PROVINCIAL GAS

For a politician with strong pro-business credentials, New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord is taking an awful pounding from his country’s business interests. He’s even been called – an indication of the Canadian fondness for punning – provincial.

The issue is natural gas, of which enormous amounts are being pumped from offshore fields in Nova Scotia, piped across Atlantic Canada and sold in the United States. Plans are under way to double the capacity of the pipeline and thus double the American exports.

Mr. Lord is not opposed to these exports, or even to increasing them. He is, however, deeply concerned that Canada is selling off a precious resource for short-term royalty gain when it should be planning for its long-term economic development. He has intervened before Canada’s National Energy Board, arguing that any increased gas production should be exported only after Canada’s needs are met. It’s not a matter of Canada first, he says, but of Canada, too.

His argument is strengthened by the map of the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline that snakes across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine. With the exception of laterals providing gas to the cities of Moncton and Saint John, much of New Brunswick has no access to this clean and economical energy source. At least two private-sector companies are interested in building laterals to rural, struggling northern New Brunswick and on to eastern Quebec, but these lines will not be built if there is no gas to fill them.

The situation in Maine is similar.

The pipeline built across this state in 1999 serves a few cities where convenient, but not rural, struggling regions – the goal, after all, was the huge energy market south of Maine. Washington County, for example, has more pipeline than any other county in the state, yet state government did not even attempt to negotiate for access. There was no recognition that the land that lies between producer and customer is as much a commodity as the gas itself.

Now there is a new opportunity to bring the benefits of natural gas to more of Maine. The expansion plans will go forward – in this country, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission already has approved pipeline extensions in southern New England; there is little doubt of approval for increasing the capacity of the pipeline in Canada though additional compression stations.

Before the final permits are granted and hundreds of millions of dollars in construction activity gets under way, state government should work with Maritimes & Northeast and the relevant regulatory agencies to ensure expanded access here. To paraphrase the provincial Mr. Lord, it’s a matter of Maine, too.