Pieridae Energy has a $10 billion idea to send natural gas to a refinery in Goldboro, Nova Scotia. It’s a rather ambitious endeavour backed by a US$4.5 billion loan guarantee from Uniper in Germany. They want natural gas that hasn’t been obtained by fracking. Most of the gas in Canada comes from fracking wells. Besides, once it’s in the pipeline, who can tell the difference?

‘Cept there isn’t a refinery in Goldboro. Unfortunately, they’re going to build it. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of investments in the project. According to Jessica Ernst it’s financed by AIMCo and about $10Billion in liabilities.

CEO Alfred Sorensen says the project will take advantage of existing pipelines so no new pipelines will be needed. It isn’t clear how all of this natural gas will be sourced. They were going to buy some of Shell’s old rusty wells and assets. However, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) blocked the licence transfers over environmental concerns.

There was a webinar held recently and uploaded to Youtube on Oct. 8. It gives a good overview of the project and has some discussion on how it could go ahead. It’s fairly long, but a presentation starting about twelve-minutes into the video sums the majority of it up nicely and it’s only takes about twenty minutes.

In this presentation it shows where a new pipeline will be needed from Quebec. This isn’t clear, as other texts have said no new pipelines are needed. click here to open the map

In some stretch of the imagination, Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet claimed sole credit for killing the Energy East pipeline. That’s disputable, but then if a new pipeline is needed for this project, perhaps he’ll get a chance to further his claim by blocking this too.

Here is what you can expect from watching the whole webinar:

Germany has now finally decided to phase out coal for 2038 – much too late, as climate activists criticise. At the same time, however, it is this delayed and inadequate coal phase-out that is being used as an opportunity to announce a new era of fossil gas. This is happening at a time when scientific evidence shows that fossil gas – especially extracted through the fracking technique – is contributing massively to global warming.Furthermore, it is now pretty clear that we have only 10 – 30 years at most to prevent the worst climate catastrophy.

Nevertheless, the German government is supporting the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline and at the same time it is promoting the construction of import terminals for fracked gas in northern Germany. In addition, the same government is providing loan guarantees for the expansion of gas infrastructure in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals abroad, e.g. in Canada.

The Canadian company Pieridae Energy is planning to build the Goldboro LNG export terminal in Nova Scotia and has already signed in 2013 a 20-year supply contract with Uniper, a company involved in the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the Wilhelmshaven LNG terminal..

Apart from the fact that Pieridae will probably have to rely on fracked gas from Canada and the USA to feed the terminal with the contractually guaranteed quantities of gas, the project has been on rather shaky financial footing for 7 years now.

The Canadian investor desperately relies on a credit loan guarantee from the German government and has even engaged a subsidiary of the state-owned bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) for lobbying the government.

This online seminar offers in particular Canadian activists the opportunity to present local perspectives and regional impacts of the project to a larger international audience. In addition, the contributions should make clear that the financially highly risky project is dependent on fracked gas from the USA and Canada and, moreover, cannot be realized at all without German support in the form of a credit guarantee from the German government. The discussion will address, among other things, the question of whether the construction of new infrastructure for fossil fuels is compatible with a reduction in the use of fossil gas in the interests of the climate targets and what role the German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) plays in financing such projects.

With:
Andy Gheorghiu, Food and Water Action Europe
Regine Richter, Urgewald
Constantin Zerger, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V.
Activists from Nova Scotia – Canada
Moderator: Nadine Bethge, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V.

License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)