A Canadian entrepreneur and storyteller working at the intersection of advocacy, research, media, and innovation.
Vancouver, British Columbia.
Joined May 2008
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This is what an energy superpower looks like. Fuelled by natural gas.
B.C.’s Montney could fuel generations of Canadian prosperity. Will we turn that abundance into industry, jobs and opportunity - or keep watching others do it?
Or, maybe worse, watch others keep doing it with our gas bought at bargain basement prices?
We have the natural resources. Do we have the ambition? 🇨🇦
Louisiana figured out how to turn $3 of natural gas into $300. That's why SpaceX, Meta, Amazon and Hyundai are all pouring money into the same state at the same time.
The rocket is the easiest place to see it. SpaceX is spending $100 billion on what Elon calls the biggest launch site on Earth, down in Vermilion Parish. That same parish is home to Henry Hub, the pipeline junction where the price of natural gas gets set for the entire country. And Starship burns liquid methane, which is basically natural gas chilled until it turns into a liquid.
Once you see that, the rest of Louisiana's $300 billion project map clicks into place. Almost every pin on it is a different way to sell the same gas.
Six of them are export terminals. They chill the gas to minus 260°F until it shrinks 600 times over and fits on a tanker. Louisiana handled 61% of America's LNG exports in 2024, and no country on the planet exports more LNG than America does.
A lot of the others are gas turned into something you'd never guess. The ammonia plants pull hydrogen out of methane and bond it to nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer. Lake Charles Methanol turns it into methanol. Hyundai's $5.8 billion mill uses gas to rip the oxygen out of iron ore, then melts the iron into steel for its car plants in Alabama and Georgia. Shintech takes gas liquids and salt and makes PVC pipe out of them.
Then you get to the data centers, which are the newest way to ship Louisiana gas out of Louisiana. Entergy is building 10 gas plants just to feed Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish. The seven newest add 5,200 megawatts by themselves, about five times what New Orleans uses on a typical day. Amazon put its campuses outside Shreveport, right on top of the Haynesville Shale.
Here's where the $300 comes from. A million BTUs of gas goes for about $2.90 at Henry Hub right now. Burn it in a modern gas plant and you get roughly 150 kilowatt-hours of electricity. That's enough to run one Nvidia H100, plus its share of the server and the cooling, for about 100 hours. AI companies rent those chips for around $3 an hour, so the same $2.90 of gas ends up worth about $300.
So every company on that map wants to do something with the gas before it leaves the state. A hundredfold markup will do that.
Starship pushes it furthest. A fully fueled Starship holds more than 5,000 tons of propellant, and roughly a fifth of that is liquid methane. Elon wants 30 flights a day out of Starbase Louisiana. At that pace you're looking at around 1.7 billion cubic feet of gas a day, close to a tenth of everything America currently exports as LNG, all going up through one launch site.
The timing works out pretty well for the people drilling it. Gas got so cheap this fall that EQT and Expand Energy, the two biggest producers in the country, said they'd hold back output until prices come back up. Spot gas at Henry Hub fell to $2.52 on October 27, the lowest it's been since November 2024. Every project on that map is a long-term buyer for gas the drillers can't get a good price for today.
When SpaceX explained why it picked Louisiana, the whole answer fit in one line, "you need ample gas, and you need the right trajectories."
Every other company on that map showed up for the first half of that sentence.
Proud of this lad, my son, who raced back from the UBC T-Birds rugby match against UVic Saturday afternoon to finish his campaign. Gracious, hardworking and articulate - he won the praise of so many.
(Result: UBC men are through to the national championships, with a strong push from #4 in the back row.)
Congratulations to Emily Lowan on her victory in Saanich North and the Islands. Running for office takes enormous grit, and whatever the political differences, nobody can deny the sheer hustle and energy her campaign brought to the doorstep. Today is her day to celebrate. Her speech last night spoke directly to issues so many British Columbians are feeling deeply: crushing rents, long waits for family doctors, and the exhaustion of working multiple jobs just to stay afloat. Those anxieties are real, and they deserve real answers.
Where her message runs off the rails, and was on the nose for many, is in the intellectual playbook she chose to summon at the podium.
Invoking the late David Graeber - the anarchist anthropologist and chief theorist behind Occupy Wall Street - Lowan quoted his line that the world is an experiment that “we make and could just as easily make differently.”
It sounds poetic in an election hall, but let’s remember what Graeber’s philosophy actually is. He wasn't arguing for better daycare funding or incremental transit tweaks. He was an uncompromising revolutionary who wrote:
“Direct action is the open defiance of an illegitimate authority... it is an insistence on acting as if one is already free, and in doing so, exposing the violence at the heart of the state.”
This isn't an abstract debate from Zuccotti Park fifteen years ago. Right here in British Columbia, we see this eco-anarchist doctrine (rejected by 90% of voters, btw) playing out in real time, where activist networks deploy blockades to obstruct First Nations who have chosen to pursue economic options, equity ownership, and major project partnerships in their own territories.
