This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

LNG Canada told the BC Energy Regulator its Kitimat, B.C., gas export facility was likely to emit black smoke continuously for multiple days, a warning that came ahead of key environmental permits being granted, according to recently released documents.

The new documents, obtained by The Narwhal and U.K.-based investigative journalism organization Point Source through freedom of information legislation, raise questions over whether the regulator should have sought more assurances about measures to stop this kind of pollution before permits were granted.

Summary

• LNG Canada has been emitting more black smoke than originally planned and some Kitimat, B.C., residents are concerned.
• Black smoke can indicate gas is not burning efficiently, releasing higher levels of toxic pollutants, according to one expert.
• The BC Energy Regulator knew about the smoke ahead of giving the project approvals but has now ordered LNG Canada to make changes.

In July 2022, LNG Canada — a consortium of five foreign-owned companies led by Shell — submitted a document to the provincial government outlining its expectations around black smoke emissions.

“Given the unpredictable nature of these types of events, it is not possible to give a frequency of them occurring although an estimate is provided,” the consortium wrote. 

The colour of black smoke is caused by a concentration of particulates and unburned fuels, which is toxic. The estimate provided to the regulator said black smoke would be emitted at the facility for between 15 and 60 minutes one to three times per year prior to the facility completing 200 shipments. LNG Canada sent its 100th shipment in mid-June, nearly one year after its first. It also estimated slightly less dark smoke would be emitted continuously from the facility for between five and 15 days on four to six occasions in the first year

Despite this information, the regulator issued LNG Canada a facility permit requiring that black smoke not be continuously emitted for more than 15 minutes. The company committed to that limit, but has failed to keep to it.

On Jan. 6 2026, the export terminal emitted black smoke emissions during non-emergency conditions for more than seven hours. The next day, it emitted black smoke for over two hours. 

In April, the BC Energy Regulator told LNG Canada to identify the root cause of black smoke emissions during flaring at its facility in Kitimat, and implement a fix by October.

In late June, the regulator instituted new requirements, including mandated reporting of instances of black smoke emissions.

A spokesperson with the regulator said the facility’s permit “contains clear statutory requirements regarding black smoke emissions designed to minimize air pollutants to protect public safety and the environment.” 

“When our oversight activities identify non-compliances, such as in this case, we can place additional requirements (e.g., having to report black smoke) on permit holders,” the spokesperson noted in an emailed statement.

Black smoke from the flare stack of a LNG facility usually indicates that gas from the facility is not being burned off in an efficient manner and higher levels of toxic pollutants are being released, according to Tim Doty, a former oil and gas inspector with the Texas state government.

“The black smoke that can be visually seen being emitted from the flare is soot, basically,” Doty said in an interview. “In theory, flares are designed to burn in an efficient way that doesn’t produce this black smoke.”

According to the regulator’s reply to detailed questions, LNG Canada’s new requirements as of June include:

• Report to the BC Energy Regulator (BCER) all instances of black smoke that exceeds 15 minutes in duration and provide operational details concurrent with such instances;   
• By Aug. 15, 2026, submit a report completed by a qualified professional to the BCER that identifies the root causes of the emission of black smoke and measures to prevent the emission of black smoke; 
• By October 15, 2026, identify and implement measures to prevent the emission of black smoke based on the root cause analysis as required by the report; 
• For the months of October 2026 to March 2027, submit a monthly report to the energy regulator BCER completed by a qualified professional that assesses the effectiveness of the measures implemented .

‘I want to have a family’: community members concerned about potential health impacts

For some community members, the black smoke and presence of other potential pollutants are a source of great concern. 

The Narwhal and Point Source spoke to a young resident who we are calling Avery Sutherland, to keep her name confidential and protect her identity. Kitimat is a small town where LNG Canada is a significant employer and a major donor to local causes, and criticism is often seen as a threat to that.

Avery Sutherland said she tried on multiple occasions to get answers to questions about potential health concerns, but LNG Canada representatives would not respond.

