On low natural gas prices: Frontier Centre for Public Policy

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

To say that “natural gas is a dying commodity” takes either some world-class mental dishonesty, disturbingly blind faith in policy over reality, or some kind of “clouds hate me” philosophical stance on life.

Is there any critical industrial material as bizarre as natural gas?

The stuff holds almost zero interest for the general public, for the same reason no one is interested in the sound of a washing machine. Both boring. Both ubiquitous. Natural gas isn’t even sold on Amazon. But forty-six percent of American homes use natural gas for heat, and surely more in Canada.

But consider the storm below the surface. Traders love it, because it is one of the most volatile commodities in existence, and volatility means trading profits. The volatility, at the slightest provocation, is almost unbelievable at times. The weather pattern shifts for three weeks out over a portion of the US and boom – the entire forward 18 months of prices can collapse or soar.

In the bigger picture though, natural gas today in North America trades at close to the same price it did a quarter century ago – not inflation adjusted, just the same old nominal dollar value, which is astonishing since global gas demand has increased by 60 percent in that time.

Natural gas is a critical fuel for much of the world, and usage is growing, particularly the relatively new field of LNG. According to the Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker website, which doesn’t even like the stuff, there are a total of 2,449 significant pipeline projects underway in the world for a total of 1.2 million kilometers (and that’s the big pipe, not the little straws that go to your house). There are 238 LNG import terminals and 189 export trains in development globally. One hundred and thirty countries either have natural gas systems or are constructing them.

Traders, consumers and businesses love the stuff even if they don’t say it often enough, while others loathe it because it is a ‘fossil fuel’. Natural gas is caught in an existential war whereby said opponents will do everything in their power to just make it go away (they really think they can). The Toronto Globe and Mail, “Canada’s news paper” (note to self: develop ethnocentric balloon head emoji, make millions), recently ran a pricelessly ludicrous opinion piece entitled ‘Natural gas is a dying commodity, and Canada needs to stop supporting it’. The article was written by one of those think tanks (International Institute for Sustainable Development) that produces nothing but ideological amplification, safely distanced from people that actually do stuff, and a mountain of impressive T4 income tax slips (latest fiscal year personnel/consultant expense: $33 million). There is no surprise that their team of political scientists would attack natural gas; their latest financials show that the Government of Canada granted them $40 million, a third of which is from climate activist/federal minister Guilbeault’s office. There’ll be no biting that little hand.

Many climate leadership icons of the world, the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan… pretty much anyone that can, is building natural gas (LNG or non) infrastructure as fast as they can. Germany, home to the world’s most advanced green energy demolition derby, built an LNG import terminal in an astounding 5 months. Many that want to import LNG but weren’t able to last year because Europe hoovered up every molecule on the market are simply doing what it takes to attain energy security, and that can mean, lord tunderin’, coal. Pakistan is the most notable example – the country plans to quadruple coal fired power output and move away from gas only because it could not obtain it: “A shortage of natural gas, which accounts for over a third of the country’s power output, plunged large areas into hours of darkness last year.” The country’s energy minister went on, “We have some of the world’s most efficient regasified LNG-based power plants. But we don’t have the gas to run them.”

For those fortunate enough to line up LNG supplies, the ante is normally a 15-20 year contract.

To say that “natural gas is a dying commodity” takes either some world-class mental dishonesty, disturbingly blind faith in policy over reality, or some kind of “clouds hate me” philosophical stance on life.

Beyond the silly messaging looking to undermine natural gas though are some very powerful undercurrents that are shaping the world in ways most don’t consider, but they should.

Thanks to the shale revolution in the US and Canada, native natural gas production exploded onto a scene that couldn’t handle the excess, leading to persistently low prices. North America is turning into an LNG export powerhouse, but until that export capacity outpaces productive capability, natural gas prices in North America look set to remain far below global prices.

It is worth remembering how significant this scenario is for North America. Cheap natural gas is an industrial godsend, enabling many strata of industries and enterprises that simply would not exist without. In May of 2022, the head of the Western Equipment Dealers Association, said that the previous winter’s high natural gas prices were unsustainable for businesses that had to heat 30-40,000 square-foot shops. The 2021-22 winter of which he was discontented saw Henry Hub prices average $4.56/mmbtu – about a third of global prices, and a fraction of what the world was to face later that year.

