Environmental groups denounce the “absurdity” of the environmental assessment of the Bay du Nord project while the quantity of oil which could be produced is revised upwards by the Norwegian oil giant Equinor.
The federal environmental assessment of the Bay du Nord project was not carried out taking into account the amount of oil that could be extracted from the Atlantic Ocean, which constitutes an additional reason to demand its withdrawal, according to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
It is no longer “about 300 million barrels of crude oil” that Bay du Nord could produce, as indicated in the project summary presented by the company Equinor in June 2018 to the Impact Assessment Agency. from Canada.
Three weeks after winning Environment Department approval for the oil project off Newfoundland, Equinor spokeswoman Alex Collins told The Canadian Press on Thursday that the company now believes that can extract “more than 500 million barrels” of crude oil.
This 67% increase in production estimated by the company was first reported by Radio-Canada on Thursday.
Equinor has confirmed to The Canadian Press that its exploration work is not complete. It could therefore revise, once again, its estimates upwards, and by a lot if we are to believe a press release published by Energy NL, an association of companies in the energy sector in November 2021.
Al Cook, one of the company’s executives, told investors at the time that “Bay du Nord had the potential to become bigger than Bacalhau”, a Brazilian oil project which would have a reserve “of one billion barrels “.
An evaluation that does not take into account the quantity
Asked whether Environment and Climate Change Canada’s authorization of the project endorses unlimited oil production by Equinor, the department replied that the “federal environmental assessment” of Bay du Nord was based on “the location of the project, number of years, components and activities” and not “how much oil the project was expected to produce”.
In a statement to The Canadian Press, the Department of the Environment said the assessment also considered “the possibility that the proponent will find additional oil reserves” and that “the potential impacts of development beyond beyond the limits of the central development zone” were also taken into consideration.
Greenpeace Canada calls assessment ‘absurd’
“We have to stop this project, we have to have a real evaluation that allows us to understand what the overall impact is. It’s completely absurd to have a project go ahead without having had the real picture of how catastrophic this project will be,” said Patrick Bonin, spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada.
He considers that it is “problematic” that we do not know the estimate of the quantity of greenhouse gases that Bay du Nord will produce, in a context where “we do not know if it is 300 million barrels, 500 million barrels, even a billion barrels” of oil that will be produced.
The same goes for environmentalist Gretchen Fitzgerald of the Sierra Club, who argues that “the inflated estimates of projected Bay du Nord oil production are alarming for our climate and show the absurdity of the environmental assessment carried out for this project. “.
According to Equinor, the project will emit 8 kg of CO2 for each barrel of oil extracted and the Ministry of the Environment argues that this oil will be “10 times less polluting” than that extracted from the oil sands.
But Greenpeace denounces that the government omits to explain that the extraction of this type of oil “represents approximately 10% of GHG emissions linked to oil”, while 90% will occur when the oil is burned.
The commissioning of the Bay du Nord project, which should last 30 years, is scheduled for 2028.
“On the one hand, Canada claims to want to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and here we have a company that keeps inflating a project that was already completely unacceptable, for which we already had 300 million reasons to reject it and there, we have reached 500 million reasons”, summed up Patrick Bonin.
The decision by the Ministry of the Environment to allow this mega oil project continues to be criticized by environmental groups, especially since it took place last April, a few days after the publication of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called new investments in the fossil fuel sector “moral and economic folly”.
Bay du Nord would be Canada’s first deepwater project to produce oil, with wells around 1,200 meters deep pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day.
Led by oil giant Equinor, the project is expected to pump billions into Newfoundland and Labrador’s coffers.