Category Archives: Environment

Jun 23 2013
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Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics

Denial and deflection on shale gas

Too much official hot air as shale gas in New Brunswick bloats expectations

Too much official hot air as shale gas in New Brunswick bloats expectations

Into each political life, a little denial must fall. But the New Brunswick government’s contention that the tide of opinion in the province is turning in favor of shale gas development seems particularly delusional.

Survey after survey have clearly established that more people than not believe tight petroleum drilling – which employs the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing – poses a threat to the environment and, by extension, to communities in rural areas. A recent Corporate Research Associates (CRA) poll merely confirms what we have known for months.

“New Brunswick residents are concerned about the safety of shale gas exploration and are split on whether the process is important to the economic future of the province,” the Halifax-based opinion-taker announced this week. “One-half (48 per cent) of residents believe shale gas to be critically important or important but not critical to New Brunswick’s economic future, while a similar number (44 per cent) believe it to be not very important or not at all important to the economy of the province.”

Meanwhile, “when asked (about) the safety of shale gas exploration, on a scale of ‘1’ to ‘10’ where ‘1’ is not safe at all and ’10’ is extremely safe, the average rating was 3.9 indicating many residents perceive shale gas exploration to be unsafe. Those in the Northern Region (3.3) and Moncton area (3.5) are more likely to consider the exploration of shale gas unsafe compared with those in the Southern region (4.6).”

All of which moved CRA’s chairman Don Mills to observe, “it is clear that there will be significant and continuing challenges to government and industry in the development of shale gas resources in the province of New Brunswick.”

In an interview with the Telegraph-Journal this week, he went further: “The results say to me that the provincial government and the industry are both in a tough corner right now. . .There are so many people who believe that fracking is unsafe, I think the opponents of shale gas have won the day on that argument, at least at this point.”

What, then, justifies Energy Minister Craig Leonard’s sunny disposition? He also told the TJ this week, “(People) need to understand that we have the strictest rules in North America in place. But the support is growing and from what we are hearing on the ground, most people we are discussing this with say that even if they have concerns with the process, they want us to see what kind of resource we do have through the exploration phase.”

That’s hardly a ringing public endorsement. People are always willing to consider the necessary evils of their circumstances as long as those evils remain hypothetical. The moment the drills go into the ground and the gas starts flowing in earnest, it’s a whole new ball game. For the provincial Tories, the game may already be over.

CRA’s early June survey found that support for the government, among decided voters in New Brunswick, had slipped to just 29 per cent, down from 32 per cent in March. The Liberals commanded a 41 per cent approval rating, up from 35 per cent in the earlier three-month period. These shifts in electoral preferences neatly coincide with Grit calls for a moratorium on further shale gas development.

Now, in a tactical tour de force (though farce may be a more accurate word), the provincial government is hoping to secure acquiescence to onshore exploration by conflating the effort with a potential eastern pipeline into Saint John – a project for which there is broad, if not unanimous, support. This sort of deflection, though common enough among politicians, almost never works. Worse, in most cases, it backfires.

The plain, hard truth is that leadership in public office inevitably entails disappointing and angering many of those who put you there.

If shale gas is, in the opinion of this government, worth pursuing, then get on with it – safely, responsibly and openly, of course. But leave out the sugarcoating and magic tricks. No one’s buying any of it.

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Jun 11 2013
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Business, Economy, Environment, Politics

New Brunswick’s biggest natural resource is fury

Seeing the forest for the trees in hydraulic fracturing

Seeing the forest for the trees in hydraulic fracturing

Those who believe that New Brunswickers are apathetic about their futures need only survey the province for visible signs of outrage, which are everywhere. Apparently, we are mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

The question is: What is the “it” we refuse to “take”?

Once upon a time, it was the sale of NB Power to Hydro-Quebec. The contretemps over that issue brought down a government already reeling from the outcry over its proposals to establish a network of polytechnics in the province and reform French language instruction for Anglophones.

These days, it’s cuts to the public service, education and health care that have ignited the pyres of dissent from Sackville to Edmundston.

No issue, however, is as incendiary as hydraulic fracturing, with its dark promise to pollute and sunder communities wherever the shale gas industry sinks its wells.

Last week, the RCMP arrested three people – about 120 kilometers north of Moncton – who were protesting SWN Resources seismic testing (advance work in the exploration of tight petroleum plays). The cops said the trio refused to make way for trucks. Other observers at the scene said the authorities overreacted.

For his part, Brad Walters a professor of environmental studies professor at Mount A, called it a sign of the times, to which we should grow accustomed. He told  CTV it reflects “a combination of things coming together here. . .There is this network of over 30 groups across the province who are talking to each other and are very strongly opposed to shale gas development.”

Call it the immoveable object that meets an unstoppable force, but opposition to shale gas in this province has become a permanent feature of the landscape. No careful ministrations by the provincial government, promising to enforce the “toughest” regulations in North America – no vows by industry representatives to adhere to only the highest standards of environmental stewardship – are likely to placate the critics.

