Sable Gas: Time to Wake Up
1/12/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Jan 12, 1997
(The following article appeared in _The Bluenose Tribune_,
January 10-February 28, Vol. 2, Issue 1. This newspaper has
a free distribution of 10,000 copies in the Halifax,
Dartmouth and Bedford areas. The article can be reproduced
with acknowledgement.)
SABLE GAS: TIME TO WAKE UP
by David Orton
To write meaningfully about the Sable Gas Project in a short
article for the Bluenose Tribune, is to set oneself a
difficult, perhaps impossible task. Why is this? One
formidable obstacle, although not the main one, is the
approximately 17 volumes of publicly available company
documents, justifying the offshore and onshore components
of the Project, which the interested public are asked to
digest and comment on. (Based on my own attendance at five
scoping meetings, and reports from participants at other
meetings, public participation has been perfunctory and
minimal.) These documents of course, build the unbelievable
corporate case that "no significant adverse environmental
or adverse socio-economic impacts are likely to occur".
This, in the extraction and transmission during twenty five
years, of over three trillion cubic feet of gas from six gas
fields using approximately thirty production wells, in the
vicinity of Sable Island. Gas is supposed to start flowing
to the American market, via approximately 558 kilometers of
pipeline through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, by November
of 1999.
More formidable are the importance and complexity of some of
the environmental and social justice issues which should be
part of the public discussions around the Sable Gas Project,
and yet are not. Like the garbage disposal crisis facing
Metro Halifax, (send it away, out of sight to rural
Cumberland County), the Sable Gas Project should be the
occasion to raise some fundamental questions about where we
are heading as a society; and what changes are necessary to
bring us into a sustainable relationship to the natural
world, which we should share on an equal basis with other
life forms. But this discussion is not happening.
Anyone who pays some attention to environmental issues,
knows that "developers" only present information that casts
their particular earth destroying projects in a favourable
light. This developer perspective tends to be dominant in a
media that is basically advertiser-funded, and sees the
embracing of economic growth and increasing consumerism, as
the highest state of intellectual enlightenment and the
definition of progress in a society.
In regard to the Sable Gas Project, media discussions have
centered around alleged economic benefits to Nova Scotians.
On investigation, I have found that permanent job benefits
are truly minimal according to company documents, e.g. eight
persons to be employed by the N.S. and N.B. gas pipeline
when it is in operation, and 154 full-time positions for the
offshore component of the Sable Gas Project. Extra spice and
political gossip in the media is provided by an alternative
pipeline route proposal through Quebec, as yet not
concretely outlined, by Montreal-based Gaz Metropolitain and
TransCanada Pipelines.
The go-ahead for the Sable Gas Project seems to be taken as
a given by media commentators - and by the oil and gas
industry itself, which regularly announces contracts and
decisions like the location of the gas processing plant in
Goldboro (fifteen full-time jobs), in Guysborough County.
Yet despite this, we are supposed to accept that the life or
death of the Sable Gas Project, is in the hands of an
appointed five-person Joint Public Review Panel.
Not dealt with by the media, or in the published list of
issues to be considered by the Review Panel, are the
potential massive contributions of the Sable Gas Project to
global warming, through greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide
from the burning of natural gas and methane leakage.
Not dealt with by the media, is the dependence of our
industrial economy and society upon fossil fuels like
natural gas, which are coming to an end. Not dealt with is
whether or not Canada, locked at present in a free-trade
energy straight jacket, should redefine its role as an
open-ended energy faucet for the United States and take
seriously the long-term fuel needs of Canadian society.
About 50 percent of natural gas production in Canada is
exported to the States. According to the proposal by
Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline, "gas control" for the
Canadian section of the pipeline in N.S. and N.B., will be
located in PanEnergy offices in Boston, with a back up
computer facility in Parsippany, New Jersey!
Not dealt with in the media are how corporate "market"
considerations, exclude the needed philosophical and ethical
discussion about the shape of future Canadian society and
how that society should relate to what remains of the
natural world. Is Nature only a "resource" destined for
eventual industrial use? Should not human ethics be
ultimately Earth-derived, based in care for the Earth and
all the creatures that inhabit it?
Not dealt with in media discussions are the environmental
track records of the specific companies, e.g. Mobil, Shell,
Imperial Oil, Westcoast Energy, and PanEnergy, which are
seeking regulatory approval in N.S.
Not dealt with, is the environmental reality that in the
N.S. and N.B. pipeline corridor, company documents show
there are 229 watercourses, 10 lakes, and a large number of
wetlands. Also, 90-95 percent of the corridor passes through
forested areas. In the past, many exploratory oil and gas
wells have been drilled on the Scotian Shelf and on Sable
Island itself, e.g. Mobil Oil. Wells have been drilled right
up to the edge of the Gully, the famous submarine canyon and
home for many marine mammals. In 1984 there were two well
blowouts off Sable Island. One of the wells, which blew in
September, took about ten months to permanently cap and
abandon.
Not dealt with is the fundamental anti-democratic imposition
of a natural gas pipeline upon hundreds of rural people in
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (as well as in Maine, New
Hampshire and Massachusetts) without their consent. This
imposition is not for a higher social good, but to enhance
multi-national profits.
Not dealt with in the media, is questioning the appointment,
independence, composition, and bewildering and contradictory
terms of reference of the "one stop" regulatory Joint Review
Panel. This Panel is overseeing the unfolding of the
"review" process and ultimately decides what are legitimate
topics for discussion and what are not, no matter what
issues are raised at panel scoping sessions. (The National
Energy Board makes up a majority component - three of the
five-panel members - of the Joint Review Panel.)
Also not dealt with by the mainstream media, is the conflict
of interest which the Nova Scotia Government finds itself
in, by being a "partner" (6%) in the offshore energy
project, while sitting in regulatory judgement on itself by
participating in the Joint Review Panel, which is conducting
hearings on this Project.
In my opinion, Nova Scotia and Canada do not need the Sable
Gas Project.
###########
To contact David Orton or the Green Web environmental
research and networking group, write R.R.#3, Saltsprings,
Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Canada BOK 1PO. E-mail address:
greenweb@fox.nstn.ca