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Jordan Heath-Rawlings
It is, or I guess it will be when it exists, almost exactly as far as you can go in Canada while still being technically in Canada. It will be huge, absolutely enormous, really, and it will accomplish things never before attempted by other projects like it. Depending on who you talk to about the Bay De Nord project, it will either save Newfoundland’s economy and usher in a new era of prosperity in the province. Or it will be the kind of disaster that could endanger the fishing industry, contribute to destroying the environment and hasten the onset of the climate crisis. And actually to a lot of people, it will be all of those things. Good and bad. So what is it?
I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, researcher, oral historian, and the author of a book called Tree Thieves Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods. She wrote about the Bay Du Nord project for McClains. Hello.
Lyndsie Bourgon
Hi. Thanks for having me.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
It is always a pleasure. And I’m gonna start, uh, just by situating us for those who aren’t familiar with the East Coast or the way, way East Coast, I guess, what is the Flemish Pass? Why is it so important?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Yeah, it’s a good question and, and you’re framing there is way, way, east Coast is very good because, uh, it’s right on the edge of the Canadian boundaries, nautical boundaries. The Flemish Pass is located about 500 kilometers, uh, north northeast from St. John’s, uh, into the North Atlantic, and it’s about one sixth of the way to Ireland.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Hmm.
Lyndsie Bourgon
What it is, is a deep basin and under which, Lies about 500 million barrels of light crude oil. It’s a very sort of harsh, extreme nautical environment. You’re way out to see, uh, if you ever see pictures of it, it looks like you’re in the middle of the ocean, cuz you know, you almost are. So I mentioned this is about a Bay du Nord offshore oil project.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
An offshore oil project, uh, what is it? Who’s behind it? How important is it?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Sure. So du Nord is a 16 billion offshore oil project. Uh, it’s majority owned by eor, but BP holds a smaller stake as well. And what it is, it’s a pretty ambitious offshore oil undertaking. Be. Nord was first discovered in 2013 by eor. And since then it’s been going through the various levels of sort of exploration, discovery, and then plans for development. So the expectations for it are pretty big. Newfoundland’s provincial government estimates that it could create more than 14 billion in economic activity and provide. 3.5 billion in government revenues. So another big part of this project is that the, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is, is thinking that it will establish the province as a sort of deepwater drilling center of excellence. And that the sort of future of offshore oil is really encapsulated through du Nord and through the work that will come through Newfoundland. You described it as a very ambitious project.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Why is it so ambitious? What will this project be like when it’s finished and, and what’s different, I guess, from other, you know, deep water mining, offshore oil extraction, like what’s special?
Yeah. So what really sets it apart is that it’s further out to sea than any other project in, in Newfoundland or Canadian offshore oil history has ever, has ever drilled. What kind of problems does that cause?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Yeah, I mean, it poses all sorts of challenges, you know, engineering challenges and environmental challenges. So the project will be about 40 wells that will be drilled just over 1000 meters below the waves, and so it’s. almost 10 times the depth of the second deepest project. Wow. So it’s sort of a huge jump forward in the science and in the engineering of, of offshore work, um, at least in Canada. And so, yeah, it requires, you know, drilling very deep into the seabed workers that will be connecting pipes, you know, that kind of. Absolutely massive, 30 foot long, 600 pound pipes that will descend all the way through the ocean and into the ocean floor. And then it will extract light crude and, and send it up to the production facility above. And so that, you know, your listeners might have a sense of kind of what an offshore oil rig looks like, uh, it’s a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. People that are working on it live on the platform. They are helicoptered in, as are their supplies and they’re working through Atlantic weather to set up this project and to, and to continue it until it shuts down, which is expected to be, I think once it’s up and running, it’ll have a 10 year lifespan. So it’s a massive operation. Before we get into the pros and cons, and I guess I want to know about the risks of going 10 times deeper than the previous deepest. Well, we’ll talk about that.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
But in terms of Newfoundland and, and its people and its economy, how big is this for them? What’s at stake here?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Yeah, so I think. in Canadian history, a lot of us have this kind of idea of Newfoundland as as being quite remote and often sort of struggling with the, the boom and bust economy and its history of sort of the cod moratorium and the ups and downs of mining and fisheries.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Mm-hmm.
Lyndsie Bourgon
And so Bean nor is framed in that context and it comes in and it provides a sort of 21st century foundation for really steady economy.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Through royalty payments and through work provided to Newfoundland and Labrador residents that otherwise isn’t there?
