Repsol scraps East Coast LNG project!
Sierra Club Canada countered fossil fuel lobbyists, working with our allies, making it clear to Canada’s leaders what Canadians actually thought on the issue of LNG and we executed a dynamic media campaign to push back against new LNG on the East Coast. Without government handouts, which is how too many fossil fuel projects get their start, Repsol has now given up on LNG expansion plans.
“While there are numerous other eastern terminal proposals, the Repsol project was seen as having the most potential because it was an expansion of an existing facility that wouldn’t require going through the extensive regulatory process of building from scratch,” writes Brian Platt in an article in Bloomberg.
This makes other fossil gas / liquefied natural gas plans in New Brunswick (NB), Nova Scotia (NS) and Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) far less likely to succeed.
As we wrote last year in Ipolitics: “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, proponents of Canadian liquefied natural gas were quick to hail Canada’s gas as a solution to Europe’s energy needs. Gas lobbyists dressed up plans for new East Coast export facilities in claims of “helping” Europe. But the Canadian public didn’t take the bait. A new poll shows the gas industry has failed to create the support necessary to claim these projects are popular with the Canadian public… polling by Abacus Data, released by the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, clearly illustrates that more Canadians oppose a new East Coast gas export facility due to climate concerns than support it.”
Read more about our efforts against this project and how the fossil fuel industry failed to sell people on new East Coast LNG infrastructure. Read more about why new LNG facilities are unnecessary in terms of global energy security from Svitlana Romanko (an environmental lawyer and Stand With Ukraine campaign lead) and Oleh Savytskyi (a climate and energy policy expert with the Ukrainian Climate Network) here.
Thank you again for your support, it made all the difference.