NEB announces timeline for Energy East decision

[Oscar]

NEB announces timeline for Energy East decision

[ http://canadians.org/blog/neb-announces ... t-decision ]

April 27, 2016 - 8:25 am

The Council of Canadians Fredericton chapter protesting the Energy East pipeline during a Trudeau election campaign appearance in their community, Sept. 8, 2015.

We now know more about the timeline for the Energy East pipeline.

The Canadian Press reports, "The National Energy Board's final report on the Energy East pipeline project should be completed by March 2018, the federal regulator announced [on April 26]. Consultations with communities along the proposed pipeline route will begin this August and a preliminary timeline has the report being issued 19 months later. The fate of the pipeline ultimately rests with the federal government, which will take the NEB's final report into account before announcing a decision on the project."

According to an NEB media release, the schedule may be as follows:

Mid-May 2016 -- Filing of Consolidated Application by Energy East Pipeline Ltd.
Early June 2016 -- Issuance of List of Participants
Mid-June 2016 -- Issuance of Hearing Order (including completeness determination)
August-December 2016 -- Panel Sessions in communities along pipeline route
January-May 2017 -- Written Process for Participants
Mid 2017 -- Draft Conditions for Comment
November-December 2017 -- Final Argument
March 2018 -- NEB Report to Governor in Council [which is a term for the federal cabinet]

In April 2015, TransCanada projected that the pipeline would be in service in 2020.

The Council of Canadians opposes the Energy East pipeline.

If approved, the 4,500 kilometre pipeline would move 1.1 million barrels of oil per day. It would cross about 2,900 waterways and put at risk the source of drinking water for about 5 million people. The crude production needed to fill the Energy East pipeline would generate an additional 30 to 32 million tonnes of carbon pollution each year — the equivalent of adding more than seven million cars to our roads. It would spur 650,000 to 750,000 barrels per day of additional production from the tar sands. That would mean about a 40 per cent expansion of the tar sands. Nearly all of the 1.1 million barrels a day of crude oil the pipeline would carry would be exported unrefined. Those exports would increase the number of oil tankers in the Bay of Fundy from 115 to 281 a year. Right whales in the Bay of Fundy are already stressed from current levels of traffic and this would worsen that situation.

Science has told us that no more than 7.5 billion barrels of oil can be extracted from the tar sands over the next 35 years to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The Energy East pipeline would move 1,100,000 barrels of oil a day. That means about 401,500,000 barrels per year. If the limit that can be drawn from the tar sands is 7,500,000,000 then that limit would be reached in about 19 years. That means Canada would hit its carbon budget within two decades with only the Energy East pipeline (no other pipelines, no other tar sands production). It would be even fewer years with a 1.5 degrees Celsius limit committed to in the Paris climate agreement. As such, the pipeline is fundamentally incompatible with the imperative of limiting global warming.

In December 2014, Justin Trudeau commented, "I hope [TransCanada] will develop a means to reassure and demonstrate that [Energy East] can be done in a responsible fashion." And in November 2015, the Globe and Mail reported, "The Liberals under Mr. Trudeau have supported TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone project, which offered Canadian oil producers a bigger conduit to ship their product to the U.S. market, but [foreign affairs minister Stephane] Dion said they also back another TransCanada crude export proposal: the Energy East pipeline. There has been confusion over the Liberal policy on Energy East ... but Mr. Dion said the government is willing to get behind the project. 'We support this … but we want that to be done properly...'"

For more on our campaign to stop the Energy East pipeline, please click here:
[ http://canadians.org/energyeast ]

Brent Patterson's blog
Political Director of the Council of Canadians
[ http://canadians.org/blogs/brent-patterson ]

[Oscar]

The National Energy Board Is a Mess, Shut It Down (Cartoon is great . . . ! See Original URL)

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/07/NE ... ign=070916 ]

Time to lay rest to this obsolete service agency for a last-century industry.

By Mitchell Beer and Chris Wood , TheTyee.ca September 7, 2016

Mitchell Beer is a president of Ottawa-based Smarter Shift and curator of The Energy Mix.
Chris Wood is a veteran freelance journalist, Tyee Solutions editor, and assistant curator of The Energy Mix.

Governance theory tells us that the National Energy Board — like scores of other quasi-independent public agencies — exists to make expert, impartial decisions in the public’s best interests. Cynics would add that its other key role is to protect the government of the day from being embroiled in unpopular decisions.

