Canada’s Troubled Pipeline Projects
While living in Calgary, the headquarters of Canada’s oil and gas industry, I occasionally heard people in the business say their pipelines were cursed. The country was brimming with oil and gas, and yet battles over proposed pipelines had limited the ability of producers to get those resources to market.
The story of the latest controversy, an expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, took a significant turn on Tuesday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced it would nationalize it. The government’s purchase of Trans Mountain from the Houston-based energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion in Canadian dollars underscores just how difficult it has become to build fossil fuel projects, at least in wealthy, democratic countries, long thought to pose fewer political and social risks than developing countries.… Seguir leyendo »