Leaders of Coastal First Nations are on the ground in Azerbaijan to line up Asian buyers for their Indigenous-led gas exports from LNG facilities under development in British Columbia.
It’s crunch time for the First Nation Climate Initiative (FNCI), the pro-LNG (liquefied natural gas) First Nation coalition that pitches the fossil fuel’s role in the world’s decarbonization efforts. For the long-term viability of Indigenous-led LNG, the organization needs to find export partners in Asia or the projects are at risk. The delegation has arrived in Azerbaijan at a time when the world is on the cusp of 1.5 C, and yet fossil fuel combustion continues to rise.
It’s not unheard-of for fossil fuel deals to be cut at the world’s climate negotiations. At COP28, the host, United Arab Emirates, was found to use the climate talks to seal oil deals. At this year’s COP29, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas a “gift of God,” while Elnur Soltanov, deputy energy minister and COP29 CEO, was caught by an undercover activist saying the country would develop oil and gas “perhaps forever.”
The FNCI is making its pitch for what it argues is a decarbonized fossil fuel at a time when the world desperately needs to eliminate carbon emissions before reaching catastrophic tipping points. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere at more than 28 times the rate of carbon dioxide.
“Methane is a very potent [greenhouse gas], so if it's not managed properly, it's a huge problem,” said Alex Grzybowski, with the First Nations Climate Initiative and CEO of K’uul Power. “Everybody knows that we're talking about using it in a safe and appropriate manner for a decarbonized future.”
However, critics are highly skeptical that LNG can be used safely. Local opposition is emerging to LNG projects with Gitanyow still maintaining a blockade into the Ksi Lisims construction zone and court challenges piling up. The opposition arrives after years of protest over the Coastal Gas Link pipeline that will carry gas from shale gas fields to LNG facilities in Kitimat, including the Indigenous-owned Cedar LNG.
Still, for the FNCI, one of the biggest threats to the organization will be failing to find buyers.
“You don't really see these projects get built unless they have long-term [buyers],” Robert Johnston, research director at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and advisor to FNCI, said in an interview.
The group is pitching Indigenous-led LNG, produced by projects such as Cedar and Ksi Lisims and other equity stake projects, as a low-carbon fuel that can help lower emissions in Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Johnson says there is an opportunity to sell LNG to steel and shipping industries “because those are harder to electrify.”
But the FNCI is bringing gas online at the eleventh hour of the energy transition in a market dominated by cheap Qatari gas, expanding American fossil fuel production and a growing LNG industry in Australia, East Africa and Papua New Guinea. The renewable industry also continues to grow at a rapid pace, even as it lags behind targets.
As part of their COP29 calls to action, Grzybowski and the FNCI are calling on the federal, British Columbia and Alberta governments to invest and support technologies that would lengthen the shelf-life of natural gas in a low-carbon world.
But critics like John Young, a LNG senior strategist at Climate Action Network, don’t believe LNG has a role in a transitioning world, even with new technologies to convert it. He thinks it’s dangerous if the world hopes to halt irreversible and deadly climate change. He points to a recent peer-reviewed study that revealed LNG has a greater climate impact than coal, if its life cycle is fully considered — from shipping, the energy needed to liquify gas, methane leaks during production and consumption.
“LNG is 33 per cent dirtier, emits 33 per cent more emissions than coal, so that's not a bridge fuel,” Young said. “That's a really dirty fossil fuel, and it doesn't give you any advantage; in fact, it’s more of a problem.”
The stranded asset risk
Johnson believes renewable technology and alternative fuels are FNCI’s biggest threat right now.
“Will something cheaper and cleaner and more reliable come along?” Johnson asked. “And what fuel can deliver all three? We’ve yet to find the perfect solution.”
Young is skeptical that natural gas can survive the expansion of the renewable energy economy.
“So, the renewable energy economy, and the rate of adaptation of renewables is extraordinary and sort of beats all expectations every year,” Young explained. “If you tie up tens of billions of dollars investing in fossil fuel infrastructure that's supposed to last 30 or 40 years, you're impeding the energy transition to truly renewable energy.”
Grzybowski believes FNCI can monitor methane emissions throughout the LNG life cycle and prove that it can have a place in a low-emission economy.
“If we did that, then we wouldn’t have conversations about whether or not natural gas was contributing to [greenhouse gas] reduction in Asia — we would know for certain that it is,” Grzybowski said.
But Young is leery of industry-led monitoring, which “hasn’t always been the very best thing either.”
For Young, the science is clear: he cannot support continued fossil fuel development when scientists have called to end new expansions to stop global warming and the severe wildfires, floods, storms and heat waves that follow in its wake.
Economic Reconciliation: a model or risk?
For the FNCI, the push for Indigenous-led LNG is partly to ensure that pro-industry First Nations can create their own sources of wealth and revenue. LNG development carries the promise that profits from corporations owned by First Nations can create cash flow for their public coffers that fund social services. First Nations could be untethered from the political ebbs and flows of Ottawa budget cycles, when cuts or program restraints can predetermine the social programs of a nation.
“First Nations would become leaders in the economy, not bystanders,” Grzybowski said.
The collective ownership of First Nation corporations is a different model from the profits that line the pockets of Calgary suits and shareholders. First Nation corporations are more akin to a publicly-owned corporation, or for Grzybowski, similar to a family business.
First Nations corporations “could become enormous economic enterprises; there's no limits on what they can do,” Grzybowski said.
“Some of the nations now are building billion-dollar projects, they’re owning billion-dollar projects, those are the big leagues,” Grzybowski said. “This is just the beginning.”
The promise is encapsulated in an emerging phrase: economic reconciliation, now often defined as the inclusion of Indigenous nations in major energy projects. The FNCI hopes to bring the model to COP29, and become a beacon for other Indigenous nations to follow in the energy economy.
But for critics like Janelle Lapointe, public engagement & mobilization co-lead for the David Suzuki Foundation, the definition is too narrow. Economic reconciliation’s original goal is to bring old economies and past governance structures into a contemporary context, including sustainable development “when it comes to tackling the climate crisis,” she said.
“What I don’t like about [economic reconciliation] is it's almost exclusively used to talk about extractive industries, and particularly with LNG.”
— with files from John Woodside and Natasha Bulowski
Matteo Cimellaro / Canada’s National Observer / Local Journalism Initiative
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