The same article pointed out how the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a trade group whose members include smelters, plastics and paper-goods makers, wanted the US to stop permitting new LNG export terminals because “The manufacturing sector cannot invest and create jobs without assurances that our natural gas and electricity prices will not be imperiled by excessive LNG exports.”

Those guys aren’t crazy. The US gas market is balanced on a knife edge. A change in next month’s forecast can create havoc in forward prices even up to several years out.

The rise of LNG is making things even more unstable. The Freeport LNG terminal had an 8 month outage due to an accident, removing 2 bcf/d of demand from the market (in a 100 bcf/d market); this single event caused a storage surplus in the US that has depressed natural gas prices ever since. All else being equal, the US natural gas storage scene would be in a deficit to the five year average as opposed to today’s surplus if Freeport had not gone down, and both spot and futures prices would most likely be significantly higher. The Freeport outage probably knocked US natural gas prices down by at least $1/mmbtu for a period of 8 months, and actually probably much more. But even at that level, in a 100 bcf/d market, where 1 bcf is equal to 1 million mmbtus, the cost savings to US consumers totaled $100 million per day. (Of course, had the price stayed higher, we might have seen far more drilling, which may have caused a collapse as well, just a bit further down the road.)

That $100 million per day cost saving came out of the hide of North American natural gas producers selling into that market, and you’d think they wouldn’t like that one little bit. And they don’t. But gas producers have their own realities and game plans which don’t generally involve sacrificing any of their sales for the good of all other producers, as economically sensible as that strategy may be.

US producers find themselves in an odd situation. Every one of the large producers knows that they could cut production by 5 percent and double their profits; the market is that tightly balanced. Doing so would single handedly drive up NG prices substantially – just observe how the gas market goes ape over a change in weather forecast.

But driving up prices, even if it is in their own self interest, will mean a spike in production, because at sustained $4 US gas, the market becomes flooded. EQT president Toby Rice, the largest US gas producer (EQT, not Toby), says at a sustained $4/mmbtu natural gas price, the US could export 60 bcf/d of natural gas. Keep in mind that $4 gas is a fraction, anywhere from a third to ten percent of global LNG prices.

Mr. Rice may very well be correct, but glosses over the reality of natural gas prices: we will never see a sensible sustained price like $4, even though we may average it – we will see 2 and 8 and 3 and 9 and so on and so on.

On top of this, solution gas from oil plays like Permian is providing massive amounts of gas in itself. The Permian, primarily an oil field, produces more solution gas than the entire country of Canada. Permian solution gas, if a stand alone country, would be one of the world’s top five largest producers.

So who cares? Well, you all do. We all do. The goofballs that wrote the Globe & Mail article do, though they either won’t admit it or simply refuse to understand.

Natural gas is the bedrock of most economies, and cheap natural gas is a special elixir to North America. It is absolutely crucial to the level of industrial activity we enjoy. There is no substitute for the clean burning capability of the stuff. Wander into a typical big box store or more crucially try to wander into an industrial building that you won’t be allowed to because it is unsafe… drive around an industrial park and look at all the magnificent industrial activity that gives us the life we live. Now imagine those being heated by wood stoves. Or solar panels in dead of winter. Geothermal? Sure, if you plan on drilling into the earth’s mantle. And if you live on an appropriate acreage. And have enough money. I guess there’s always coal.

And that sums up a lot of the world’s population’s situation: If countries aren’t building LNG, it’s likely because they are building coal, as in the countries that Europe outbid for LNG last winter in a shocking me-first display of hydrocarbon-swilling (accompanied by fossil-fuel-subsidizing self-loathing?) hypocrisy.

There are storm clouds on the horizon. The drilling efficiency that these companies boast about relentlessly in IR presentations and every 90 days in conference calls consists to a large degree on drilling longer horizontal wells. Do the math on that one. Reservoirs are finite in size. If you increase the length of wells by another mile or two, you’re just draining the reservoir faster. One day we will see true sweet spot exhaustion, which is not a laughing matter when one considers that three fields – Appalachia, Haynesville and Permian – account for more than 70 percent of US gas production, and about a fifth of global production.

