Canada's LNG Touted-And Doubted-as 'Transition' Fuel as Doctors Sound the Alarm

Canada News.Net

2 days ago

Doctors and health professionals are flagging significant health risks in British Columbia and around the world as Canada's first liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes make their way toward Asian shores.
Some analysts, meanwhile, are touting the industry milestone-and more credible voices are doubting it-as a boon for global efforts to curb the greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate emergency.
LNG Canada said Monday that the vessel GasLog Glasgow has departed the northern port of Kitimat, British Columbia, full of ultra-chilled natural gas, The Canadian Press reports. LNG Canada hasn't confirmed the overall price tag for the project. But the federal government has billed it as the biggest private sector investment in Canadian history-$40 billion between the Kitimat operation, the northeast B.C. gas fields supplying it, and the pipeline in between.
Shell and four Asian companies are partners in LNG Canada, the first facility to export Canadian gas across the Pacific in the ultra-chilled state using specialized tankers. A handful of other projects are either under construction or in development on the B.C. coast.
"Cleaner energy around the world is what I think about when I think about LNG," Shell Canada country chair Stastia West said in an onstage interview at the Global Energy Show in Calgary in June.
But "clean" was not quite the adjective the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment attached to LNG in an early July release.
"The departure of this first LNG tanker marks a troubling new chapter in British Columbia's health story," family physician and CAPE President Dr. Melissa Lem said in a release. "While industry celebrates, health care professionals are bracing for the consequences of expanded fracking operations. Fracking and LNG production accelerate climate change and release harmful pollutants-including benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, and particulate matter linked with asthma, heart disease, birth defects, and childhood leukemia."
Lem said northeastern B.C. communities adjacent to fracking operations "are already experiencing these impacts, with higher rates of adverse pregnancy outcomes and respiratory diseases. Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected, with studies showing elevated levels of fracking-related chemicals in household air, water, and the bodies of pregnant women compared to unexposed populations. Health care professionals are moving away from these communities with their families because of their lived experience with the local health impacts of fracking, exacerbating issues with access to care. This represents a serious environmental justice issue that demands immediate attention."
"We're already seeing the health consequences of climate change in B.C. through more frequent and intense wildfires, heat domes, and flooding," added family doctor Dr. Bethany Ricker, a Nanaimo-based representative of CAPE-BC. "By expanding LNG production, we're locking in decades of these climate-related health emergencies."
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told the fossil energy show that Canadian oil and gas exports can be an "antidote" to the current geopolitical chaos, CP writes, while claiming outsized benefits from LNG as a climate solutions.
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"By moving more natural gas, we can also help countries transition away from higher emitting fuels, such as coal."
Smith cited a recent study by the fossil industry-funded Fraser Institute that claimed if Canada were to double its gas production, export the additional supply to Asia, and displace coal there, it would lead to an annual emissions cut of up to 630 million tonnes annually.
"That's almost 90% of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions each year," Smith said.
The primary component of natural gas, fracked or otherwise, is methane, a climate super-pollutant about 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. And actual scientists doing real research say methane releases from fracking operations, controlled or not, can make the climate impact of gas as bad as or worse than coal. But CP says the authors of the Fraser Institute study, released in May, still maintained that LNG's claims to reduce emissions elsewhere should be factored into Canadian climate policy.
"It is important to recognize that GHG emissions are global and are not confined by borders," wrote Elmira Aliakbari and Julio Mejia.
"Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide by expanding its LNG exports."
Many experts see a murkier picture.
Most credible estimates suggest that if LNG were to indeed displace coal abroad, there would be some emissions reductions, said Kent Fellows, assistant professor of economics with the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.
But the magnitude is debatable.
"Will all of our natural gas exports be displacing coal? Absolutely not. Will a portion of them be displacing coal? Probably, and it's really hard to know exactly what that number is," he said.
Fellows said there's a good chance Canadian supplies would supplant other sources of gas from Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East, perhaps making it a wash emissions-wise. He said the Canadian gas could actually be worse from an emissions standpoint, depending on how the competing supply moves. LNG is more energy intensive than pipeline shipment because the gas needs to be liquefied and moved on a ship.
In China, every type of energy is in demand. So instead of displacing coal, LNG would likely just be added to the mix, Fellows added.
"Anyone who's thinking about this as one or the other is thinking about it wrong," Fellows said.
A senior analyst with Investors for Paris Compliance, which aims to hold Canadian publicly-traded companies to their net-zero promises, said he doubts a country like India would see the economic case for replacing domestically produced coal with imported Canadian gas.
"Even at the lowest price of gas, it's still multiple times the price," said Michael Sambasivam. "You'd need some massive system to provide subsidies to developing countries to be replacing their coal with a fuel that isn't even really proven to be much greener."
And even in that case, "it's not as if they can just flip a switch and take it in," he added.
"There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to take in LNG as well as to use it. You have to build import terminals. You have to refit your power terminals."
Moreover, the world is not many months away from a global glut of LNG that will further erode demand for Canadian gas. "As pointed out by the IEA [last month], we are at the cusp of 'the largest capacity wave in any comparable period in the history of LNG markets,'" wrote Alexandra Scott, senior climate diplomacy expert with Italy's ECCO climate think tank, and Luca Bergamaschi, the organization's co-founding executive director. "This would have profound impact on global gas markets at a time when major gas consumers, namely Europe and China, show trends of much lower demand than expected, as both blocs electrify their economy and increase efficiency."
What LNG would be competing head-to-head with, Sambasivam told CP, is renewable energy.
And if there were any emissions reductions abroad as a result of the coal-to-gas switch, Sambasivam said he doesn't see why a Canadian company should get the credit.
"Both parties are going to want to claim the emissions savings and you can't claim those double savings," he said.
There's also a "jarring" double-standard at play, he said, as industry players have long railed against environmental reviews that factor in emissions from the production and combustion of the oil and gas a pipeline carries, saying only the negligible emissions from running the infrastructure itself should be considered.
Devyani Singh, an investigative researcher at Stand.earth who ran for the Greens in last year's B.C. election, said arguments that LNG is a green fuel are undermined by the climate impacts of producing, liquefying, and shipping it. Methane that leaks from tanks, pipelines, and wells has been a major issue that industry, government, and environmental groups have been working to tackle.
"Have we actually accounted for all the leakage along the whole pipeline? Have we accounted for the actual under-reporting of methane emissions happening in B.C. and Canada?" asked Singh.
Even if LNG does have an edge over coal, thinking about it as a "transition" or "bridge" fuel at this juncture is a problem, she said.
"The time for transition fuels is over," she said. "Let's just be honest-we are in a climate crisis where the time for transition fuels was over a decade ago."
The main body of this report was first published by The Canadian Press on June 29, 2025.