Site C dam to electrify LNG industry is far from clean

In April 2010, when then-premier Gordon Campbell announced that B.C. was resurrecting plans to build the Site C dam, atmospheric scientist Andrew Weaver was along to lend support.

Well before he became an MLA, and later the leader of the B.C. Green party, Weaver used words to describe the controversial project that became a template for Liberal and NDP premiers to come:

Hydro power is “clean.” It is “zero-emitting” power. It “does not produce greenhouse gas emissions.” Therefore, it is good.

Weaver’s assertions were as demonstrably false then as they are now.

All energy has environmental costs. Hydroelectric power may be clean in the extremely narrow sense that the energy carried in transmission lines does not emit greenhouse gases. But it is dirty in countless ways. Consider just three: flooded farmlands and uprooted farming families, destroyed Indigenous hunting and gathering sites, and mercury-contaminated fish in reservoirs that are themselves sources of greenhouse gasses.

Weaver later became sharply critical of Site C. But unfortunately, his earlier arguments in favour of the project were co-opted by the government to justify providing more allegedly green energy to an expanding natural-gas industry that includes a major liquefied natural gas plant on B.C.’s north coast and a new 670-kilometre pipeline linking the plant to the Peace region where companies drill and frack for natural gas.

This was readily apparent in December when Premier John Horgan and Environment Minister George Heyman officially released the provincial government’s latest climate action plan known as Clean B.C. at a packed event at Vancouver’s main library, which Weaver attended.

The word “electricity” is mentioned no fewer than 47 times in the document, including on first reference where Michelle Mungall, minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources, states that the government will use B.C.’s “abundant carbon-free electricity to power our province’s future.”

What Mungall didn’t say was that powering our future will be more and more about powering the natural-gas industry and LNG, something Weaver also strongly opposes.

The Clean B.C. document notes that in the Peace, “demand for electricity is growing faster than in any other part of British Columbia.” This has spurred the building of one new major transmission line known as the Dawson Creek/Chetwynd Area Transmission Project, or DCAT. That line now powers a number of gas processing plants, including the Sunrise gas plant near Dawson Creek, one of the largest such plants built in western North America in 30 years.

DCAT was built with the natural gas industry exclusively in mind. Now, a second line is slated for the same region. Known as the Peace Region Electricity Supply line (PRES), it too will supply the gas industry.

According to Clean B.C., these lines will allow natural gas companies to power their plants with “clean electricity” rather than following standard industry practice, using natural gas-powered equipment instead. By replacing gas with electricity, the government claims that “millions of tonnes of new greenhouse gas emissions” will be avoided.

The document does not say so, but the source for all of the hydroelectricity is the W.A.C Bennett dam, the first dam on the Peace River and the massive edifice that impounds Williston Lake, one of the world’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs. Also generating power and just downstream is the Peace Canyon dam. If and when completed, power produced at the $10.7-billion-and-counting Site C dam would also be part of that supply chain, thus linking destruction of some of B.C.’s richest farmlands to accelerating natural-gas production.

The document also does not include the cost to build those new transmission lines, who will pay their capital costs, or how building them helps our planet, especially when virtually all of the power carried in those lines goes to the fossil fuel industry.

DCAT’s capital cost was $300 million. PRES’s estimated cost is $285 million. There will almost certainly be cost overruns. The roughly $600 million to build those two lines gets added to a growing roster of new capital projects and upgrades.

And here’s the rub: Those costs are borne by all B.C. Hydro customers, not just the companies that the lines are largely built for. Worse, paying those bills will benefit our overheating planet not one iota.

The gas and valuable gas liquids like condensate that are “saved” by electrifying natural gas plants don’t remain in the ground. They flow to the surface along with all the other hydrocarbons that are drilled and fracked from the earth.

The government wants us to believe that using hydro power to electrify LNG production somehow reduces emissions. But all that electrification actually achieves is to save gas from being combusted in BC so that it can be piped out of the province and burned somewhere else.

All this plays out in a context where global emissions from natural gas and oil combustion continue going up, moving earth’s climate toward a dangerous and potentially irreversible tipping point.

B.C.’s 2019 budget adds further insight into the costs to be borne by B.C. taxpayers as the gas industry is electrified. Among a long list of capital projects with price tags exceeding $50 million is a new “interconnection project” involving B.C. Hydro and LNG Canada, the major LNG consortium led by Shell that proposes to build its LNG processing facility in Kitimat.

B.C. Hydro says the $82-million project involves upgrades to a substation in the Kitimat area and a new double circuit transmission line. The project is yet another reminder that when it comes to a clean, green future for our province, electrifying the gas industry is top of mind.

Clean B.C. is conspicuously silent on these costs. It also fails to mention that electrification will play out against the backdrop of vastly expanded natural gas drilling, fracking and gas production in the event that the LNG Canada plant ever materializes.

The plan is also curiously silent on Site C, the most expensive publicly funded infrastructure project in B.C.’s history. In fact, the government fails to mention the dam even once in the report’s 68 pages.

It appears increasingly that such omissions are a deliberate attempt to avoid discussing emissions. Because if sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions is truly the goal, it is climatic lunacy to build an obscenely expensive and unnecessary dam and transmission lines to power up the very industry that needs to be powered down.

Weaver knows that better than most. Clean B.C.’s architects clearly see things differently.

Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.