Alberta’s New Pipeline Pitch: Bad for Business, Disastrous for Climate, Analysts Say

Climate advocates and policy analysts are taking Alberta Premier Danielle Smith back to business school after she promised to pitch a new westbound oil pipeline to the federal Major Projects Office by May 2026.

On Wednesday, Smith committed to a “West Coast oil pipeline do-over that hinges on First Nations getting onboard early and Ottawa reversing a tanker ban that would make such a project unworkable on the northern B.C. coast,” The Canadian Press reports. Once the province has put up $14 million for early regulatory work, “the hope is that Alberta’s kick-start will instil enough investor confidence for the private sector to eventually take over and potentially for First Nations to take ownership stakes,” the news agency writes.

“What stands before us right now is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unlock our wealth and resources and become a world-leading energy superpower,” Smith told media Wednesday.

The project is the latest in a series of efforts by Alberta governments to support a fossil industry that can’t attract the capital for the expanded infrastructure it says it needs. In 2018, then-NDP premier Rachel Notley leased a fleet of rail cars and signed contracts with railways to move the province’s oil to markets, CBC recalls. Her United Conservative Party successor, Jason Kenney, eventually cancelled those deals at a cost of nearly $1 billion.

Instead, Kenney gambled and lost another $1.3 billion on the failed Keystone XL pipeline before U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled the project on his first day in office.

The latest plan from Smith earned swift rebukes, with Aly Hyder Ali, program manager, oil and gas at Environmental Defence Canada, declaring Smith’s declaration “nothing but a farce”. He cited estimates that place the cost of a new pipeline at up to $50 billion over the 10 years it would take to complete the project.

“There is no private company behind the project, no committed investors, and no clear plan—just a province stepping into a paperwork process, desperate to keep the idea of a new oil pipeline alive,” Ali said in a statement. By the time the project could be completed, “global oil demand is projected to have peaked and begun a slow, steady decline, resulting in another stranded asset. According to recent analysis, 66% of new capital investments in oil and gas infrastructure would fail to deliver returns and become stranded assets as the world continues to accelerate towards a global energy transition.”

Janetta McKenzie, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, said Smith should heed the private sector’s caution about new oil infrastructure, noting that industry has refused to buy in “after months of pressure from the Alberta government to bring forward a proposal, and offers of concierge service” from the federal government.

“If a new pipeline promised to be profitable, there would be a private sector proposal in some phase of development,” McKenzie said. “It’s economically perverse that the provincial government will spend public money on a project the private sector has balked at, while simultaneously sabotaging private investment in renewable energy projects the market is demanding.”

She added that a new Alberta oil pipeline would be a “multi-decade gamble prefaced on the hope that the world will not reduce oil consumption, despite the advent of lower-cost alternatives and the increasing risk of dangerous climate change. It is a bet that private sector proponents are not willing to take on.”

“This talk of a new pipeline was always only a distraction meant to provide cover for funnelling as much public money towards oil and gas corporate profits as possible,” Conor Curtis, head of communications at Sierra Club Canada, said in a release. “Oil and gas corporations know their industry is dying economically, and even when production increases they still cut jobs.”

In mid-September, Simon Fraser University political scientist Anil “Andy” Hira said there’s only one way private investors would agree to go along with the kind of plan Smith is now proposing. “The private sector is in no way willing to take on the risk of building another pipeline,” he told The Energy Mix. “So unless the federal government steps in and decides to put in massive amounts of money, these things are not going to get built.”

Toronto Star national columnist Althia Raj says Smith’s purpose with her announcement is to dare Prime Minister Mark Carney to defy her, “throwing a bone to separatists in her province, and inflaming a divisive cross-country debate” over pipelines and climate change that the federal government has tried hard to tamp down.

“This is a test of whether Canada works as a country,” Smith told media. “Because if we can’t build with the collaboration of the federal government and between provinces, if it’s everybody gets to get their products going to market except Alberta, that’s not a country.”

Within minutes of the announcement, Smith was on notice that the Indigenous support she’d framed as a condition for the project will not be forthcoming, CP reports. Marilyn Slett, chief councillor of the Heiltsuk Tribal Council and president of the Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative, recalled First Nations’ decades-long fight to win a federal moratorium on oil tankers in their waters.

“As the rights and titleholders of B.C. North and Central Coast and Haida Gwaii, we must inform Premier Smith once again that there is no support from coastal First Nations for a pipeline and an oil tankers project in our coastal waters,” Slett said.

B.C. Premier David Eby told media that Smith wasn’t pitching a real project.

“Premier Smith continues to advance a project that is entirely taxpayer funded, has no private sector proponent,” he said, adding that he would work with Alberta on projects “that have real private sector backing, that aren’t entirely taxpayer-funded wedge politics.” He added that the proposal is “incredibly alarming to British Columbians”.

But in Calgary Wednesday, fossil industry advocates were praising Smith’s move.

“It’s bold, it’s aggressive, and it’s what’s needed to be done in order to get this country moving forward economically,” Robert Cooper of Calgary-based investment firm Acumen Capital Partners told CBC, claiming that federal policies—not increasingly shaky global markets—have made it impossible for oil pipelines to attract investment.

Rafi Tahmazian, a retired energy portfolio manager with Canoe Financial, said Smith “should be praised” for championing the industry, CBC says, but compared the venture to the Trudeau government’s hugely expensive purpose of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. “If the province has to be involved, that’d be a shame. It’d be too bad,” Tahmazian said, since governments have “no business” building or operating pipelines.

The Star’s Raj says Carney “seemed to be pouring cold water on Smith’s plans” on Wednesday, telling a Liberal Party caucus meeting the proposal wouldn’t make the second series of nation-building projects that he’s expected to announce later this year. But she recalls moments when both Carney and Eby have sent out mixed messages on pipeline development.

In the end, “none of these leaders—Smith, Eby, or Carney—can all get what they want (if they can figure out what that even is),” she writes. “And at least one of these politicians is painting the other into a box. The question is, who?”

Cover photo:  Chris Schwarz, Government of Alberta/flickr