Native Village In BC Hosts 2nd Largest LNG Terminal On Earth, Despite Rising Seas & Tsunami Risks
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As I arrived in town, the facility was expecting to send off its first load of LNG any day. Though the announcement was still months away at the time of my visit, Kitimat would soon bask in international attention after Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced his government’s “Major Projects” to build a stronger Canadian economy in the face of spiking tariffs from the United States. Topping Carney’s list would be a doubling of LNG Canada’s production, positioning the Kitimat facility to become one of the largest in the world, second only to Cheniere Energy’s operation in Sabine Pass, Louisiana.
LNG has been produced in BC for domestic energy and transportation purposes since the 1970s. Most of the province’s natural gas is extracted in northeastern BC, near Dawson Creek, from the rich Montney formation. It is obtained by drilling into sedimentary rock formations, often through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves injecting a mix of water and chemicals to release trapped gases. The extracted gas is then compressed and piped to an LNG facility. In this case, natural gas bound for export at Kitimat is piped southwest along the 670 kilometres of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline, from around Groundbirch, south of Fort St. John. In Kitimat, the gas is cooled into a liquid, which occupies much less space, before being loaded onto tankers for export to markets in Asia, where more than 50 percent of electricity is currently generated through coal burning. Natural Resources Canada glowingly promotes LNG as “non-corrosive, non-toxic and, most importantly, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel in the world—and it’s more affordable than many renewables!” Burning LNG to produce electricity does result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal, though the overall impact of increasing LNG exports on emissions worldwide is a matter of some controversy.
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When I’d spoken to him in preparation for the trip, he’d told me about an epic king tide the year before. The area had seen heavy rainfall, and the rivers were swollen. Combine that with a higher-than-usual tide and the water in the channel very nearly breached Haisla Avenue, the town’s main drag running parallel to the waterfront, shouting distance from the beach. It’s where the marina, the wastewater treatment plant, a gas bar, a general store, and the Haisla Nation culture department are all located, not to mention a brand-new youth centre built next to a soccer pitch. Johnston showed me photos: salt water flooding vehicles up to their rims and threatening to spill into backyards. “If we were in a heavy-storm situation at that point,” Johnston had told me, “all the buildings along the front road would have been under water.” The other thing I noticed in the photos was a giant’s game of pick-up sticks at the water’s edge: huge tree trunks and deadfall washed down from the surrounding temperate rainforest watershed. People use it for firewood and for carving, and it’s where it gets the name that the Haisla call the village: c̓imáuc̓a, or “snag beach.” I remember thinking a storm surge could easily lift up those massive logs and deposit them somewhere people prefer they weren’t. A tsunami could do it too.
About a month after my visit, on the evening of July 29, 2025, Emergency Info BC issued a tsunami watch for much of the province’s coastline. An 8.8-magnitude earthquake—one of the largest the world has ever recorded—had struck off the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and though it was thousands of kilometres away, the BC areas covered by the alert were at risk of dangerous waves and currents. In the hours following the Kamchatka quake, the tsunami alert was upgraded to an advisory, only one step below an evacuation order. A graphic from Emergency Info BC showed a thick amber outline of the area from Saanich Inlet on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island right up the coast to BC’s border with Alaska, looping around Haida Gwaii and sending dendrites into dozens of inlets and channels—including up the Douglas Channel. The agency advised residents in affected areas to stay out of the water and to avoid the shore and any low-lying coastal areas altogether. A person going down to check on their boat could easily be swept away by an advancing wall of water.
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https://thewalrus.ca/lng-pipeline-canada/