First Nations Buy Into Pipelines

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

“Meaningful Indigenous participation in our resource economy is maturing. At first, First Nations used to ask for compensation, the jobs, and then for the contracts that created those jobs, Now they seek purchase equity in the project itself. Soon they will create the project and seek others to invest in it. Then they will have real economic power.”

It’s taken years to get here, but there’s a new trend in Canada’s pipeline industry, and it couldn’t come soon enough. That’s because the path we’ve been on until now has been one to ruin.

On July 30, TC Energy announced it was in the process of selling 5.34 per cent of its Nova Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL) System and the Foothills Pipeline assets for a gross purchase price of $1 billion. “The Agreement is backed by the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC) and was negotiated by a consortium committee (Consortium) representing specific Indigenous Communities (Communities) across Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. This results in an implied enterprise value of approximately $1.65 billion, inclusive of the proportionate share of the Partnership Assets’ collective debt,” TC Energy said.

This comes a few months after its March 14 announcement to sell “all outstanding shares in Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Holdings Ltd. and the limited partnership interests in Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Limited Partnership (collectively, PRGT). PRGT is a wholly owned subsidiary of TC Energy and the developer of a natural gas pipeline project in British Columbia and potential delivery corridor that would further unlock Canada as a secure, affordable and sustainable source of LNG.”

The Nova system sale is significant. It’s the principal natural gas gathering system throughout Alberta and a bit into B.C. In addition to supplying Alberta with its gas needs, Nova, in turn, feeds the TC Energy Mainline. It also supplies Saskatchewan via Many Islands Pipe Lines and TransGas, both subsidiaries of SaskEnergy. And since Saskatchewan’s domestic gas production keeps falling, we now rely heavily on Alberta gas to keep our furnaces lit and our new gas fired power plants turning, keeping the lights on. When you look at the Nova map, it’s basically the map of Alberta.

Some of the most significant difficulties in getting major pipeline projects built in this country over the last 16 years has been Indigenous opposition. One of the first stories I wrote about with Pipeline News during the summer of 2008 was a First Nations protest on the Enbridge right of way at Kerrobert, complete with a teepee. That was for the Alberta Clipper project, but it was relatively quickly resolved.

Then there was Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project, which was approved by the Conservative federal government but halted by the courts because of insufficient Indigenous consultation. It was ultimately killed very early into the Trudeau-led Liberal administration, when he said, “The Great Bear Rainforest was no place for a pipeline, a crude pipeline.”

Northern Gateway would have terminated at Kitimat. Yet, curiously enough, that same forest had to be crossed to built the TC Energy Coastal GasLink project. It went grossly overbudget in no small part due to delays and resistance in every manner possible from the Wet’suweten in northern B.C. As Canadian Press reported on Dec. 11, 2023, “By the time the pipeline was finished, its estimated construction cost had ballooned from $6.6 billion to $14.5 billion.”

And then there was Trans Mountain Expansion. It had opposition from the BC government, City of Burnaby, and everyone who could apply a Sharpie marker to a Bristol board. But Indigenous opposition was a major factor. As Pipeline Online reported via the Canadian Press, “The project’s $34-billion price tag has ballooned from a 2017 estimate of $7.4 billion, with Trans Mountain Corp. blaming the increase on “extraordinary” factors including evolving compliance requirements, Indigenous accommodations, stakeholder engagement, extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

By this spring, the number was $34 billion, and I anticipate its final cost will be higher still.

Maturing

There’s been a big change in recent years, not just in pipelines, but in other energy industries like wind and solar. That change had gone from consultation to jobs to equity investment.

The word used almost always is “reconciliation.” That can be a loaded word in many ways, Some feel it will heal wounds, and right past wrongs, or at least try to. Others would say it’s a form of extortion. And some take issue with racial overtones. But here’s something I heard this week that makes a lot of sense:

“Meaningful Indigenous participation in our resource economy is maturing. At first, First Nations used to ask for compensation, the jobs, and then for the contracts that created those jobs, Now they seek purchase equity in the project itself. Soon they will create the project and seek others to invest in it. Then they will have real economic power.”

That’s what Steve Halabura, professional geologist, told me. And he would know, since he’s been working with First Nations on this economic development front.