“As a young person, I want to have a family,” she said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of back and forth I’ve seen over the last couple of years at different talks that LNG [Canada] gives, where they refuse to directly acknowledge the studies that have been done on the impacts of flaring on women who are pregnant and their children, and how that often leads to like more birth complications and more premature births.”

In response to questions about this, the regulator spokesperson said: “It is important to note for the benefit of residents of Kitimat that air quality measurements in the Kitimat Valley have remained below B.C. Ambient Air Quality Objectives since LNG Canada received its air discharge permit.”

But some critics claim the air quality monitoring program is insufficient.

“The current ambient air pollution monitoring is not sufficient to get a real handle on what the health implications are for the people that are living close to this facility,” Tracey Saxby, executive director of environmental non-profit, My Sea to Sky, said in an interview. “When you dig into the data you realize that there aren’t enough sensors, they aren’t gathering data in the right places and not enough of the sensors are continually operating.” 

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment has said the facility’s flaring activity has exposed residents to “health-harming chemicals, including black carbon and benzene.”

“They are not consistently monitoring for some of the most harmful pollutants, like benzene,” Saxby said. “These are big monitoring gaps.” Health Canada has labelled benzene a known carcinogen since 1993.

In 2024, the U.S.-based Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice published a report highlighting how LNG export facilities degrade air quality by releasing pollutants known to cause respiratory illnesses, cancer and birth defects from prolonged exposure.

Scientific studies have shown that burning gas also releases other toxic pollutants as a result of incomplete combustion, such as volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine soot particles, which are directly associated with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and risks to fetal development.

“When you see this kind of pollution, it’s a sign that the flare isn’t being operated correctly and usually that comes with a lot of other emissions that are actively being released that are not visible to the naked eye,” Doty explained.

“It’s likely that the real world pollution levels are far worse than the picture painted by the current data,” Saxby said. “Even though the existing data is very sparse, it shows worrying spikes in benzene levels that raise a lot of questions about the health impacts from the LNG Canada facility.”

As The Narwhal and Point Source recently reported, LNG Canada originally told the regulator it would operate its facility without routine flaring — and then quietly removed this commitment months before commissioning. 

Sutherland wishes the consortium that owns LNG Canada was more forthcoming with information. Its presence in the community has been divisive for as long as the facility has been in development, which means for young residents like herself, it’s been a factious issue for most of their lives. 

“When I was growing up, there were schoolyard and classroom arguments about this since as long as I can remember,” she said of the facility, which was proposed in 2013.

James Smith, another Kitimat resident whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, worked at the plant during construction. He said while he was expecting problems to occur at the facility, he didn’t predict the scale of the impacts. 

“I wasn’t expecting the black smoke,” he said. 

Smith said he’s experienced excessive noise and bad smells at his house since the facility started operations and on multiple occasions found his yard covered in a thin film of black residue.

Doty said the ongoing problems suggest to him the facility’s problem with its flare tip could be causing the black smoke.

“Flares like this should be operating with about 98 per cent combustion efficiency, but there is no way that the flare is operating with anything close to that efficiency,” he said. “If there’s too much pressure going to it, you’re never going to get things to combust properly — and that seems to be what is happening at LNG Canada.” 

In response to questions from The Narwhal and Point Source, the regulator spokesperson noted: “The causes of the black smoke events have not yet been definitively determined.” 

‘Truly massive’ invisible emissions

On top of the elevated levels of flaring at the LNG Canada export terminal, there are increasing concerns about the facility routinely releasing natural gas into the atmosphere.

Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which is an invisible, odorless and an extremely potent greenhouse gas. When released directly into the atmosphere it is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate.

“If people could actually see the invisible emissions that are being released from the LNG Canada facility that are detectable with an optical gas imaging camera, it would really blow them away,” Doty said. He monitored emissions at the Kitimat facility with a camera.“The emissions that could not be seen with the bare eye were shocking. They were truly massive.”

Doty said the emissions — both visible and invisible — could have “very negative health implications for nearby communities and downwind receptors.” 

“If I was living nearby, I would be very concerned, and I would want the plant shut down, at least in the short term, while it is re-engineered,” he said. He noted the unburned gas could contain volatile organic compounds such as benzene and butane, in addition to the climate-warming methane.

