Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePrince
Why do people bring this up as if it's some sort of silver bullet that because the Conservatives didn't do it, it absolves the Liberals of any blame.
But to actually answer your question, I'll share exactly what I stated in a different post - that yes, the Liberal government shares much of the blame for this (I won't be so pompous as to say that the blame falls squarely on the Liberals, there's many factors at play)
Liberals have been in power since 2015. Shale gas started being a thing in the US around 2007, and Canada's most prominent shale gas resources (Montney/Duvernay) are a bit more difficult to extract than the US stuff, and a lot more difficult to get to market, given the geographic proximity to existing infrastructure. The large fracs required for adequate exploitation of these resources didn't really start being a thing until 2016/2017 (after the Liberals were in power). It took time for technology to catch up to how best to develop the resource.
So to answer your question, a lot of these projects did try and get off the ground in the early 2010s under a conservative government, but the well results weren't quite good enough to support the billions of dollars of investment needed. That's changed over the last 5-6 years, but the current policies of the Federal government have made it too difficult and onerous to get a terminal built in a reasonable amount of time.
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I'll take issue with that.
In a lot of ways the Montney was the proving grounds for a lot of the multi stage, multi well fracs that are now being used elsewhere.
The big advantage in Canada was the land situation, where companies could develop large swaths of land with huge multi well pads and long laterals.
That has only been a thing in a lot of the states (Texas in particular) because companies have shown small land owners the benefit of pooling land/mineral rights to allow for Canadian style development. Prior to that, the # of wells, and the length you could drill was limited due to the patchwork land situation, and that killed all of the efficiencies that Canadian had developed.
Once they got that straightened out, we saw the current shale oil/gas boom in the US.
The technology and techniques were there waiting for them, they just needed to figure out how to deploy them.
The reason a lot of the Canadian projects stalled in the 00/10s was the price of gas going into the toilet in ~2008, partially due to the global financial crisis, and partially due to the glut of supply precisely because of the type of development we're talking about.
I work for a company that operates in Canada and the US, and I can tell you that the technology flow, specifically when it comes to this kind of development, is very much more North to South than vis versa.