After two years of fruitless negotiations and regulatory wrangling, an attempt to secure access for central Canada to natural gas from offshore of Nova Scotia has been shelved.

The Cartier Pipeline partnership of Enbridge Inc. and Gaz Metropolitain withdrew their request for an addition to Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline, canceling hearings that the National Energy Board had scheduled for April 23 in Halifax.

The plan called for building the last missing link in the Canadian east-west pipeline system by connecting M&NP to Trans Quebec and Maritimes Pipeline with two links: Cartier between Quebec City and the western boundary of New Brunswick, and the Northwest Facilities from there to the M&NP mainline.

The sponsors told the NEB that while they are not entirely abandoning the plan for a 517-kilometre (325-mile), C$595 million (US$380 million) package of pipelines, the “sense of urgency” that had been driving it since the gas market spike of 2000-01 “has been tempered by recent events.”

The Cartier group observed that reviving offshore exploration drilling has yet to expand supplies, while it also faced vigorous opposition against its plans to inject Canadians into the lineup for Nova Scotia gas that has so far been primarily dedicated to the northeastern United States.

During increasingly hot preliminary wrangling before the NEB, opponents of the plan included M&NP, the East Coast Producer Group of ExxonMobil Canada, Shell Canada, Imperial Oil and Mosbacher Operating Ltd., the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, marketer Emera Inc. and the Nova Scotia government. No target date was set for reviving proposal to build the Canadian missing link, which has been made unsuccessfully in various guises since the 1970s.

©Copyright 2002 Intelligence Press Inc. Allrights reserved. The preceding news report may not be republishedor redistributed, in whole or in part, in any form, without priorwritten consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.