The Canadian Northern Energy Corridor Project
NOTE: This page is under construction!!
PREAMBLE
The Senior Engineer of AscenTrust, LLC., was born in the hospital at McLennan Alberta, on January 01, 1948, raised on a farm located on highway #2, near LacMagloire, graduated class valadictorian at Langlois School in Guy in Northern Alberta and graduated, in Electrical and Computing Engineering, with Distinction, in 1969, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
AscenTrust, LLC., an existing Texas corporation, wholly owned by it's Senior Engineer, will provide the overall Project Engineering, Project Design, Project Management and Construction Management for all projects financed through the effort of IDFS, INC., the Heritage Fund of Alberta and JPMorgan-CHASE BANK
Introduction
The Canadian Northern Corridor (CNC) has been conceptualized as a multi-modal (road, rail, pipeline, electrical transmission and communication) transportation corridor through the Northern portions of the provinces from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. It is our intention to include three gigawatts of natural gas fired, combined-cycle power production to be tied to the high-voltage Direct Current, underground transmission system. The power production facilities will be connected directly to feed the local grid. The excess electrical production will be added to the high voltage transmission line which will extend from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.
The Canadian Northern Corridor (CNC) would be a multi-use corridor infrastructure megaproject spanning Canada's east-west mid-latitude with several northern spurs, approximately 7,000 to 10,000 km long and costing roughly $200–300 billion. The concept was originally outlined by academics at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy. CANADIAN NORTHERN CORRIDOR SPECIAL SERIES
The Northern Corridor concept is about establishing a new multi-modal (road, rail,pipeline, electrical transmission and communication) transportation right-of-way through Canada’s north and near north. The Northern Corridor would prepare the way for privately funded and economically driven projects to, for example, transport a full range of export commodities efficiently to port facilities on all three coasts while also improving economic development and living conditions in remote areas. This infrastructure would improve access for Canadian goods to alternative markets, assist with trade diversification, enhance regional development and interregional trade opportunities in Canada, support northern and Indigenous economic and social development goals along with Arctic sovereignty objectives, mitigate environmental risks through monitoring and surveillance within a contained footprint and reduce the emissions intensity of transportation in Canada’s north and near-north.
In initial concept, the Northern Corridor would be approximately 7000 km in length. It would largely follow the boreal forest in the northern part of the west, with a spur along the Mackenzie Valley, and then southeast from the Churchill area to northern Ontario and the “Ring of Fire” area; the corridor would then traverse northern Quebec to Labrador, with augmented ports. The right-of-way would have room for roads, rail lines, pipelines and transmission lines, and would interconnect with the existing (southern-focused) transportation network.
The Northern Corridor is a practical and focused response to the need for government to do what government should do in terms of infrastructure – create the environment in which private investment, properly regulated, can be applied to projects without intransigent “one-off” regulatory processes for a new right of way for each project. The establishment of a multi-modal right-of-way facilitates a long-term, integrated approach to the approval, construction and operation of infrastructure. Another benefit of the Northern Corridor concept is that comprehensive approaches, which due to their scale allow for accommodation of many diverse interests, can (paradoxically) be more achievable than a series of incremental steps.
The objective of this webpage is to examine the potential of the Northern Corridor and outline the range of issues that would need to be studied in detail to determine the viability.
The process being put in-place by the Senior Engineer to re-start the licensing and construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline Project (Phase IV) is the reason for the creation of this webpage.
An important driver for the study of a new, integrated Canadian transportation corridor is the now apparent opportunity cost of Canada’s restricted ability to export commodities to world markets. Examples of this include energy products where, notwithstanding the post-2014 decline in global oil market prices, the international prices for oil and natural gas remain generally higher than those realizable in the currently accessible North American market. 7 Agricultural and forestry have also faced costly transportation bottlenecks prompting the Forestry Products Association of Canada to make calls on the federal government for longer-term transportation infrastructure planning horizons and a shift away from north-south transportation towards east-west transportation. Such a shift to the development of east-west transportation infrastructure is needed in order to match a long-term trend away from land-based export (south to the U.S.) and towards access to tidewater through Canadian ports.
Federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for energy and mines have already recognized a lack of infrastructure as a limiting factor in the further development of Canada’s mining and oil and gas commodity sectors. Following their 2014 conference, they released a discussion paper, which stated that: “A lack of infrastructure in certain regions (e.g. the North) and industry segments (e.g. oil and gas extraction, oil sands and liquefied natural gas) are creating bottlenecks that have contributed to higher transportation costs, project delays and, in some cases, lower revenues.”
The current downturn in commodity prices is generally forecast to be relatively short-lived for some or all of the commodities that Canada has historically exported. Analysis of industrial commodity prices over the last 150 years indicates that short-term variations in price are exceedingly common and are generally very large relative to long-run trends.
Therefore, there is good reason to assume that better prices will return for Canada’s commodity exports. No less relevant is the case for increased economic development in the north, accompanied by increases to the standard of living, including reductions in the cost of living. Canada’s northern communities currently face substantially higher living costs than those further south. In 2006 (the most recent year for which detailed data are readily available) the costs of goods and services in the north was more than 28 per cent higher than in the rest of Canada. This cost differential is primarily driven by high transportation costs that result from poor infrastructure. A Northern Corridor would go a long way towards reducing these cost differentials as well as providing new employment and business opportunities for northern residents.
An important question related to timing is whether moving ahead with work on the Northern Corridor could provide a fiscal stimulus to the economy to complement ongoing monetary policy accommodation. 14 Economic orthodoxy suggests that increased government spending during a recessionary or below potential-growth 15 period is an appropriate contra-cyclical fiscal policy. In these situations, new government spending is expected to stimulate the use of human and capital resources that would otherwise be idle. For example, Finance Canada calculations indicate that every infrastructure dollar spent under the federal government’s “Economic Action Plan” had a multiplier of 1.6 in terms of economic impact. 16, 17 This multiplier effect is heavily dependent on the overall state of the economy at the time government spending occurs. In times of below potential-growth, when the private sector is not making significant investments, incremental government spending has the largest potential expansionary effect. However, in periods when the economy is strong, government spending tends to crowd out private investment because governments employ labour and capital that would otherwise have been employed by the private sector. In extreme cases, if the crowding-out is one-for-one, increased government spending will not have any effect on overall economic output. This means that the short-term economic benefits of developing a Northern Corridor are difficult to forecast. They will depend in large measure on whether the economy is operating at or below its potential at the time of major investment. Given the long lead times for investment in a Northern Corridor, it would have a significant short-term fiscal stimulus impact only if Canada’s current output gap persists well into the future. It is safe to say, however, that from a timing standpoint there is benefit to planning ahead so that the Northern Corridor could be ‘ready to go’ when the short-term economic benefits of investment would be most impactful. More fundamentally, investment in a Northern Corridor would have a major, long-term, structural impact in terms of increasing the overall productive capacity of the economy, especially for export-oriented sectors and inter-regional and inter-community trade in currently remote regions. Accordingly, its potential economic merits should be assessed primarily on these grounds.