FANTASY ISLAND
THE ISLAND THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO SAVE British Columbia’s economy is perched on the banks of an underwater pasture at the mouth of the Skeena River, near the top of western Canada’s North Coast. Each year, hundreds of millions of young salmon cascade down from the province’s second-largest fishery, riding the current from the highlands, growing to adulthood in the river’s eelgrass before swimming for the open ocean.
But visions of a very different kind of resource, in a different corner of British Columbia, turned eyes to Lelu Island in 2013. One day, the provincial government promised voters, Lelu Island would be the hub of an approximately $25 billion industrial complex, where natural gas fracked deep in the province’s interior would be liquefied, pumped onto waiting tankers, and dispatched to sate Asia’s seemingly insatiable thirst for energy. Christy Clark, then the newly re-elected premier of the ruling BC Liberal Party, had staked her government on the idea that liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export facilities such as this one would kick-start a struggling regional economy and give British Columbia, like its neighbor to the south, a way to turn underground wealth into real riches.
For a corner of Canada that had long relied on natural resources—from sea otter pelts to timber to salmon—the allure of low-cost, easy-to-drill natural gas with a ready supply of buyers was obvious.
“LNG is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create 100,000 new jobs throughout [British Columbia], and a Prosperity Fund to eliminate the provincial debt,” Clark told local legislators in 2014. If that wasn’t enough, she added, “it’s also the greatest single step we can take to fight climate change.”
Then, in July 2017, that dream vanished into thin air. Petronas, the Malaysian state oil company behind the Lelu Island terminal, pulled the plug, it said, “following a total review of the project amid changes in market conditions.” One thing was clear: A flood of new natural gas export facilities around the world, coupled with dirt-cheap gas prices, had conspired to hammer
