Whose line is it anyway?

In this case a transmission line for the Lower Churchill.

A couple of weeks ago, former Premier Roger Grimes took issue with a comment by noob finance minister Jerome Kennedy that the Lower Churchill transmission line would be a good project for federal infrastructure spending.

The Telegram story - not online - quoted Grimes:

"There has been no routing actually planned for a transmission line,"says Grimes. "If they have a transmission line already planned, already designed ... then why don't they tell us where it is?"

He was reacting to Kennedy who the Telegram quoted as saying:

"That's something that we could start immediately, it's something that
we wouldn't have to wait for the environmental assessments because, essentially, we'd simply be building a transmission line," said Kennedy at the time.

Kennedy said Transportation Minister Trevor Taylor delivered a similar
message to federal Infrastructure Minister John Baird just days before.

Similar comments were made by [Premier Danny ] Williams in a year-end interview with The Telegram.

Williams did mention the Lower Churchill in that year-end interview.

Williams also took issue with Kennedy’s comments in the Telly story on Grimes’ comments saying that Kennedy had spoken out of turn. There would need to be an environmental impact assessment. Williams also said that Grimes simply didn’t know enough about what was going on:

"Poor Roger is talking through his hat. He doesn't have the background,he doesn't have the information," says Williams.

"We've been working on this plan for a long, long time, we've a lot of
engineering done," says Williams.

Of course, Grimes and Williams have been at odds over the Lower Churchill for years and of all the province’s politicians, Grimes seems to have a unique ability to get under Williams’ skin.

But that’s not the only talk of transmission lines since the New Year. Emera president Chris Huskelson told the Halifax Chronicle Herald that without a line to Newfoundland, it made no sense – presumably economic sense - to try and ship power directly from Labrador into the Maritimes.

"Newfoundland decides to bring energy to the island, it makes perfect sense to bring energy further to Nova Scotia. If they decide not to bring energy to the island, it won’t make sense to bring it to Nova Scotia."

Then to cap it all, Ed Martin, president and chief executive officer of NALCO(R) and Hydro told the Chronicle Herald that shipping power across the Cabot Strait to Nova Scotia is one of the options Hydro is looking at for the Lower Churchill. Hydro and Emera signed a memorandum of understanding a year ago to explore the possibility of shipping power from the Lower Churchill to Nova Scotia. But as Martin said this weekend:

"It’s looking like somewhere in the Sydney area would be an excellent landfall for us," Mr. Martin said of the proposed undersea cable.

"Not only is it distance-wise one of the closest points to Newfoundland, but it’s close to the Lingan plant, which is a significant emitter for Nova Scotia (Power) . . . but nothing is final yet."

Nothing is final yet.

Well, nothing is really clear in all of this. As labradore noted in a post on Sunday, not so very long ago, Martin and Hydro were talking about shipping electricity into New Brunswick from Cap St. George on Newfoundland’s west coast. That was certainly the option examined in 2005, as reported by both the Telegram and Stephen Maher of the Chronicle Herald. Sea Breeze Power of British Columbia was proposing an underwater line from the coast of labradore to Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia.

This isn’t a new idea. As Bond Papers reported in 2007, the idea of underwater transmission lines for Lower Churchill power goes back to the 1970s although officials were quick to note that it wasn’t an attractive proposition:

For one thing, according to Vic Young, president of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, the 77-mile cable across the Cabot Strait is an extremely poor prospect. Although a study two years ago stated it was technically possible, its capital and maintenance costs would be enormous. The electricity delivered would cost about twice what it would if brought down overland.

But all this talk of transmission lines and environmental assessments gets really curious when one looks at the Lower Churchill proposal which is now in the hands of a joint federal-provincial environmental assessment panel.

The only transmission lines mentioned in that proposal are for two running from Muskrat Falls to Gull Island and then a single line back to Churchill Falls. From there, power would head into Quebec through the existing interconnection.

The project is described very straightforwardly in the agreement between the federal and provincial governments on the environmental review panel:

The Proponent proposes a project/undertaking consisting of hydroelectric generating facilities at Gull Island and Muskrat Falls, and interconnecting transmission lines to the existing Labrador grid.

…

Interconnecting transmission lines consisting of:

• A 735 kV transmission line between Gull Island and Churchill Falls; and,

• Two 230 kV transmission lines between Muskrat Falls and Gull Island.

The 735 kV transmission line is to be 203 km long and the 230 kV transmission lines are to be 60 km long. Both lines will be lattice-type steel structures. The location of the transmission lines is to be north of the Churchill River; the final route is the subject of a route selection study that will be combined on double-circuit structures.

