David Clark, The Province / Protesters at Sumas border crossing yesterday object to proposed gas-fired power plant in Washington state.

The lungs of people living in Abbotsford are already stressed and respiratory disease rates are predicted to soar if a giant gas-fired power plant is built at Sumas, Wash.

Speaker after speaker at yesterday's protest at the Sumas border crossing slammed the plant and the pollution it will spew into the lower Fraser Valley, already one of the worst regions in Canada for air quality.

The proposed 660 mW plant is intended to produce power for the spot market in California. It will burn Canadian gas and switch to standby diesel fuel when gas supplies are tight.

A crowd numbering in the hundreds jeered at the mention of federal Environment Minister David Anderson, who local Alliance MP Chuck Strahl said should be fighting the power project but has yet to draw his sword.

Whatcom County Coun. Connie Hoag told protesters the plant will pump three tonnes of pollutants, including arsenic and ammonia, into the atmosphere each day.

"Hospital rates for respiratory cases in Abbotsford and Chilliwack are already higher than in the rest of the lower Fraser Valley and air quality in the two communities is worse than in the rest of the valley," Hoag said. "The scientific evidence that bad air causes heart and lung disease is conclusive."

If California wants more power, it should host the plants to produce it, she said, but no new power plant has been built there in a decade.

Whatcom County already produces five times more power than it consumes and Washington state is a net exporter of power. Neither Washington state nor B.C. need to be gassed with fumes from a power plant that will produce as much pollution as 141,700 cars, Hoag said.

"Everything about this plant is bad," she said.

Barry Penner, the Liberal MLA for Chilliwack, said hospital admission rates for respiratory complaints in his community are 39 per cent above Vancouver levels.

Airborne fine particulates in Chilliwack are above a trigger level for causing lung-tissue damage, Penner said. If the Sumas plant goes ahead, Chilliwack residents will be breathing air that is 73 per cent into the danger zone.

Penner said the province should investigate whether B.C. Hydro has any legal obligation to connect to the Sumas plant in order to give it access to a trans-border power grid.

Robert Loch, who on retirement moved from Los Angeles to Custer, Wash., said he has had his fill of smog, but fears more may be coming his way if the plant is built 24 kilometres from his home.

PLUGGED INTO CALIFORNIA

Deregulation of the energy industry in California has made utilities nervous about building new power plants. And even if there were the will to invest, the environmental hurdles might prove stifling.

This is the situation the $400-million US Sumas Energy 2 plant is designed to exploit. It would be a factory for electricity, sitting on the Canadian border, that will help keep air conditioners in California humming.

The plant will burn enough gas to fuel more than half of the homes in Washington state and pump out power sufficient to meet two-thirds of the electricity needs of Seattle. Besides jetting three tonnes of toxins into the atmosphere a day, it will use 4.5 million litres of water every 24 hours.

VICTORIA - There is an entirely unwholesome miasma of secrecy surrounding current activities in British Columbia's energy industry. Because significant amounts of money are involved, the provincial government would do all citizens a great service if they would open this subject to better scrutiny.

To begin, there is the cost of energy products to the consumer. The province benefits equally with the energy companies from rising prices. The tax and royalty share of energy sales is a significant contributor to the recent noisy claims about a provincial budget surplus.

Available numbers from the provincial energy department give a shadowy outline of the sector's growth. In the past 12 months, sale of exploration permits in the prolific natural gas fields of northeastern B.C. have increased to $137 million from $92 million.

While those actual numbers are trivial in a provincial budget exceeding $20 billion, the 48-per-cent trend of the rise is significant and will certainly be further increased when the next lease sale opens on Sept. 20.

Behind this easy money is a series of unanswered questions. Most of them are related to the parallel growth of interest in pipeline construction and the eventual use of the pipeline output inside and outside B.C.

These are questions of the future, not of the present. Today, the export sale of natural gas far exceeds its domestic consumption. This was one of the outcomes of the free trade agreement with the United States -- the lifting of all restrictions on energy exports. In the short term, the U.S. appears agreeable to buying every available gigajoule of natural gas the Great White North can produce.

The question here is: How long will the party last? Increased pipeline capacity to Chicago raises the future price of natural gas because buyers are still uncertain whether the new Alliance pipeline can be filled. Behind this concern is expert opinion that the new gas fields are shallow wells that will expire in less that 10 years.

And finding enough new reserves to feed the export dragon is only part of the problem. Within B.C. there is now an apprehended demand for natural gas to fuel thermal electricity plants. B.C. Hydro, for one, is co-sponsor of a pipeline proposal beneath Georgia Strait from the U.S., then north to a land terminal on Vancouver Island.

Centra Gas, a subsidiary of Westcoast Transmission, has another, smaller proposal on the table to build a natural gas supply line from Victoria to Sooke. The line is intended to run under at least part of a regional park and hiking trail.

To say that either of these projects has made available a vast amount of public information on the utility of their construction would be a laughable mendacity. In fact, the proponents of both pipelines have, so far, been far less than forthcoming about what the dickens they are really doing.

In this regard, the provincial government could really help by moving clearly into the picture.

The buffoonish comedy about lack of concern for local issues that characterized the government's handling of the Sumas pipeline and gas-fired electricity plant in Washington state should not have to be replayed on Vancouver Island and in the Gulf of Georgia. The potential for another political firestorm of citizen protest should be evident even to the meanest intellect on the government bench.

One of the certain protest targets will be B.C. Hydro. Despite its clear ties to the provincial government as a Crown corporation, the company has a significant history of ignoring the proprietors in the name of corporate efficiency.

For example, the province now says it has an interest in the outcome of the decision on the Sumas natural gas project. If that is so, the government must take into account the Hydro statement that the Sumas project is part of a package involving the Georgia Strait crossing and two gas-fired thermal electric plants on Vancouver Island.

Notwithstanding current complaints about gasoline prices at the pump, the future of natural gas production and consumption in B.C. is far more important. The government can truly do nothing about the price of a commodity controlled by an international cartel.

By contrast, Victoria controls completely the means of production and delivery of natural gas within the province. And this is where every British Columbian's real interests lie.

patrick_nagle@bc.sympatico.ca

Patrick Nagle's column appears weekly.