Energy East: Shovels In The Ground By 2019?
SAINT JOHN–Over 200 people streamed through an Energy East open house is Saint John Thursday night. They came to find out more about the $16 billion project that would bring over a million barrels of Canadian oil to a marine terminal and the Irving Oil refinery in Saint John each day.
TransCanada, the company behind Energy East, is hoping the project can get through the regulatory process and begin construction. It recently filed an amended application to the National Energy Board which included a number of changes to the project, including dropping a planned marine terminal in Quebec.
“We are aiming for a 2020 in-service date,” TransCanda’s Tim Duboyce told Huddle. “Our target remains 2020 even with those changes recently announced. So if we get the go ahead it would be shovels in the ground in 2019 with basically two full years of construction.”
The company will be submitting a final supplemental report to the National Energy Board (NEB) by March 31. From there it is up to the NEB to decide what the next steps will be.
“There are significant advantages to having pipeline capacity coming in and connecting to a facility like Irving Oil’s refinery. It’s the biggest refinery in Canada and it’s not connected to a pipeline,” said Duboyce. “This is a really important way of helping offer a competitive, safe and reliable supply of Canadian oil, and possibly offset all or most of the imported oil that is coming in right now and sending billions of dollars out of the Canadian economy.”
Saint John-based Irving Oil is a partner with TransCanada on a proposed $300 million marine terminal that will be supplied by the Energy East pipeline.
“We import most of our crude today from production sources around the world, so having access to a pipeline the size of Energy East to deliver 1.1 million barrels of crude oil to Saint John every day is going to create an attractive source of crude oil for our refinery,” said Irving Oil’s Andrew Carson.
“We think it is a really important project,” he said. “As a refinery you’re always trying to find the most attractive and economically efficient sources of crude oil. Having that scalable way of accessing crude oil production from Alberta and Saskatchewan is something that is very important to ensuring that we always have efficient economic access to growing sources of crude oil production.”
TransCanada says the Energy East project will create over 3,700 full-time direct and indirect jobs in New Brunswick every year during the construction phase.
Duboyce also points to the longer term benefits for New Brunswick.
“During construction and the first 20 years of service, there will be $850 million in new tax revenues in the province for municipalities and the provincial government,” he said. “That’s a significant amount of money that can be used for programs.”
Despite the economic benefits, the project is controversial. First Nations communities in New Brunswick have expressed opposition to Energy East and recently a group of Quebec municipal politicians came out against the pipeline, saying there was not enough economic benefit for Quebec and expressing concern about the environmental risks.