No proposal has been presented publicly for any other transmission lines related to the Lower Churchill. There’s nothing in Quebec or New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In Both Quebec and New Brunswick, Hydro has simply filed an application for wheeling - moving power through the existing grid - but there’s no discussion of new transmission lines.

While Danny Williams might claim Roger Grimes isn’t up-to-speed on the project, existing public information suggests the Premier and his finance minister aren’t exactly coming clean on the whole thing either.

In fact, Grimes might well be closer to the truth given that if a new transmission line – say through Quebec – is being contemplated there’s been nothing done to make it possible within the next couple of months.

As Grimes noted – and the Premier concurred – a transmission line would have to go through an environmental assessment. That idea would be a wee bit more complicated politically if the line through Quebec was expressly intended to carry power from the Lower Churchill through Quebec to another market.

If there’s another line Kennedy was thinking about, like say across to eastern Newfoundland, there’s still a provincial environmental process that would at least have to be considered. The major problem there is one of cost. Figure on a project costing upwards of $2.0 billion by the time it is done.

The cost of that little make-work venture would be borne entirely by the ratepayers of eastern Newfoundland who, it should be noted, don’t really need all that extra power and certainly wouldn’t get it right away, anyway. Hydro just expropriated over a 100 megawatts of generating capacity from AbitibiBowater and there is surplus power in the grid since the Abitibi Stephenville mill closed in 2005. The Inco project at Long Harbour will suck up some of the juice but there is no great demand for power on the island in the near term.

As for timing, those lines – even if they were built over the next couple of years – would be more than a decade old before any Lower Churchill power coursed through them. The Lower Churchill project will take nine years to complete. The proposal in the environmental review called for construction to start in 2009 with first power in 2014 and the completion of the whole thing in 2018.

But even if the environmental assessment is finished this year it would be well into 2010 before anyone would start digging dirt in Labrador.

Even 2010 would be an optimistic start-time these given that Hydro doesn’t have a single customer for the Lower Churchill power and the money markets are a wee bit skittish these days what with the shortage of capital in the markets.

Heaven forbid that work might start without those contracts in place and with the work being funded out of the public treasury or whatever cash the energy corporation might have laying about. That’s what happened last time with BRINCO as some people are only now realizing. The company borrowed cash and started work in the mid-1960s. Hydro Quebec took maximum advantage of the BRINCO foolishness and with the latter in a financial bind managed to secure the sort of contract concessions it had been seeking from the start.

All the bluster at the time about running power down through Nova Scotia was just a tactic to improve the bargaining position with Hydro Quebec. Ditto the talk of running a line through Quebec with federal backing. There’s no evidence the request was ever made, even though many people insist on repeating the story. In the end, Hydro Quebec got everything it was looking for from the start and then some.

Maybe what we have here with all this talk of transmission lines is the same sort of bluster and political posturing we saw 40-odd years ago.

Certainly there is nothing in the public domain to suggest that anything Kennedy referred to is real.

Maybe Roger Grimes knows a lot more than Danny Williams will ever give him credit for. And when it comes to contracts, it’s not like the two haven’t been at odds before with Williams having to change his position when the facts were in. Anyone remember Voisey’s Bay?

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It's the bit they don't say that kills you

There's yet another piece on Newfoundland and Labrador in the Globe. Today's topic is the Lower Churchill project, which may become part of the Summer of Love election campaign just as it was in 1998 under Brian Tobin.

But here's a comment from PetroNewf chief executive Ed Martin that leaps out for the unstated bit:

"But with respect to the maritime route, it is a viable alternative [to shipping power overland through Quebec]. It's a hands-down viable alternative from a technical perspective."

Technically, engineers can put the proverbial arse back in the proverbial cat.

Technically, engineers can run a single strand thinner than human hair around the globe at the equator and tie a knot in it with tweezers, via remote control from the moon, while blind folded and being distracted by the voice of Lucy Liu's efficiency expert in the original Charlie's Angels (it's a nerd thing).

But is it viable financially?

That's where the answer typically comes up with a simple and emphatic "No!"

200 megawatts shipped all the way from Labrador to Rhode Island? Ya gotta be kidding.

The cost of the land lines down through New Brunswick, Maine and into Massachusetts alone would make the thing dodgy. Add in the underwater cabling to both the island of this province and to the mainland and you have a pretty costly venture.

All of that will be borne, supposedly, by a block of power that is actually less than the power block used annually by two industrial projects in western Labrador.

