Canada’s LNG Failure Is Its Own Fault, Seven Gen Founder Says
(Bloomberg) — The Canadian natural gas industry shouldn’t blame environmentalists, First Nation communities or the government for its failure to get LNG export infrastructure built. It should blame itself.
That’s the view of Seven Generations Energy Ltd. founder Pat Carlson, who stepped down as chief executive officer of the Calgary-based natural gas producer last month. Carlson, who made community relations a hallmark of Seven Generations’ culture, says the industry needs to do a better job of involving those most affected by its operations.
Businesses can’t rely on the government to push projects past the objections of local communities, said the 63-year-old Carlson in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg News. Instead, governments should provide a final examination of operations that have already been mostly agreed on. That philosophy helped Seven Generations build its Kakwa River Project in northwest Alberta, he said. It has also helped the company’s shares outperform its peers.
“A pipeline to the Pacific and an LNG project on the Pacific, where the people along the route are involved — they’re owners, they’re builders — I don’t know that that’s been put forward,” Carlson said. “Maybe it has and I just don’t know about it, but I suspect it hasn’t, and I suspect there’s an opportunity there.”
System Failure
A project that needs government assistance to overcome local resistance represents a failure of the free-market system and a step toward a state-controlled economy, he said. And industry should work to convince environmentalists that getting Canadian natural gas to the coast fights climate change by cutting China’s dependence on dirtier coal, he said.
Carlson’s views won’t surprise those who’ve followed his career. Like many of its peers, Seven Generations helps fund hospitals and scholarships in the region where it operates, and it works to hire local contractors.
But the company also puts out an annual stakeholder report, which this year started with Carlson’s review of the last thousand years of human history and the evolution of democracy. In fact,…