That is the most glaring flaw at the heart of the anarchist critique. While invoking Indigenous rights as an abstract slogan, this mindset routinely overrides the actual, self-determined aspirations of Indigenous communities that are choosing economic independence and shared prosperity over perpetual reliance on government transfers.
About one in ten B.C. voters backed the Greens this election. Yet I suspect very few of those well-meaning citizens have taken the time to truly examine what this strain of green thinking entails. It doesn't seek to refine our economic system. It seeks to dismantle it.
At the same time, what British Columbia does not need is an equal and opposite reaction to Graeber-think. Retreating into our own ideological bunkers and answering dogma with hardline polarization is a guaranteed path to conflict, not reconciliation.
You cannot fund community health centres, electrify transit grids, or pay nurses’ salaries with protest theory. Those services are underwritten by royalties, payroll taxes, and the tangible economic engine of B.C. - mining, forestry, energy, ports, and trade.
Tomorrow when La Rose vs HMTK opens in a Vancouver courtroom, an object lesson will be on display of what happens when Graeber-styled thinking occurs in the wild, where the goal is for the tail to wag the dog. I’ll be watching it closely.
I genuinely wish Emily the best as she steps into the Legislature. The transition from movement activist to accountable lawmaker is where ideology collides with balance sheets and physical reality. That’s a transition every British Columbian has a stake in seeing succeed.
Not long after starting @Resource_Works, I saw something special in Margareta Dovgal. She joined us and became a leading part of our success as we built a British Columbia and national voice for Canada’s natural resources.
A decade later, tonight she’s the new MLA for Vancouver-Yaletown!
We’ll miss her terribly. But seeing her dreams come true is a joy. BC is gaining an exceptional talent, and I couldn’t be prouder.
I’ve been following the progress of #WoodfibreLNG since it was a stack of binders.
Today’s economic impact report is worth a look if you want to understand the scale and value of the work.
Chasing the fading light south from Terrace. Waves of blue mountain shadows beneath an October horizon, descending toward YVR.
Pleased to bag a few mentions in this thumbsucker.
thenarwhal.ca/fossil-fuel-in…
“What a great day for Canada…Canada’s building big again.”
PM Mark Carney comments moments ago in Vancouver on today’s news - phase 2 of LNG Canada, which will become the second largest LNG facility in the world.
By doubling the size of British Columbia’s first LNG export terminal, this news materially improves global energy security.
While confirming that Canada’s energy superpower ambitions are no pipedream. lngcanada.ca/news/lng-canada…
I’ve been her boss for years at @Resource_Works. @Margare7a led the Indigenous partnerships work, built our COVID recovery coalition, took research to Parliament, and a lot more. Best of all, she’s mentored so many other young people along the way. A pillar. And very serious in the honourable duty of asking voters for their consideration.
From growing up below the poverty line to testifying before Parliament, Margareta Dovgal knows what families need to get ahead.
conservativebc.ca/candidate/…
So proud of what this young man has accomplished in such a short time.
Alexander Muir isn't afraid of a scrum, and he's ready to fight for young British Columbians who want to build a life here.
conservativebc.ca/candidate/…
A 90-day diesel export ban - floated, backed and seemingly denied before nap time at the White House.
Since we're thinking about this anyway, here are some facts about the production, trade and use of Canadian diesel fuel.
Our @Resource_Works read on Canada's first Investment Summit prospectus: 167 projects, >US$450B, and every province and territory in the book.
Canada is ready to build - I’ve never seen this degree of alignment.
In 2017 the proponent walked away from Pacific NorthWest LNG at Prince Rupert. Had project opened on original schedule in 2019, my conservative estimate is it would have shipped about C$93 billion of LNG by now. The tally passes C$100 billion in mid-January.
Investors are undoubtedly chewing over these same facts. Hence the importance of getting it right this time.
#InvestInCanada
#CanadaEconomy
#GetItDoneBC
Question of the day: can anyone think of a secure, dependable alternative source of fuels the world can’t do without?
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Noteworthy advice from Sean Boyd, chair of Canada’s largest mining company by market value and the world’s second-largest gold producer.
The author will be speaking Oct. 23 at a @Resource_Works event in Toronto with Energy Minister @timhodgsonmt, I’ll paste the link into this thread.
financialpost.com/commoditie…
There’s nothing left to debate: West Coast energy export projects gave Canada the fortitude and stamina to weather the U.S. trade war.
I’m grateful to @GlobalBC News for allowing me to explain why that’s a major takeaway from our new @Resource_Works analysis authored by Philip Cross.
Trump’s tariffs landed and one corner of the 🇨🇦 economy just kept humming – the one shipping energy to Asia from the west coast.
The facts are now in, leading to an inescapable conclusion: the Trump-resistant option to reduce Canada’s exposure starts right under our feet.
A new study by economist Philip Cross for Resource Works finds that B.C.’s oil and gas production rose 92.2% since 2015. New pipeline and LNG capacity drove exports, high-paying jobs and trade diversification.
Read the study out today:
resourceworks.com/what-b-c-s…
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