CALGARY C The nation’s Energy Board shouldn’t make a decision on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project “by a show of hands,” an attorney for any number of Canada’s largest oil companies argued Wednesday.
Don Davies, acting for Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc., Imperial Oil Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc. and others, said the NEB panel should weigh the advantages of the pipeline against both the perils of a potential spill and the risk-mitigation measures that Kinder Morgan Inc. has planned for that line.
Noting the project faces opposition, Davies said the pipeline expansion, which would add 590,000 barrels each day of pipeline capacity between Alberta and metro Vancouver, could be built in wherein satisfies environmental concerns.
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“In a resourceful country like Canada, this can be made to happen,” he said, and dismissed the argument the the easy way avoid a pipeline spill isn’t to construct the work whatsoever.
“If all of us took that approach, none of us would wake up in the morning,” Davies said.
Davies, like the lawyer for that Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers on Tuesday, asked the NEB to approve the line as domestic energy companies have demonstrated a fiscal need for the project.
BP Canada a lawyer Bernette Ho said Wednesday that, around the existing pipeline between Alberta and Burnaby, B.C., interest in the line’s capacity far outstrips supply on “the only pipeline system transporting crude oil towards the West Coast.”
Davies also defended the NEB process – which has been widely criticized during the final hearings on the project – and said the nation’s regulator comes with the power and the responsibility to determine if the project is incorporated in the public interest, regardless of the views expressed by other interveners that only the general public itself can consent to the work.
gmorgan@nationalpost.com
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