CALGARY, Alberta, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Japan will emerge as a
top market for Canadian liquefied natural gas as developers gear
up to export more than 9 billion cubic feet a day, the
equivalent of nearly all the gas that flows from Alberta’s gas
fields into its massive pipeline network, Canada’s natural
resources minister said.

Five LNG plants are currently planned for Canada’s Pacific
Coast, and two of those already have 20-year gas export
licenses, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said in an
interview from Tokyo. The one snag so far has been the inability
of the developers to sign up customers.

CALGARY, Alberta, Sept 18 (Reuters) – The financial gains
Enbridge Inc forecasts will flow from its proposed
Northern Gateway pipeline to Canada’s West Coast are based on
rosier oil production predictions than the company shares with
its own investors and analysts, a lawyer for a native group
opposed to the project said on Tuesday.

Hana Boye, attorney for the Haisla First Nation, whose lands
encompass the end-point of the C$6 billion ($6.2
billion)pipeline’s route, told a public hearing that Enbridge’s
calculation of benefits to the oil industry are based on the
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ (CAPP) output
forecast.

CALGARY, Alberta, Sept 17 (Reuters) – Asian oil markets
should easily absorb the half million barrels per day they would
get via Enbridge Inc’s proposed Northern Gateway
pipeline in Canada, raising little ire among traditional Middle
East suppliers, an energy market expert said on Monday.

Volumes that would flow through Enbridge’s proposed C$6
billion ($6.2 billion) pipeline to Canada’s West Coast, for
shipment across the Pacific, are not large enough to shock
Chinese and other northern Asian markets, Neil Earnest, a
witness for Enbridge, said at public hearings in Edmonton into
the contentious project.

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – Peter Lougheed, the Alberta leader who battled the Canadian federal government’s encroachment into the energy industry in the 1970s and 1980s and later became a cautionary voice against unchecked oil sands development, died late Thursday. He was 84.

Lougheed, Progressive Conservative premier of Canada’s biggest oil-producing province from 1971 to 1985, was hailed as both a staunch defender of Alberta’s interests and patriotic Canadian, best known for butting heads with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau over energy policy during the era’s energy crises.