Lyndsie Bourgon
It’s interesting. I mean, in 2018, the province said that they were going to double oil production within 10 years. Their politicians have, certainly, the majority of them have, have really. Adopted this idea that oil and gas, particularly, I suppose what they’re framing as green oil and gas is really important for the province’s future. But as you can imagine, that’s up for debate. I mean, the work that’s being done has been. Estimated that, you know, there’s gonna be 22 million work hours provided through this project to Newfoundland and Labrador residents, and that’s really hard to ignore. So it, you know, it really provides the towns, a lot of these kind of small former fishery towns and now sort of peninsula towns that might work in manufacturing or provide other sorts of services. It, it provides a incoming revenue stream for a lot of the people that work there. Also provides an opportunity for folks that live in Newfoundland to stay home to work, which is a really big part of this story. So I think there’s a sort of stereotype, particularly in the West, that people from Newfoundland need to leave Newfoundland to work and Bean Nord counters that, you know, it would, it would provide an opportunity for a lot of people to stay home with their families and not do shift work going back and forth from Alberta or other mining projects.In other parts of the country or, or even kind of other jobs in other parts of the country, that it would provide a fair, stable income and allow you to be at home, which a lot of people have felt was not in their future as as, as Newfoundlanders and and laboratorians. That’s the positive side, and I think everybody wants what’s best for Newfoundland’s economy and for jobs in the province and for people not to have to leave. This is not. A popular time to be digging gigantic deep oil wells.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
What does EOR say about environmental concerns around this project? You know, it’s a gigantic new fossil fuels endeavor. Surely they faced a lot of criticism. Yeah, they have, and the improves process has been long and drawn out for it. How did they defend it before we get into like the poking holes and the, the actual risks? How, how did they defend it?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Yeah, so eor, they’ve really banked on this kind of imagery they have around their work that they are the friendly oil and gas company and that. You know, and part of that is that they are owned by the Norwegian government. They’re seen as being sort of a little bit more ethical. They say that extracting a barrel of oil from bein Nord, you know, will only produce about eight kilograms of carbon dioxide, for instance, which is far less than the amount that’s produced coming out of the Alberta oil stands. Which, you know, some companies have estimated that the, the footprint of that oil. 100 kilograms per barrel. And so that is a big part of how EOR sort of justifies continuing to do this work. And then on top of that, you know, they, they conducted an environmental impact assessment and they’ve, they’ve kind of followed through on all of the requirements of the federal and the provincial governments to think about the environmental impacts. They’ve also, you know, we can talk a little bit about this later, but when. When the project was approved, it, it was approved with over a hundred conditions, and so a condition of the approval. One of these 137 conditions that were kind of attached to the approval of the project is that, not that it will be carbon neutral, but that it will achieve net zero status by 2050. So basically requiring. All the greenhouse gas is produced in the operations and in the work will have to be offset by carbon capture technologies or other ways by 2050. So that’s also a big part of how, um, the project is, is kind of framing itself as not as bad, essentially as other oil and gas projects.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Well, one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you about this is because, you know, you are really trying in your piece to balance the economic necessities with the environmental costs and, and we’ve done a good job of that so far. I think painting aside from each of it, but I will tell you that when I, I read that piece and I think about this, and especially when I see like biggest, deepest, hugest, et cetera, et cetera. All I can think about is what happens if something goes wrong, if it’s going that deep and there’s that much, like there’s a disaster movie scenario here, right? What is it?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Well, there’s quite a few ways that things can go wrong. You know, there are. Oh, there’s unpredictable conditions at sea. There could, you know, that could lead to chemical spills, for instance, or leaks or blowouts. Newfoundland has a pretty strong history of disaster happening actually around oil and gas offshore. So there was the Sea Rose project in 2018. It spill. Over 200,000 liters of oil into the Atlantic. There’s the Cougar helicopter flight crash where offshore workers were, were being helicoptered to the platform to take work and the helicopter crashed. And then of course there is the ocean ranger. Disaster in 1982 where bad weather essentially crept up really quickly on the Ocean Ranger mobile oil platform in the Grand Banks area, which is, you know, just a slight amount closer to Newfoundland than beta Nord and the lifeboats capsized, and all eighty four crew members died and then there are environmental disasters. So you know, a blowout can impact the fisheries, you know, in Newfoundland and p e I and Labrador for instance. And it can really impact sort of far down the food chain , the ecosystems and the output of. Marine life. Mm-hmm. , you know, you’ve got birds and, and other marine life that are going to have to change their migratory route to go around the project. And that are impacted by things like even air pollution and sound. Underwater sound really impacts the breeding grounds of, of all sorts of fisheries that impact all sorts of animals down the line. And that doesn’t even really take into account the environment environmental. That come from climate change, you know, either upstream in the production of this oil and gas that’s being extracted, but also downstream.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
And so it, you know, there are three, four levels of waste that there could be damage caused and and risk kind of out of control. So I’m not trying to be a spoiled sport with all this, but then why was it approved? I understand the people of Newfoundland would want it and, and you mentioned the provincial government was for it. This must have had to go further up the chain and what was that process like?