Now for his part the Premier calls this Rhode Island thing "very,very" crucial and "very, very" something else. When politicians use words like "very" and then use them repeatedly in relation to the same thing (always positive), you can usually be concerned that there is more than a little exaggeration on the go.

It's a verbal nose pull.

And so is Ed Martin's emphasis on the technical feasible of the sub-sea route.

The real question is whether it will be financially viable.

And that's not a poser for engineers.

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The Globe on bridge building

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are surely agog with the attention paid by the Globe and Mail to the province's offshore oil and gas industry.

First the story on Tuesday that contained little in the way of new information and missed a great deal of other stuff. There's a Bond commentary with a link to the first Globe story.

Now on Wednesday a piece focusing on Hydro chief executive Ed Martin and his supposed role of building bridges between the major oil companies and the provincial government.

The Globe parses the core issue reasonably well: there are two different perspectives with two contending objectives.

The role attributed to Martin is difficult to confirm. Certainly, he is an experienced oil and gas industry executive and he can certainly understand how the industry operates. How much he is able to do in building any bridges between the two perspectives is less clear. As NOIA's outgoing president Ted Howell put it in the Globe piece:

"He knows how the companies evaluate projects, and he brings that to the table with government. But ultimately, it is going to be the Premier's call in terms of what he feels is the appropriate deal for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador."

The main problem in building the bridge may well be determining how wide is the span that needs to be built. The Globe story gets it monumentally wrong.

Industry officials warn that, if the province insists on making unrealistic demands, the international oil companies will simply not explore or develop in the waters off Newfoundland. In a nutshell, the message is: Five per cent of nothing equals nothing.

The equity position demand is more like 10%, not five. The government has stated - and as the Globe reported on Tuesday - that the equity demand in the forthcoming energy plan will be more than 5%.

More importantly, though, there appears to be a fundamental disagreement between industry and government over what shape the equity takes. That point is found only in the last paragraph of the story: the oil companies would expect that a state-owned enterprise would farm in, that is, buy in and take the risks everyone else takes.

That's essentially what occurs in some other places, like Norway, where the government's oil and gas company Statoil operates in the private sector like all the other companies in the business. Statoil, now merged with Norsk Hydro, has been able to expand its operations outside Norway and works globally with private sector companies and other state-owned oil and gas enterprises.

The alternative - the one that appears to be government's intention - is to add the equity position onto government's royalty regime. That's where the problem starts and it is at the core of why the Hebron deal failed.

As Bond Papers has noted previously, one of the major philosophical divides between the parties on Hebron centred on Ed Martin's conflicting roles as the chief tax and benefits negotiator for the province on the one hand and then his position as a potential business partner on the other.

The two interests are fundamentally incompatible, to some minds. As an operator, the concern would be about controlling costs and maximizing profitability. As the government's agent, the goal would be to maximize local benefits through royalties, jobs and - as in government's original Hebron demand - expensive capital projects that may not be required except to meet the political demand.

The Globe missed that entirely, except for what can read into the comments from Ed Martin:

"So from a strategic perspective the province is crystal clear: Premier Williams wants to make sure he gets this right in terms of how these developments occur for the benefit of the province. And for that, you need a seat at the table."

The Globe also missed the obvious: for all the talk about a seat at the table and the strategic importance of oil and gas, the provincial government still hasn't figured out exactly what role Martin's new energy company will fill or how that so-called seat at the table will be acquired.

Ask Ed Martin or Danny Williams whether the energy company will acquire licenses and operate like any other oil business and you'll likely hear the reply that that option hasn't been ruled out.

Ask about farming in - that is, buying the equity stake - and you'll hear that government intends to pay for its share. There has not been any indication of how it intends to pay for the share. Buying in occurs all the time. It's a straight-up business transaction and it needn't be limited formally to five percent, 10% or any specific level.

It's just plain odd that government would insist on any specific amount in every project. On that level, government's demand looks like the sort of stuff one gets from developing countries where oil and gas is a political issue, a nationalist issue. It isn't about how the state-owned oil and gas company can get into the industry, make cash and then return the benefit of that cash to the owner in just the same way that a private sector company returns profit to its shareholders.

One way follows the Norwegian approach. The other way is the Venezuelan one.

Resolving that confusion would likely do more to re-start the Hebron talks than any supposed back channel discussions between Ed Martin and his former colleagues at Petro-Canada.

Maybe the answer will be in the energy plan.

Then again, as the energy plan becomes more of a political document than a business one, maybe it won't.

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