And you see that in the timeline I laid out. The 2008 protests were very much about compensation and jobs. Trans Mountain Expansion saw significant First Nations’ owned and operated firms awarded contracts. And now, they’re buying equity positions.

You know what? If First Nations bands, and people, do indeed become owners in these resource companies and infrastructure, if it helps pay for housing and water treatment plants, if it means meaningful work and paycheques, are they likely to fight the next project tooth and nail? Or will they want to be a part of it?

And think of it this way – if we could have gotten to this point ten years ago, maybe these projects might have gone much more smoothly. Maybe their final costs wouldn’t have been double, or quadruple, the original budget. When you think of it in that perspective – if a billion dollar equity stake meant Coastal GasLink could have cost $5 billion less, would it have been worth it to bring First Nations in as equity partners?

Some will say that’s extortion. Others would say it’s justice, or reconciliation. But maybe, just maybe, this is how we move forward, and everyone in the end wins. And maybe then Canada can, once again, build great things.

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Inflation Reduction Act, Green New Deal Causing America’s Energy Crisis

Published on December 14, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Greg Blackie

Our country is facing an energy crisis. No, not because of new demand from data centers or AI. Instead, it’s because utilities in nearly every state, due to government imposed “renewable” mandates, self-imposed mandates, and the supercharging of the Green New Scam under the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” have been shutting down vital coal resources and building out almost exclusively intermittent and costly resources like solar, wind, and battery storage.

President Donald Trump understands this, and that is why on day one of his administration he declared an Energy Emergency. Then, a few months later, the President signed a trio of Executive Orders designed to keep our “beautiful, clean coal” burning and providing the reliable, baseload, and affordable electricity Americans have benefitted from for generations.

Those orders have been used to keep coal generation online that was slated to shut down in Michigan and will potentially keep two units operating that were scheduled to shut down in Colorado this December. In Arizona, however, the Cholla Power Plant in Navajo County was shuttered by the utility just weeks after Trump explicitly called out the plant for saving in a press conference.

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Unlike states with green mandates, Arizona essentially has none. Instead, our utilities, like many around the country, have self-imposed commitments to go “Net Zero” by 2050. To meet that target, they have planned to shut down all coal generation in the state by 2032 and plan to build out almost exclusively solar, wind, and battery storage to meet an expected explosive growth in demand, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. So it is no surprise that like much of the rest of the country, Arizona is facing an energy crisis.

Taking a look at our largest regulated utilities (APS, TEP, and UNS) and the largest nonprofit utility, SRP, future plans paint an alarming picture. Combined, over the next 15 years, these utilities expect to see demand increase from 19,200 MW to 28,000 MW. For reference, 1,000 MW of electricity is enough to power roughly 250,000 homes. To meet that growth in demand, however, Arizonans will only get a net increase of 989 MW of reliable generation (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) compared to 22,543 MW (or nearly 23 times as much) of intermittent solar, wind, and battery storage.

But what about all of the new natural gas coming into the state? The vast majority of it will be eaten up just to replace existing coal resources, not to bring additional affordable energy to the grid. For example, the SRP board recently voted to approve the conversion of their Springerville coal plant to natural gas by 2030, which follows an earlier vote to convert another of their coal plants, Coronado, to natural gas by 2029. This coal conversion trap leaves ratepayers with the same amount of energy as before, eating up new natural gas capacity, without the benefit of more electricity.

So, while the Arizona utilities plan to collectively build an additional 4,538 MW of natural gas capacity over the next 15 years, at the same time they will be removing -3,549 MW (all of what is left on the grid today) of coal. And there are no plans for more nuclear capacity anytime soon. Instead, to meet their voluntary climate commitments, utilities plan to saddle ratepayers with the cost and resultant blackouts of the green new scam.

It’s no surprise then that Arizona’s largest regulated utilities, APS and TEP, are seeking double digit rate hikes next year. It’s not just Arizona. Excel customers in Colorado (with a 100% clean energy commitment) and in Minnesota (also with a 100% clean energy commitment) are facing nearly double-digit rate hikes. The day before Thanksgiving, PPL customers in Rhode Island (with a state mandate of 100% renewable by 2033) found out they may see rate hikes next year. Dominion (who has a Net Zero by 2050 commitment) wanted to raise rates for customers in Virginia by 15%. Just last month, regulators approved a 9% increase. Importantly, these rate increases are to recover costs for expenses incurred years ago, meaning they are clearly to cover the costs of the energy “transition” supercharged under the Biden administration, not from increased demand from data centers and AI.

