Oil platform off Newfoundland | Ottawa still postpones its decision on Bay du Nord

Ottawa is once again postponing its decision on the oil and gas extraction platform project off the coast of Newfoundland.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
The Press

The government “has extended the deadline for the Minister of Environment and Climate Change by 40 days [Steven Guilbeault] to decide whether the project is likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects,” Ottawa said Friday afternoon.

The Bay du Nord project, by the Norwegian Equinor, consists of building a floating oil and gas extraction facility in the Flemish Pass, 500 kilometers from St. John’s.

With an expected life of 30 years, Bay du Nord would produce about 1 billion barrels of oil, according to the Oil and Gas Industries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Minister Guilbeault was originally scheduled to make his decision in December, but he then extended the deadline for doing so by 90 days.

It is urgent to turn our backs on fossil fuels to limit the impacts of the climate crisis, recalled Monday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent report.

This report “only reinforces” the government’s desire to take stronger measures to fight against global warming and adapt to it, said Minister Guilbeault in the wake of its publication.

Calls to reject the project

This new deadline to decide the fate of the Bay du Nord project must be used to find something better, say Équiterre and Greenpeace Canada.

“The government must take advantage of this additional time to announce, as of the next federal budget, significant funds to diversify the Newfoundland economy and create green jobs in order to ensure that the transition leaves no one behind” , declared Patrick Bonin, head of the climate-energy campaign for Greenpeace.

High school and CEGEP students who were demonstrating on Friday in Montreal as part of their weekly climate strike called for the project to be rejected.

They again went to Mr. Guilbeault’s constituency office, where they were able to speak with the Minister’s team – the latter was not there.

“We hope that after hearing us, Minister Guilbeault and his team will make the right decision; and if they still need to hear us, we will be there every Friday to militate, with our placards and our slogans”, declared to The Press Ève Claveau, from the group Pour le futur Montréal.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey was quick to react to the postponement of the decision, calling Bay du Nord “a valuable project that will play a key role in helping [la] province to meet global demand for responsible oil while achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

“Our oil and gas industry […] can be part of the solution as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy,” he said in a written statement.

“Inconsistent” with Canada’s Commitments

Bay du Nord “is incompatible with Canada’s national and global climate commitments,” wrote about 100 social and environmental groups and a dozen academics from across the country earlier this week in an open letter calling for the rejection of the project.

The missive, co-signed in particular by the Quebec Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Federation of Quebec Workers (FTQ), also deplored that the project is in contradiction with “Canada’s commitment to cap emissions from the sector oil and gas industry, is based on a seriously flawed environmental impact study and does not provide[sse] Newfoundland and Labrador does not have the support needed to transition workers to a prosperous and clean economy”.

Critics point out that the extraction forecast of 300 million barrels has tripled since the environmental assessment of the project, which was also carried out under the old Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and not news Impact Assessment Actwhich requires that all projects be assessed on their impact on Canada’s climate commitments.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans stated in its scientific review of the environmental assessment that it had identified numerous errors and omissions in the documentation cited by the proponent, which “significantly undermined the reliability and credibility of the assessment process”.

The greenhouse gas emissions that Bay du Nord would generate would be equivalent to adding 7 to 10 million gasoline cars to the roads or building 8 to 10 new coal-fired power plants, the signatories of the letter calculate .

The project thus goes against the recommendations of the International Energy Agency, which advocates “ending the expansion of oil, gas and coal production and infrastructure and accelerating the global transition to renewable energy,” they add.