To see a major LNG project approved
Premier Christy Clark gave the traditional series of year-end interviews with legislature press gallery reporters at the end of the fall session. Here is a transcript of her discussion with Tom Fletcher.
TF: Are you still confident that we're going to see a major LNG project approved by the end of 2014?
PCC: We did see one small one, with the FortisBC project going out at Delta. They're doubling their capacity and going to be shipping LNG. We're still in negotiations with Petronas and Shell, so I don't know if it will be by the end of 2014, but I'm hoping in the next few months.
[Days after this interview, Petronas announced it was delaying its final investment decision until 2015.
TF: The greenhouse gas situation, there's been a lot of debate about that. I talked to a couple of SFU climate mitigation specialists – these are not the people who were up on Burnaby Mountain – and they agreed with my suggestion that it's unlikely to the point of impossible to have a major LNG industry and still meet Gordon Campbell's ambitious greenhouse gas target for 2020. What do you think?
PCC: I think that we may prove them wrong. Many of these facilities, not all of them, will be partly or fully electrically powered up, so that reduces those impacts, and there's going to be a real incentive to invest in new technology to minimize that as well.