Veterans of Canada’s Atlantic industry administered a stiff dose of realism when the national expert panel on science issues rendered a verdict on technical aspects of plans to open up Pacific coastal waters offshore of British Columbia to natural gas development.

While ruling that there are no insurmountable scientific barriers against ending a 32-year-old drilling moratorium, the panel punctured a balloon of BC government and business visions that a west coast gas industry can be up and running within 10 years. A better prediction would be closer to 20 years, the technical jury found.

The verdict came from a group that was in a position to understand industry as well as scientific and environmental issues. Experienced hands dominated the four-member group that was appointed from among leading lights of The Royal Society of Canada to form the federal government’s Expert Panel on Science Issues Related to Oil and Gas Activities, Offshore British Columbia.

The panel’s chairman, Jeremy Hall, is an earth sciences professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s. Members Richard Addison, John Dower and Ian Jordaan all have strong East Coast connections. Addison is an Irish-born chemist who served as a senior officer of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia and had a hand in regulatory aspects of the Sable Offshore energy Project. Dower, a biologist, comes from St. John’s. Jordaan, an engineer, is a fixture at Memorial in St. John’s whose background includes industry work in East Coast offshore contracting.

The national panel laid down a likely time line for creating a West Coast offshore industry that it described as “tight and realistic” that stretched out for about 10 years longer than the ambitious schedule foreseen by provincial officials and promoters.

Production could start in 2020, but only “provided (aboriginal) land claims issues and ownership of offshore resources are settled within two years, and significant discoveries are made within a year of initial drilling.” The national panel pointed out that industry will want aboriginal claims settled before significant exploration even begins, rather than take chances on facing an entirely changed regulatory regime after big commitments are made.

The federal and provincial governments have yet to go beyond preliminaries in working out shared jurisdiction over offshore territory, a subject that took years of political negotiation and lawsuits to resolve on Canada’s East Coast.

The national panel said it can conceive of land claims settlements, a regulatory regime and a broad-brush “strategic environmental assessment” coming together over the next three years. Seismic exploration is expected to take until 2011 or ’12 to complete, including specialized environmental and regulatory reviews.

Exploration drilling is projected for the 2012-14 period. Even if the hunt goes well, the national panel expects the industry to need the 2013-15 period for delineation drilling to confirm there are enough gas reserves for a production project. Then a development application, environmental assessment, regulatory approvals and construction are forecast to take until 2020.

The national technical panel canvassed industry experts and drew heavily on Canada’s experience in the east. The group pointed out that the time between discoveries and production has been 15 to 20 years or more in the cases of both oil finds on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the SOEP gas development offshore of Nova Scotia.

The reception of the report already highlighted the political obstacles standing in the way of development offshore of Canada’s West Coast, where communities are far larger and much touchier than on the Atlantic side of the country. Within a week of the document’s release, environmental groups objected formally and vehemently to the prospect of industry activity offshore of BC.

The Expert Panel repeated recommendations by a mid-1980s predecessor to establish an exclusion zone 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) wide along the coastline and develop regulatory authorities to keep a close watch on industry activity in open areas.

“Provided an adequate regulatory regime is put in place, there are no science gaps that need to be filled before lifting the moratoria on oil and gas development,” the panel said. It called for a regulatory structure capable of filling technical gaps and described industry as a prospective partner in the work. “Lifting the moratoria would enhance the opportunities for filling many of the science gaps through shared-cost partnerships involving industry participation.”

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