But for now, North America reigns supreme with respect to the world’s most coveted heating and industrial fuel. The US, Canada and Mexico remain more or less isolated from global natural gas prices for now, which brings incalculable benefits to North American businesses and citizens, a benefit that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Terry Etam is a columnist with the BOE Report, a leading energy industry newsletter based in Calgary. He is the author of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity. You can watch his Policy on the Frontier session from May 5, 2022 here.

Related Topics:#FrontierCentreForPublicPolicy #OnLowNaturalGasPrices #TerryEtam

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Will the Port of Churchill ever cease to be a dream?

Published on November 21, 2025

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From Resource Works

By Geoff Russ

The Port of Churchill has long been viewed as Canada’s northern gateway to global markets, but decades of under-investment have held it back.

A national dream that never materialised

For nearly a century, Churchill, Manitoba has loomed in the national imagination. In 1931, crowds on the rocky shore watched the first steamships pull into Canada’s new deepwater Arctic port, hailed as the “thriving seaport of the Prairies” that would bring western grain “1,000 miles nearer” to European markets. The dream was that this Hudson Bay town would become a great Canadian centre of trade and commerce.

The Hudson Bay Railway was blasted across muskeg and permafrost to reach what engineers called an “incomparably superior” harbour. But a short ice free season and high costs meant Churchill never grew beyond a niche outlet beside Canada’s larger ports, and the town’s population shrank.

False starts, failed investments

In 1997, Denver based OmniTrax bought the port and 900 kilometre rail line with federal backing and promises of heavy investment. Former employees and federal records later suggested those promises were not fully kept, even as Ottawa poured money into the route and subsidies were offered to keep grain moving north. After port fees jumped and the Canadian Wheat Board disappeared, grain volumes collapsed and the port shut, cutting rail service and leaving northern communities and miners scrambling.

A new Indigenous-led revival — with limits

The current revival looks different. The port and railway are now owned by Arctic Gateway Group, a partnership of First Nations and northern municipalities that stepped in after washouts closed the line and OmniTrax walked away. Manitoba and Ottawa have committed $262.5 million over five years to stabilize the railway and upgrade the terminal, with Manitoba’s share now at $87.5 million after a new $51 million provincial pledge.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has folded Churchill into his wider push on “nation building” infrastructure. His government’s new Major Projects Office is advancing energy, mining and transmission proposals that Ottawa says add up to more than $116 billion in investment. Against that backdrop, Churchill’s slice looks modest, a necessary repair rather than a defining project.

The paperwork drives home the point. The first waves of formally fast tracked projects include LNG expansion at Kitimat, new nuclear at Darlington and copper and nickel mines. Churchill sits instead on the office’s list of “transformative strategies”, a roster of big ideas still awaiting detailed plans and costings, with a formal Port of Churchill Plus strategy not expected until the spring of 2026 under federal–provincial timelines.

Churchill as priority — or afterthought?

Premier Wab Kinew rejects the notion that Churchill is an afterthought. Standing with Carney in Winnipeg, he called the northern expansion “a major priority” for Manitoba and cast the project as a way for the province “to be able to play a role in building up Canada’s economy for the next stage of us pushing back against” U.S. protectionism. He has also cautioned that “when we’re thinking about a major piece of infrastructure, realistically, a five to 10 year timeline is probably realistic.”

On paper, the Port of Churchill Plus concept is sweeping. The project description calls for an upgraded railway, an all weather road, new icebreaking capacity in Hudson Bay and a northern “energy corridor” that could one day move liquefied natural gas, crude oil, electricity or hydrogen. Ottawa’s joint statement with Manitoba calls Churchill “without question, a core component to the prosperity of the country.”

Concepts without commitments

The vision is sweeping, yet most of this remains conceptual. Analysts note that hard questions about routing, engineering, environmental impacts and commercial demand still have to be answered. Transportation experts say they struggle to see a purely commercial case that would make Churchill more attractive than larger ports, arguing its real value is as an insurance policy for sovereignty and supply chain resilience.