“At the moment, the program to monitor ambient air pollution in the area isn’t effective and doesn’t have enough monitors in place to truly calculate how air quality is being impacted,” he said.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Summary

• Internal documents show LNG Canada’s original plans for the project included a commitment that operations would not include routine flaring. 
• While LNG Canada and the B.C. government have promoted the site as an environmental leader, the facility burned about 350 million cubic metres of gas in its first year of operation.
• LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

This story is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

LNG Canada, the country’s first major liquefied natural gas export facility on B.C.’s West Coast, has made international headlines over the past year — for burning off the gas it should have been exporting. 

An issue with one of the facility’s flare stacks has caused the plant to burn off extra gas since starting up in late 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Early versions of LNG Canada’s operational plans included detailed environmental commitments — and a promise the Kitimat, B.C., plant would operate “without routine flaring.”

In 2019, the consortium of five foreign-owned companies behind the multi-billion-dollar project told the BC Energy Regulator its massive gas liquefaction and export facility would have minimum disturbance to the local community, assuring the provincial government the plant would be built to specifications that would ensure flaring — the burning of unused gas — would only need to be done in extraordinary circumstances. 

These promises appeared in multiple versions of regulatory reports submitted to the B.C. government. Six versions of the reports — drafts of LNG Canada’s flaring management plans marked as “restricted” — were included in hundreds of pages of government documents obtained by The Narwhal and UK-based investigative journalism outlet Point Source. 

In November 2023, the commitments vanished from the latest drafts — and remained absent from all subsequent drafts and the final version. The removal of commitments close to completion raises fresh questions about whether potential problems during construction may have led the company to downgrade its environmental targets.

A few months later, the mega-project started its commissioning process. Then came the flaring.

As The Narwhal and Point Source previously reported, LNG Canada burned approximately 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, making it one of the most polluting LNG facilities in the world. Some unplanned flaring events included multiple occurrences of flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly as tall as London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community. 

“The fact that LNG Canada showed the regulator multiple draft documents which all said that the facility would not flare on a routine basis was beyond misleading,” Tim Doty, a former state oil and gas inspector from Texas, said in an interview. “This was totally false information.”

During his tenure with the Texas government, Doty managed thousands of air quality monitoring projects as part of environmental assessments of industrial facilities. He’s now a consultant who works on behalf of companies and organizations to assess and monitor emissions at oil and gas facilities around the globe. 

Unnecessary flaring of gas essentially wastes the resource — and creates carbon pollution.

Even after LNG Canada quietly dropped its planned commitment to operate without routine flaring, stakeholders continued to tout its environmental credentials. In June 2025, Shell CEO Wael Sawan said LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest-carbon [LNG] projects anywhere in the world,” speaking at the Energy Asia conference in Malaysia. 

B.C. Premier David Eby echoed the claim in July that year, saying gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Many experts now say these claims were fundamentally untrue.

Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the volume of flaring at the facility “undermines claims being made” about low-carbon LNG.

“Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue,” he previously told The Narwhal.

The premier’s office did not reply to a request for an interview, referring questions to the Energy Ministry, which acknowledged it received the questions but ultimately did not respond.

LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

‘An extremely big polluter’: former oil and gas inspector

LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. Government data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to the facility last year via the Coastal GasLink pipeline, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

The average household in Canada consumed around 2,216 cubic metres of natural gas in 2024, according to the Canadian Gas Association. That means LNG Canada burned off the equivalent amount of gas that could have provided energy to 157,942 homes.

Yet, LNG Canada’s documents submitted to the provincial government claim environmental excellence. 

“LNG Canada’s ‘commitment and policy on health, safety, security, environment and social performance’ focuses on ways to avoid and minimize negative environmental and social impacts resulting from our operations and enhance the positive impacts in a systematic manner,” the early documents noted.

Doty said regulatory plans for LNG facilities are often subject to multiple revisions by the government regulator. 

“It is normal for there to be a bit of back and forth between the operator and the regulator when documents are being prepared that are associated with operating permits which allow the company to release pollution,” he explained. “However, it does seem strange that these documents contained these environmental pledges that were later scrapped entirely.”