It’s the same story around the country. Electricity rates are rising. Reliability is crumbling. We know the cause. For generations, we’ve been able to provide reliable energy at an affordable cost. The only variable that has changed has been what we are choosing to build. Then, it was reliable, dispatchable power. Now, it is intermittent sources that we know cost more, and that we know cause blackouts, all to meet absurd goals of going 100% renewable – something that no utility, state, or country has been able to achieve. And we know the result when they try.

This crisis can be avoided. Trump has laid out the plan to unleash American Energy. Now, it’s time for utilities to drop their costly green new scam commitments and go back to building reliable and affordable power that generations to come will benefit from.

Greg Blackie, Deputy Director of Policy at the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. Greg graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State University with a B.S. in Political Science in 2019. He served as a policy intern with the Republican caucus at the Arizona House of Representatives and covered Arizona political campaigns for America Rising during the 2020 election cycle.

Automotive

Politicians should be honest about environmental pros and cons of electric vehicles

Published on December 13, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

According to Steven Guilbeault, former environment minister under Justin Trudeau and former member of Prime Minister Carney’s cabinet, “Switching to an electric vehicle is one of the most impactful things Canadians can do to help fight climate change.”

And the Carney government has only paused Trudeau’s electric vehicle (EV) sales mandate to conduct a “review” of the policy, despite industry pressure to scrap the policy altogether.

So clearly, according to policymakers in Ottawa, EVs are essentially “zero emission” and thus good for environment.

But is that true?

Clearly, EVs have some environmental advantages over traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. Unlike cars with engines that directly burn fossil fuels, EVs do not produce tailpipe emissions of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, and do not release greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide. These benefits are real. But when you consider the entire lifecycle of an EV, the picture becomes much more complicated.

Unlike traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, battery-powered EVs and plug-in hybrids generate most of their GHG emissions before the vehicles roll off the assembly line. Compared with conventional gas-powered cars, EVs typically require more fossil fuel energy to manufacture, largely because to produce EVs batteries, producers require a variety of mined materials including cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese and nickel, which all take lots of energy to extract and process. Once these raw materials are mined, processed and transported across often vast distances to manufacturing sites, they must be assembled into battery packs. Consequently, the manufacturing process of an EV—from the initial mining of materials to final assembly—produces twice the quantity of GHGs (on average) as the manufacturing process for a comparable gas-powered car.

Once an EV is on the road, its carbon footprint depends on how the electricity used to charge its battery is generated. According to a report from the Canada Energy Regulator (the federal agency responsible for overseeing oil, gas and electric utilities), in British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Ontario, electricity is largely produced from low- or even zero-carbon sources such as hydro, so EVs in these provinces have a low level of “indirect” emissions.

However, in other provinces—particularly Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia—electricity generation is more heavily reliant on fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, so EVs produce much higher indirect emissions. And according to research from the University of Toronto, in coal-dependent U.S. states such as West Virginia, an EV can emit about 6 per cent more GHG emissions over its entire lifetime—from initial mining, manufacturing and charging to eventual disposal—than a gas-powered vehicle of the same size. This means that in regions with especially coal-dependent energy grids, EVs could impose more climate costs than benefits. Put simply, for an EV to help meaningfully reduce emissions while on the road, its electricity must come from low-carbon electricity sources—something that does not happen in certain areas of Canada and the United States.

Finally, even after an EV is off the road, it continues to produce emissions, mainly because of the battery. EV batteries contain components that are energy-intensive to extract but also notoriously challenging to recycle. While EV battery recycling technologies are still emerging, approximately 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries, which are commonly used in EVs, are actually recycled worldwide. This means that most new EVs feature batteries with no recycled components—further weakening the environmental benefit of EVs.

So what’s the final analysis? The technology continues to evolve and therefore the calculations will continue to change. But right now, while electric vehicles clearly help reduce tailpipe emissions, they’re not necessarily “zero emission” vehicles. And after you consider the full lifecycle—manufacturing, charging, scrapping—a more accurate picture of their environmental impact comes into view.