Canada enters the global LNG race

Owing to social, political and geographical factors, Canadian LNG projects are a complex proposition versus competing facilities on the US Gulf of Mexico

On 1 July—Canada Day—the first cargo left LNG Canada’s new production facility at Kitimat on the Pacific coast, bound for South Korea. This milestone comes a decade after British Columbia (BC) became ground zero for potential Canadian LNG development. At one point, more than 20 projects were proposed and the BC government was already spending expected tax revenues before any final investment decisions (FID) had been made. The biggest challenge for developers then was managing expectations. In the end, only two projects survived the early phase of LNG enthusiasm, as many were shelved due to project economics and a difficult investment climate. The largest of these is LNG Canada (14mt/yr) at K