BC’s multibillion-dollar natural gas industry is all pumped up but struggling to find a place to go.
Although the province is awash in trillions of feet of natural gas, the industry is struggling to nail down buyers for the resource.
In less than a decade, North America has gone from being a net importer of natural gas to an exporter, with some speculating the U.S. has a century’s worth of gas resources sitting in the ground.
But the rush to extract these resources has been so successful it’s created a market oversupplied to the point that it can cost more to extract the resources from the ground than they can be sold for.
B.C.’s biggest challenge is being at the end of the demand pipeline. That has gas companies thinking about how they can take advantage of home-grown demand.
“We have to be the biggest advocates now of our own resources because it’s so important to our economy,” said Gary Weilinger, vice-president strategic development and external affairs at gas giant Spectra Energy (NYSE:SE). “And the reason why we need to do that is in spite of the fact we have so much natural gas we are handicapped in that we’re furthest from the market.”