The BC Energy Regulator told The Narwhal and Point Source the early versions of the reports “included commitments and commentary that were outside of the intended scope of the report and not consistent with the design of their facility.”

“Routine flaring is authorized for specific purposes, including pilot systems, continuous purge systems, passing valves, manual sampling systems and online process analyzers,” a regulator spokesperson explained in a detailed response to questions.

Doty questioned whether the designs were ever intended for a facility that would operate without routine flaring or if something happened while building the plant. 

“You can see from the way that this facility was designed that there was always supposed to be some kind of combustion going on — and with that comes emissions,” he said, adding additional problems may have occurred early in the commissioning process.

The regulator spokesperson disagreed with the theory that the plant was designed for high rates of flaring. 

“The [BC Energy Regulator’s] reviews of the facility and LNG Canada’s submissions during design and construction … did not identify factors that would have contributed to increased flaring rates during operation,” the spokesperson noted.

James Smith, a Kitimat community member whose name has been changed to protect his family from potential repercussions, worked on the project during construction. He said he witnessed numerous problems on the job site, ultimately leading him to quit.

“They cut corners: it was about timelines and money,” he said. “They knew even before the flare arrived, before they started building it, that it wasn’t going to work. That was the word on the ground.”

The Narwhal could not independently verify Smith’s claims, and LNG Canada did not respond to questions about alleged problems during construction. 

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and discovered it could take three to five years to fix.

The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, if not before, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025.

“I’ve been assessing and monitoring facilities in the oil and gas sector for more than 30 years, and I can tell you that LNG Canada is an extremely big polluter,” Doty said. “In my opinion, it should not be allowed to operate with such excessive emission levels.”

The facility is currently operating with a cracked flare tip as well as several leaking valves, according to previous reporting from The Narwhal and technical reports since the issue was identified. A flare tip, which sits at the top of the flare stack, helps ensure the safe combustion of the gas.

The technical problems have increased the risk of flames from flares retreating back into the system’s pipes and causing an explosion. To stop this from happening, LNG Canada has substantially increased the gas flows to all of the facility’s flares.

“A replacement flare tip is currently being installed,” a spokesperson for the consortium wrote in an emailed statement. “While the replacement is expected to improve flare tip integrity, a longer-term redesigned tip is being developed.”

LNG Canada wants the B.C. government to let it increase flaring tenfold

Earlier this year, LNG Canada revealed it was planning to ask the B.C. regulator to increase its flaring limit tenfold for the next three years. The company’s deputy chief operating officer, Teresa Waddington, disclosed the plans during a Kitimat council meeting in March and at a recent presentation to Kitimat residents.

If approved, the new limit would allow the company to continually flare up to 300 tonnes of gas per day, an increase from its current limit of 28 tonnes per day. The company said the new, more permissive flaring limit would help accommodate operational problems which have led to higher-than-anticipated flaring volumes.

LNG Canada told The Narwhal and Point Source the proposed amendment is “not expected to materially increase emissions in the local air shed.”

“The original … authorization was based on long-term, stable operating conditions and did not reflect the higher flaring volumes typically seen during start-up and early operations at an LNG facility,” the spokesperson wrote. “LNG Canada is requesting a temporary, three-year provision that reflects overall flaring during the early operations period.”

However, flare tips are large and complex pieces of equipment and can take more than a year to procure, according to Waddington. As a result, she said LNG Canada wants to keep purging extra gas to prevent the flames from spreading downward into the pipes, likely until 2028.

“LNG Canada has said that it’s going to take three years to replace the flare [tip], but I can tell you that it doesn’t take three years to replace a flare [tip] like this,” Doty said. “The plant should be shut down. It should be properly repaired and engineered and then started back up again.”

Tracey Saxby, a marine scientist and executive director of non-profit environmental organization My Sea to Sky, worries LNG Canada is setting a precedent that other liquefaction and export facilities will follow.

