add up. BC LNG proposals are solutions in search of a problem. Their fuel cannot be ready soon enough to matter to Europe and cannot be extracted and burned without harming the climate.

FIVE LNG PROPOSALS REMAIN IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, TWO THE PUBLIC CAN COMMENT ON NOW

Canada is home to a total of zero LNG export facilities. Of dozens proposed over the years in British Columbia, all but five are now dead. Most succumbed to a combination of market forces and concerted public opposition to fracking gas in eastern British Columbia and shipping it in liquified form off the Pacific Coast. The harms of fracking include health impacts like low birth weights, contaminated drinking water, degraded Indigenous land pockmarked with thousands of gas wells, and accelerated climate impacts.

Proponents of remaining BC LNG proposals promise to begin operations between 2025 and 2030, but if their past records of delay are any guide, these promises will prove to have been little more than wishful thinking.

Indeed, just one of the projects has started construction at all and is only 50 percent complete. This project, the Can$40-billion LNG Canada, has already pushed back its opening date from 2023 to mid-2025, a forecast that’s likely to slip further. Plus, the new Coastal Gaslink pipeline that TC Energy is building to supply LNG Canada has suffered repeated delays and will distinguish itself as one of the most expensive gas pipelines in the world. TC Energy pegged the pipeline’s cost at Can$4.4 billion in 2012, boosted the estimate to Can$6.6 billion in 2020, and in February warned that costs had “increased significantly,” without saying how much. Controversy about the pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, keeps mounting. Wet’suwet’en leaders recently called on the United Nations to investigate Coastal Gaslink for what they say is Canada’s violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Two other projects, the Tilbury Phase 2 Expansion project and Cedar LNG, await environmental assessments. (Members of the public can comment on both until mid-April.) Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound was issued its environmental approval in 2016 by then-Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine Mckenna, but the project languishes behind obstacles and lacks some permits. The last live project, Ksi Lisims, is so new that its timeline is highly speculative; a consortium that includes fossil fuel interests and the Nisga’a First Nation, only announced it in July 2021.

BY THE TIME BC’S LNG FACILITIES OPEN THEIR DOORS, EUROPE PLANS TO HAVE ELIMINATED ITS RELIANCE ON RUSSIAN GAS

British Columbia’s LNG is purportedly destined for Asia, not Europe. But because the market for LNG is increasingly global, with nearly 40 percent of LNG now traded on the spot market or via short-term contracts, adding Canadian LNG to the global supply could help Europe overcome its supply shortage.

But the EU will be sailing away from Russian gas just as BC’s LNG arrives to dock.

Not quite two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Commission outlined its new “REPowerEU” plan, which aims to reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas by nearly two-thirds before year’s end. About 60 percent of this reduction would come from securing alternate gas suppliers and the other 40 percent from lo...