The NEB seems to be botching both tasks. Its bizarre behaviour has shredded its credibility. It has been caught holding secret ex parte tête-a-têtes [ http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/08 ... ng-charest ] with energy lobbyists, covering up its own mistakes with liberal use of the email “delete” function [ http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/03 ... ddle-night ] and scarpering from the public at meetings in communities as small as Bella Bella, B.C. [ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... -1.1289416 ], and as large as Montreal. [ http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ ... -1.3739215 ].

Its disarray now threatens key parts of the government’s core agenda: achieving meaningful carbon emission reductions while not repeating the generational mistake an earlier Trudeau made over energy in Alberta.

Even if it hadn’t given up on serving either a publicly or politically useful purpose, it would still be time to put the National Energy Board down.

The NEB is obsolete, an anachronism, a captive service agency [ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/06/17/NEB/ ] for one particularly toxic, last-century industry, rather than a police force for the public interest. Increasingly, it’s also a laughingstock.

The National Energy Board as currently constituted is not just beyond saving. It poses a real and present threat to Canada’s energy development, economic prosperity, social cohesion and institutional credibility, to say nothing of future generations’ hopes for a tolerable climate.

Enough already. It’s time to call time on an agency created in the age of Sputnik. The Board is hardwired by legislation written in 1959 to see energy solely in terms of what was available in the middle of the last century, and to be blind to the new energy sources and systems of the current century.

As an urgent priority at the next sitting of Parliament, the government should use its majority to stop the collapse of credible oversight of Canada’s strategic energy sector. It should pass emergency legislation to:

•Abolish the National Energy Board;
•Name a temporary panel drawn from the federal judiciary to oversee its essential functions, and;
•Launch a public, from-the-ground up process to design a replacement agency that is credible, competent and ready for a more complex future.

The NEB’s dated obsession with hydrocarbons is burned into its institutional DNA. It was torqued tighter by the Harper government, which freed it to dismiss natural security concerns, avoid the dissenting public and say “yes” even faster to fossil fuel projects. [ http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/03/25/Natio ... rgy-Board/ ]

The predictable result: an agency in shambles, caught up in ethical scandals and increasingly divorced from the reality of global energy policy, reeling from errors of its own making and lacking a constituency outside the fossil industry.

MORE:

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/07/NE ... ign=070916 ]

[Oscar]

National energy regulator to replace Energy East reviewers following complaints

[ http://calgaryherald.com/business/energ ... complaints ]

THE CANADIAN PRESS Published on: September 9, 2016 | Last Updated: September 9, 2016 3:09 PM MDT

OTTAWA — The National Energy Board has sidelined all three Energy East reviewers following complaints that two of them met privately with a TransCanada consultant last year and discussed the proposed oil pipeline.

The Calgary-based national energy regulator says it has also limited the duties of board chairman Peter Watson and vice-chair Lyne Mercier, who will not be involved in choosing the new panel to resume the Energy East pipeline hearings at a later date.

Media reports this summer revealed that Mercier and board member Jacques Gauthier, both of whom were assigned to the Energy East hearings, met privately in January 2015 with former Quebec premier Jean Charest, who was a paid consultant for TransCanada Corp at the time.

Late last month, the federally mandated and government-appointed energy regulator suspended the fledgling hearings into the proposed, 4,500-kilometre oil pipeline.

More than 50 environmental and governance advocates this week urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to scrap the whole NEB review process and start over with reviews on Energy East and the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in B.C. [ http://calgaryherald.com/business/energ ... y-projects ]

But Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr says that, while an overhaul of the energy regulator is slated for the longer term, existing major oil infrastructure bids will be assessed under the law as it currently exists.

“It’s up to the National Energy Board to determine the way it governs itself,” said Carr.

“In the longer term, the government of Canada will look at the mandate of the National Energy Board, to look at its corporate governance, to look at its relationship with the government of Canada. But we will now operate under the law as it exists and the National Energy Board will have to take a decision in this matter.”

TransCanada spokesman Tim Duboyce said the NEB hearings are an important way to help Canadians better understand the $15.7-billion project.

“We look forward to the sessions resuming and a respectful and constructive dialogue with Canadians about Energy East,” said Duboyce.

But the public dispute over the panellists’ behaviour further clouds a regulatory and review system that has been the subject of fierce complaints for years from both environmental advocates and industry.

MORE:

[ http://calgaryherald.com/business/energ ... complaints ]