That insurance argument is compelling in an era of geopolitical risk and heightened concern about Arctic security. It is also a reminder of how limited Canada’s ambition at Churchill has been. For a hundred years, governments have been willing to dream big in northern Manitoba, then content to underbuild and underdeliver, as the port’s own history of near misses shows. A port that should be a symbol of confidence in the North has spent most of its life as a seasonal outlet.

A Canadian pattern — high ambition, slow execution

The pattern is familiar across the country. Despite abundant resources, capital and engineering talent, mines, pipelines, ports and power lines take years longer to approve and build here than in competing jurisdictions. A tangle of overlapping regulations, court challenges and political caution has turned review into a slow moving veto, leaving a politics of grand announcements followed by small, incremental steps.

Churchill is where those national habits are most exposed. The latest round of investment, led by Indigenous owners and backed by both levels of government, deserves support, as does Kinew’s insistence that Churchill is a priority. But until Canada matches its Arctic trading rhetoric with a willingness to build at scale and at speed, the port will remain a powerful dream that never quite becomes a real gateway to the world.

Headline photo credit to THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

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Canada is failing dismally at our climate goals. We’re also ruining our economy.

Published on November 20, 2025

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By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

Short-term climate pledges simply chase deadlines, not results

The annual meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is dedicated to implementing international action on climate change, is now underway in Brazil. Like other signatories to the Paris Agreement, Canada is required to provide a progress update on our pledge to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. After decades of massive government spending and heavy-handed regulations aimed at decarbonizing our economy, we’re far from achieving that goal. It’s time for Canada to move past arbitrary short-term goals and deadlines, and instead focus on more effective ways to support climate objectives.

Since signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, the federal government has introduced dozens of measures intended to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, including more than $150 billion in “green economy” spending, the national carbon tax, the arbitrary cap on emissions imposed exclusively on the oil and gas sector, stronger energy efficiency requirements for buildings and automobiles, electric vehicle mandates, and stricter methane regulations for the oil and gas industry.

Recent estimates show that achieving the federal government’s target will impose significant costs on Canadians, including 164,000 job losses and a reduction in economic output of 6.2 per cent by 2030 (compared to a scenario where we don’t have these measures in place). For Canadian workers, this means losing $6,700 (each, on average) annually by 2030.

Yet even with all these costly measures, Canada will only achieve 57 per cent of its goal for emissions reductions. Several studies have already confirmed that Canada, despite massive green spending and heavy-handed regulations to decarbonize the economy over the past decade, remains off track to meet its 2030 emission reduction target.

And even if Canada somehow met its costly and stringent emission reduction target, the impact on the Earth’s climate would be minimal. Canada accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions, and that share is projected to fall as developing countries consume increasing quantities of energy to support rising living standards. In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), emerging and developing economies are driving 80 per cent of the growth in global energy demand. Further, IEA projects that fossil fuels will remain foundational to the global energy mix for decades, especially in developing economies. This means that even if Canada were to aggressively pursue short-term emission reductions and all the economic costs it would imposes on Canadians, the overall climate results would be negligible.

Rather than focusing on arbitrary deadline-contingent pledges to reduce Canadian emissions, we should shift our focus to think about how we can lower global GHG emissions. A recent study showed that doubling Canada’s production of liquefied natural gas and exporting to Asia to displace an equivalent amount of coal could lower global GHG emissions by about 1.7 per cent or about 630 million tonnes of GHG emissions. For reference, that’s the equivalent to nearly 90 per cent of Canada’s annual GHG emissions. This type of approach reflects Canada’s existing strength as an energy producer and would address the fastest-growing sources of emissions, namely developing countries.

As the 2030 deadline grows closer, even top climate advocates are starting to emphasize a more pragmatic approach to climate action. In a recent memo, Bill Gates warned that unfounded climate pessimism “is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Even within the federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change, the tone is shifting. Despite the 2030 emissions goal having been a hallmark of Canadian climate policy in recent years, in a recent interview, Minister Julie Dabrusin declined to affirm that the 2030 targets remain feasible.

Instead of scrambling to satisfy short-term national emissions limits, governments in Canada should prioritize strategies that will reduce global emissions where they’re growing the fastest.