“Woodfibre LNG in Squamish has estimated that flaring during startup will last for one month, with intermittent flare events of three to four days,” she said in an interview. “After that, during regular operations, they are saying they will only flare three per cent of the time, which is 11 days a year. But after what we have seen at LNG Canada and other facilities worldwide, this seems unrealistic.”

She said the excessive flaring at LNG Canada held against its previously stated commitments demonstrates there is “nothing anyone can do if the operator of one of these facilities breaks its promises about pollution.”

The regulator said it is “actively overseeing LNG Canada’s progress on short-term and long-term corrective actions and measures to reduce flaring from all facility flare systems.” 

“[BC Energy Regulator] technical experts review flaring and air contaminant discharge information submitted by LNG Canada, conduct inspections and take compliance actions where required,” the spokesperson noted, adding an “investigation into potential non-compliances is ongoing.”Updated on July 31, 2026, at 5:39 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement that the BC Energy Regulator has promoted the LNG Canada facility as an environmental leader. It is the B.C. government that has made that claim.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

Summary

• LNG Canada burned 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, more than the estimated highest source of LNG flaring emissions in the world in 2024.
• The high levels of flaring call into question environmental claims made about the facility, which government officials have repeatedly said produces the cleanest LNG in the world. 
• Ongoing problems at the plant, which hopes to double production by building a second phase, could persist for three to five years.

An LNG facility in Western Canada burned more gas in 2025 than any other liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility on record in 2024, raising concerns about Canada’s claim it’s producing the cleanest LNG in the world. 

Burning excess methane gas, or flaring, is a normal safety procedure at liquefaction facilities. It releases greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide as well as emitting dangerous pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and small particulate matter, which affect human health. The LNG Canada facility in British Columbia flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, according to figures submitted to the provincial regulator and analyzed by The Narwhal in partnership with U.K.-based journalism organization Point Source. That means Canada’s first major LNG facility is one of the highest sources of LNG flaring emissions globally.

The flaring volumes reported by LNG Canada to the regulator are around 50 per cent higher than estimates for the world’s most polluting LNG export terminals in 2024, according to data that was used as the basis for the World Bank’s most recent Global Gas Tracker report.

The data was published by the Earth Observation Group at the Colorado School of Mines, a research team that specializes in producing nighttime satellite imagery to track gas flaring.

According to the group’s estimates, Nigeria’s Bonny Island LNG terminal was the highest-flaring facility of 2024. It burned an estimated 234.4 million cubic metres of gas, closely followed by the Arzew-Bethioua terminal in Algeria, which burned 233 million cubic metres.

Global flaring data from LNG facilities operating in 2025 have not yet been published but the Canadian facility will be among the world’s top sources of flaring at LNG terminals, according to Mikhail Zhizhin, a researcher at the Payne Institute for Public Policy in Colorado. Zhizhin was instrumental in the development of technology to monitor gas flaring from space.

“If the flaring data that has been supplied by LNG Canada to the regulator is accurate, it puts the facility amongst the highest flaring LNG facilities in the world,” Zhizhin said in an interview.

In an emailed statement, LNG Canada attributed the flaring to the facility being at an early phase and said it will be infrequent during normal operations.

The high volume of flaring from the $40-billion Canada-based facility raises new questions about ongoing problems with some of the terminal’s key mechanical components — and concerns about what it could mean for the local community, Kitimat, B.C. 

According to government data, LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. The worst month for flaring was June 2025, when the facility burned almost 110 million cubic metres. The data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to LNG Canada last year, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

“This is definitely high,” Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “Proponents may argue that it is regular during commissioning, but the several instances of unplanned flaring by the company suggest that this is out of the ordinary.”

Some of those unplanned flaring events included flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly the size of London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community.

The export plant sent its first shipment of LNG overseas on June 30, 2025.

Flaring at LNG Canada has consistently exceeded allowable amounts permitted by the provincial government. According to the regulator, LNG Canada — owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Petronas, Korea Gas, PetroChina and Mitsubishi — has been flaring at levels that are “not consistent” with government permits, meaning the facility has been breaking provincial regulations for several months.

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and it could take three to five years to fix. The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025. 