This worries people like Susan Holt, president and CEO of the New Brunswick Business Council, which commissioned a report, released recently, on the economic potential of shale gas in the province. “Some of the opposition is a little bit disconcerting to industry because it appears to be general industry opposition rather than specific,” she told the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris. “When New Brunswickers resist general industrial activity, that is more nerve-racking for our folks because it begs the question, how do we develop our economy?”

How, indeed?

Legitimate concerns about water and soil degradation and principled stands against fossil fuels warming the planetary orb only partially explain the current antagonism. At the heart of the hostility to shale gas is a position against which there is no defence: People simply detest the idea of it. Onshore petroleum development somehow cuts against the weave of the province’s social fabric.

The identical mental dynamic was at work when potash was first developed. It was in even planer view when wind turbines began dotting the countryside. Lest we forget uranium?

Logic is a blunt instrument of persuasion when passions are running high, as they tend to do when statements from the provincial Department of Energy and Mine declare that “Nine companies hold a Crown license to search and/or lease within New Brunswick. These include a total of 71 rights agreements, covering over 1.4 million hectares, for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas.”

In fact, the Province has spent a good deal of time touting New Brunswick as the undisputed nexus of the emerging tight oil and gas industry in Atlantic Canada. Estimates, it likes to say, peg the volume of natural gas trapped between layers of sedimentary rock hundreds, or even thousands, of meters beneath the soil’s surface at close to 77 trillion cubic feet.

What it – and industry, itself – hasn’t spent much effort doing is reminding New Brunswickers that no one yet knows whether the resource is even commercially viable. Nor have they attempted to explain (until very recently) the safeguards that must attend its extraction and development.

Now, it may be too late to expect a sea change of attitude.

It’s a shame we can’t harness the energy from all the outrage we generate.

If we could, we’d never again worry about the future of our province.

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May 13 2013
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Energy, Environment, Oil and Gas

Shale gas flows with hot air

Is what lies beneath enough?

Is what lies beneath enough?

At the current rate of progress, shale gas in New Brunswick is fast becoming the best-regulated industry that never was.

After two, exhaustive reports by independent auditors and a best-practice framework covering the dos and don’ts of resource exploration, extraction and production, the Alward government has now released a 37-page “blueprint” that ties up the whole, messy business with a bright, Tory-blue bow.

All this even before the industry, itself, has determined whether shale gas is, in fact, commercially viable. And yet, there are those who continue to believe the province is not going far enough to protect the interests of average citizens from the presumed avarice of the petroleum lobby.

The blueprint, say the opposition Liberals, is conspicuous for its lack of rigor. Quoted in news reports, environment critic Bernard LeBlanc said, “New Brunswickers’ environment and health are at risk based on the actions of this government moving forward. There are glaring oversights in this document, including a proper discussion about greenhouse gas emissions.”

Added Green Party Leader David Coon: “A lot of what is in the document says, ‘the government will continue to‘ or that things will be ‘ongoing’. It doesn’t contain much new and it leaves out considerable things.”

In fact, though, absent an actual gas-producing industry, the blueprint goes about as far as it can and, indeed, should.

Much of the debate over shale gas development in this province has been wildly chimeric – informed as much by horror stories about industry’s past abuses in small towns and communities south of the border as by engineering science and the lessons lawmakers elsewhere in North America have learned.

Far less attention has been paid to likelihood of commercially exploiting a proportion of the estimated 67 trillion cubic feet of shale gas that lays beneath the surface in quantities sufficient to justify the cost and inevitable disruption, let alone the regulatory regime. At the moment, that’s not a question boosters, opponents or even governments can answer.

In a letter to the editor, published by Newsday in March, Jannette M. Barth (who is described as “the founder of the Pepacton Institute, an economic research and consulting firm”) writes: “Gains from shale gas development in the United States are greatly exaggerated. Macroeconomic models do not capture regional, state or local impacts. It is possible that the combined losses at these less-aggregate levels will be greater than any macroeconomic gains.”

She continues: “Peer-reviewed research and other research not funded by the natural gas industry have found only modest short-term employment gains to regions with shale gas development. Research also shows that economic impacts concluded by industry-sponsored studies are likely overstated, and that regions with shale gas development end up worse off in the long run, with higher levels of unemployment and long-term poverty.

“A survey of municipalities in 12 Marcellus-area counties in Pennsylvania  found that while 26 percent of the municipalities experienced increased expenditures from Marcellus Shale development, 75 percent said it had not increased their revenue, indicating that costs to communities are increasing without any offsetting increase in revenue.”

New Brunswick industry types will almost certainly take issue with these conclusions, but even they are determined to inject a note of caution into the discussion. As Brunswick News reported on Friday, Contact Exploration president Steve Harding thinks “there has been so much energy that has gone into this potential resource and, to be fair, that’s all it is today. We haven’t been able to quantify it as something that is commercial.”

Barbara Pike, executive director of the Maritimes Energy Association, concurs: “The fact that the government recognizes that we still don’t know whether there is a substantial onshore natural gas industry in New Brunswick. . is important.”

Until they do – know, that is – there’s not much point is wasting further breath on fanciful predictions of either doom or boom. If and when the industry decides to pull the trigger, that’s when a true, independent analysis of its claims should inform public policy and draft the next, and final, blueprint for New Brunswick’s energy future.

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