Shell Ramps Up in Kitimat, Raising Canada’s $30 Billion LNG Hopes – by Natalie Obiko Pearson (Bloomberg News – July 9, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

A flurry of activity in a remote Canadian town is raising optimism that Royal Dutch Shell Plc and its partners are ready to go ahead with the nation’s largest infrastructure project: a C$40 billion ($30 billion) liquefied natural gas terminal that could at last unlock energy exports to Asia.

The action is unmistakable in Kitimat, British Columbia, the Pacific coast city hugging a deep inlet that would be the closest launch point on the continent for LNG cargoes to Asia. The lights are on, shades open and SUVs parked outside a 49-unit apartment complex built to house Shell executives, which sat mostly darkened for the last two years.
Local workers have left jobs at a Rio Tinto Plc smelter nearby to join contractors ramping up for the LNG project. Landlords are raising rents and houses are selling twice as fast as they used to in anticipation of a flood of workers coming to town.

“I would put money on it — it’s going ahead,” says Phil Germuth, mayor of Kitimat, who recently hosted a banker from Barclays Bank Plc visiting from the U.K. to examine the project. Germuth also met a group of officials reporting to the board of Mitsubishi Corp., one of the project’s five partners, who visited the site in May.

When Crystal Smith, head of the Haisla Nation whose indigenous lands surround the proposed terminal, was invited to the project site last week by another group from Mitsubishi, she couldn’t find a spot in the usually deserted parking lot.

For the rest of this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/canada-s-30-billion-lng-hope-edges-closer-as-shell-ramps-up