Company officials have since met with local politicians but have failed to provide the public with details of why the issue might take so long to fix.

LNG Canada declined to answer this question, though the spokesperson said “we continue to tune the equipment to real-world conditions.”

“In normal operations at LNG Canada flaring will be related to infrequent activities such as maintenance, planned turnarounds and facility upsets,” the spokesperson wrote.

‘Completely untrue’: experts question environmental claims about Canadian LNG

Analysts believe the high flaring levels at LNG Canada raise serious questions about environmental claims that have been made about the facility.

Last summer, the premier of British Columbia, David Eby, said gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Discussing why energy-importing countries would benefit from purchasing fuel processed at the facility, he said: “They should be using Canadian LNG that’s produced ethically, that promotes environmental protection, as well as high-quality labour standards and safety standards.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan similarly said last year that LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest carbon projects anywhere in the world.”

Speaking in India in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney said: “Canada is well-positioned to contribute as a reliable supplier of the world’s lowest-carbon, responsibly-produced LNG from our West Coast.” 

Eby declined an interview request and did not respond to questions about the current state of the facility. Shell did not respond to questions. Carney also declined an interview request and referred questions to the federal Energy Ministry, which did not respond by publication time.

Doleman said the new information calls these environmental claims into question. 

“This flaring data undermines the claims that are being made about the facility producing low-carbon LNG,” he said in an interview. “Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue.”

LNG Canada said high levels of flaring are normal during the start-up phase of a project of this type. The spokesperson said air quality data recorded in Kitimat show levels of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide remained “consistently low” in 2025.

“LNG Canada continues to prioritize the safety of its people, the community and its assets, to support safe and responsible operations,” the spokesperson wrote.

There is significant uncertainty about the true volumes of global gas flaring due to the difficulty of measuring emissions via satellite. Recent research by the Colorado School of Mines has suggested the true levels of flaring from the world’s LNG facilities may be significantly higher than previously estimated, Zhizhin said.

The fact that LNG Canada flared a significant volume of gas every single day in 2025 is unusual, according to researchers. A peer-reviewed paper published last September found LNG terminals in a start-up phase have a 90 per cent chance of flaring less than six days a year and only a 10 per cent chance of flaring for as many as 255 days in a single year.

Laura Minet, lead author of the paper and head of the Clean Air Lab at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, explained “the probabilities are based on what has been happening in other facilities around the world between 2012 and 2022.” She said the frequency of flaring at LNG Canada does not appear to be typical, especially compared to LNG facilities that have moved from commissioning into regular operations. But, she said, because companies around the world aren’t required to track how much gas is flared, getting accurate data can be challenging.

“The fact that LNG Canada is saying the technical issue is going to take three years to fix is concerning,” Minet added. “It raises questions over what is getting prioritized and where the likely environmental and health impacts from this pollution fit into those priorities.”

Doleman agreed.

“The operators and project proponents should tell people why this plant is flaring so much and tell them exactly how they are going to address this issue,” he said.

LNG markets subject to instability as U.S.-Israel war on Iran continues

The ongoing global energy crisis in the wake of the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran in late February has seen the price of LNG more than double for some importers and led to windfall profits for some exporters. 

A second phase of the LNG Canada project, which would double output from the plant, was recently given federal support and placed on a list of projects deemed to be of national importance. The consortium of companies behind the facility are actively seeking investment in the expansion.

The U.S. is currently the world’s largest LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar. Geopolitical instability caused by the war in the Middle East — which saw Qatar halt LNG production in March — could influence importing countries like South Korea and Japan as they balance energy needs.

However, the current wave of high prices could have lasting impacts on demand for LNG as importing nations look to cheaper alternatives, Doleman said. Recently, a planned LNG import terminal in China was cancelled by state-owned Sinopec, which reallocated its investments to the development of domestic gas reserves. In New Zealand, plans for an import terminal are being reconsidered as the country’s government weighs the financial risks. 

“The current high price environment is killing long-term demand for LNG around the world and it is going to be interesting to see how things pan out for the [Canadian] facility over the coming years,” Doleman said.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.