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Public hearing ordered for Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway proposal
News Articles Featured | Vancouver Sun | May 05, 2011
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The National Energy Board has issued an order calling for a full public hearing for Enbridge Inc.’s proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline project to commence in Jan. 10, 2012.
The NEB, on Thursday, said the joint review panel reviewing Enbridge’s application seeking permission to build the 1,100-kilometre pipeline from just outside Edmonton to an ocean terminal at Kitimat has laid out a process to gather public suggestions with regard to the project’s environmental and social impacts that will stretch into July 2012.
Enbridge made its application for what has become a hotly controversial project in May of 2010, and in its order, the panel said it is important for all interveners who have taken part in the NEB’s considerations to date continue to participate regardless of what side they are on.
“[The panel] will consider all relevant information received in making its decision,” the order says.
The joint panel has two jobs in the review, the first of which is to evaluate the proposed project’s environmental risks.
Secondly, the panel must evaluate whether Enbridge’s proposal to pipe up to 550,000 barrels per day of Alberta oilsands bitumen to a storage facility and terminal on the Pacific coast at Kitimat, where it would be shipped via oil tanker to markets in the Asia Pacific region.
Environmental groups and several B.C. first nation communities have opposed the project over the risk of a pipeline rupture or tanker oil spill in sensitive north coast waters.
John Carruthers, president of Northern Gateway Pipelines, the Enbridge subsidiary responsible for the project, characterized the NEB order as good news.
“An impartial, public regulatory process is the way Canada decides about projects like Northern Gateway,” Carruthers said in an email statement, “and it’s our belief that the more people know about what we’re proposing, our commitment to safeguard the environment, and the tremendous economic benefits for our entire country, the more supportive they will be.”
depenner@vancouversun.com
Tagged with: pipeline, canada, enbridge, northern gateway