Lyndsie Bourgon
Yeah, so it was, it was quite a long process. I mean, from 2018 to 2020, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, which is under the Environment and Climate Change Canada Department looked through a submission. E I, a environmental impact submission from EOR and returned to the company two years later asking for more information, which they did. And then from there they, they welcomed public submissions. You know, in the meantime, the federal government kind of continued to delay the decision, continued to delay. There was lobbying during. Point from trade unions and environmental groups and, and kind of everyone getting their, their opinions in on what Bean Nord could mean. There were rallies all throughout this time and, and really the government was the federal government, which did give the kind of final decision on bean Nord was considering the balance. The balance between risk and the work that EOR had done to show that they understood that risk and that they had mitigations in place versus the economic and cultural risk that had been kind of laid out. And so when it was approved, which was April, 2022, last April, you know, it did come with 137 finding conditions, . And so that was a lot. And the. Justification given to that is that the government was wanting to see that there would be work done on Ecuador’s front to address the climate concerns in particular. So you, you know, you’ve got the net zero requirement in there. Not very long after the same department did not approve an additional Suncor oil sands development in, in Alberta. And you know, I think the argument. Between these two is that the Beja Nord project is downstream and upstream releasing less carbon dioxide, less into the air than oil sand’s work. And so that was, that was how that came about. Not without. Much name calling. I mean, minister Steven Gibo before he had this job and you know, before he had entered politics, they called him Green Jesus of Montreal.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
He, yes, he’s got a history.
Lyndsie Bourgon
He very, he has a history of environmental activism and, you know, he, he was co-founder of the group, achy terror. He climbed the sand tower to to protest climate change. You. Many years ago, and yet here we are. And so I think for many, it was a pretty stark showing of hypocrisy. Right. But for Gibo, I think, you know, the way that the department has framed this decision is that he took everything into account and, and decided that this was a, a sort of innovative project that would.
Or extraction to take place with environmental concerns in mind. And that’s fair enough. I mean, we’ve spoken about, uh, the economic necessity versus the environmental concerns, but I wanna ask before we’re done, uh, a bit of a bigger picture question.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
You kind of touched on it when we talked about the practical risks of climate change. When you talked to people in Newfoundland, how do they wrestle with the economics. To keep the province, you know, on solid financial ground and the increasing reality of just climate change that they’re seeing around them. Like this is a province that is going to feel the brunt of the climate air that’s already seen worse storms, more unpredictable weather.
Lyndsie Bourgon
I mean, this is a type of thorny part of the culture that I really get into and you know, I’ve found reporting on Bay du Nord and then also on other, other topics of, uh, extraction. You know, I think it would be a disservice to kind of frame it, not that you are, but to sort of frame it, that anyone who works in the industry just thinks that it should always be development over everything else and that, you know, there’s no sort of care about climate change or over extraction or boom and bust cycle. You know, people that I was interviewing, they were saying to me like, we know that we need to transition away from this cycle. We want to, nobody actually wants to work in a boom and bust economy. Right. You know, like, I don’t think that that’s, that anybody really wants to ever feel the, the rug pulled from underneath them, let alone kind of regularly every two to five years kind of thing. But at the same time, they were saying, you know, give us that time to prepare for any sort of transition that we think needs to come next. Maybe this should be the last one and you know, there was a real reliance in industry and in people that work offshore in talking to me and saying like, there are these conditions and there is the sort of net zero requirement that’s attached to this thing. And, and what else could we ask for at this point? But to do this work and do it safely and well, and, and hope that it gives us space to transition 10 years down the line as opposed to denying it now and not having anything in its place. I mean, that’s a nice thought. I agree with it. Everyone would agree with it, right?
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Mm-hmm.
Lyndsie Bourgon
On this level, environmentalists and workers , and people that work in, in politics, for instance, in policy. I think they would all agree. It’s just that the trust on the environmentalist side that that will actually happen, right? And the concern on the worker’s side that there will be actually fair paying jobs on the other end. They can be, they can be at. And so what ends up happening is that there’s a lot of, there’s calls just to stop all drilling, no new projects, and people get their backs up about that.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Last question then. If this is going forward, what does that actually mean in terms of time? What gets built now? When will, uh, when will the first barrel of quote unquote clean oil come up from there?
Lyndsie Bourgon
I don’t know, and I, I don’t know that anyone knows for sure at this point. So the federal government gave its approval, but there are still some, uh, negotiations happening between the province and EOR in terms of how much manufacturing will actually take place in Newfoundland. Versus how much will actually be shipped in from elsewhere and, and essentially just be geographically arriving in St. John’s Harbor and then leaving right away. I think that this is actually a really interesting component of the story. It’s, you know, a lot of the work is still outsourced and is still kind of being done. In in other markets and then arriving at ports in Newfoundland and then being shipped out right away when you actually have the capacity. Or you could have the capacity to do manufacturing in Newfoundland itself and have it leave from there. So it’s this huge globalized industry and they’re really getting down to that nitty gritty now of what the company can. Ensure happens in Newfoundland, aside from simply being located off of it.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Lindsay, thank you so much for this. It’s a great piece.
Lyndsie Bourgon
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
Lindsay Bourgon writing in McLean’s. That was the big story. For more head to the big story podcast.ca. You know by now you can find us on Twitter at the big story fp n, and you can call us four one six nine three five five nine three. And leave us a voice message, good or bad. You can also email us with story ideas. This was actually a story idea that was emailed from a listener, although they didn’t leave their name, so I have no idea who it was. But if it was you and you were curious about this project, now you know a little more. That email address is hello at the Big Story podcast ca. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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