Today, Christy Clark’s government provided talking points to favoured media about the province’s financial report to September 30, the second fiscal quarter. According to Global’s Keith Baldrey, natural gas royalties are down dramatically from forecasts. He tweeted “it’s a continuing downward trend that’s worth pointing out.”

I asked – without response – if Baldrey had noted that oil and rights rights sales have also trended downward, while production subsidies have gone in the opposite direction.

It surprises no one that the pot of LNG gold promised three years ago is proven to be as elusive as the treasure a leprechaun hides at rainbow’s end. What should surprise though is that BC’s natural gas industry is providing little current value to the province’s treasury. What it is contributing is unmeasured pollution. In this province, oil and gas production is almost unregulated; the government having eliminated most of its capacity to monitor and evaluate activities of the resource companies. By no coincidence, these corporations have contributed almost $20 million to the BC Liberal Party since 2005.

Arriving in Ottawa for the meeting of First Ministers, Clark, a politician who never utters truth except by accident, said:

We’ve had a black eye for a long time on environmental matters and we have not deserved it.

She’s a person who covers eyes tightly and tells the world she can see no evil.

BC Ministry of Natural Gas Development Summary of Shale Gas Development 2014:

Shale gas prospects in Northeast British Columbia continued to be the focus of industry…

Almost 90% of wells drilled in British Columbia are now targeting unconventional gas, with British Columbia’s world-class shale gas plays, such as the Horn River Basin, the Cordova Embayment, the Liard Basin and the Montney play trend, at the forefront of this activity…

Geoscience BC:

The Montney Shale Gas Play in northeast British Columbia is a world-class unconventional natural gas resource. Operations in the Montney are moving into development drilling, which will increase the demand for water and deep sites for the disposal of fluids…

Fracking, Site C and the mystery of Hudson’s Hope water contamination, Damien Gillis, Common Sense Canadian, October 30, 2015:

A series of landslides above the northeast BC community of Hudson’s Hope has been dumping contaminated soils into several local creeks, extending now to the Peace River. Local landowners whose water supply has been affected are demanding answers…

Since the summer of 2014, the ongoing slides have spewed sediment laced with toxic heavy metals – including lead, arsenic, barium, cadmium and lithium – into Brenot Creek, which flows into Lynx Creek, which in turn feeds into the Peace River. Large bars of sediment have formed in Brenot and Lynx Creeks and contaminated water has now nearly reached another major river in the area…

The top 10 air polluters in B.C., Larry Pynn & Chad Skelton, Vancouver Sun, February 2015:

Spectra Energy’s Pine River gas plant in northeast B.C. is far and away the province’s biggest single emitter of major air pollutants, according to a Vancouver Sun analysis of Environment Canada’s annual national pollutant release inventory.

Spectra Energy vice-president of external affairs Gary Weilinger said the company “meets or exceeds” provincial air pollution standards…

BC’s Dirty Secret, Dogwood Initiative:

If mined and burned, the total heat-trapping pollution from the reserves of BC’s proposed and operating coal mines will be approximately 14.8 billion tonnes. This would amount to an unbelievable 6.35 per cent of the total heat-trapping pollution scientists believe humanity can emit globally between now and 2100. Put another way, it is equivalent to adding almost 2.8 billion additional passenger cars to the road. That’s almost 3.5 times the total number of cars on the road worldwide today.

A bridge to nowhere: methane emissions and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas, Robert Howarth, Cornell University, April 2014:

In April 2011, we published the first peer-reviewed analysis of the greenhouse gas footprint (GHG) of shale gas, concluding that the climate impact of shale gas may be worse than that of other fossil fuels such as coal and oil because of methane emissions…

Using these new, best available data and a 20-year time period for comparing the warming potential of methane to carbon dioxide, the conclusion stands that both shale gas and conventional natural gas have a larger GHG than do coal or oil, for any possible use of natural gas…

…While it is true that less carbon dioxide is emitted per unit energy released when burning natural gas compared to coal or oil, natural gas is composed largely of methane, which itself is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Methane is far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than is carbon dioxide, and so even small rates of methane emission can have a large influence on the greenhouse gas footprints (GHGs) of natural gas use…

When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field…

Natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal per unit of energy when burned, but separate teams at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded last year that methane emissions from shale gas are much larger than previously thought…

…“a big part of it is just raw gas that is leaking from the infrastructure”. Their range of 2.3–7.7% loss, with a best guess of 4%, is slightly higher than Cornell’s estimate of 2.2–3.8% for shale-gas drilling and production. It is also higher than calculations by the EPA, which revised its methodology last year and roughly doubled the official US inventory of emissions from the natural-gas industry over the past decade. Howarth says the EPA methodology translates to a 2.8% loss…

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