Any new oil pipeline will need massive taxpayer subsidies, analyst warns

With a “flashing red warning light” heralding years of low oil prices, and a major Canadian fossil company joining its international peers in laying off hundreds of workers, a Simon Fraser University political scientist says no new oil pipeline will be built in Canada without huge taxpayer subsidies.

“The private sector is in no way willing to take on the risk of building another pipeline,” Prof. Anil “Andy” Hira told The Energy Mix in mid-September, in an interview that touched on the questionable economics of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects as well as oil pipelines. “So unless the federal government steps in and decides to put in massive amounts of money, these things are not going to get built.”

Hira was speaking just a couple of weeks before Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that her province would pitch a new million-barrel-per-day bitumen pipeline to Canada’s new Major Projects Office by May 2026, and in the midst of persistent reports that the global market for more oil is drying up.

“The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are cutting jobs, slashing costs, and scaling back investments at the fastest pace since the coronavirus market collapse,” the Financial Times reported in mid-September. “Spending plans have been reined in, with some projects paused or put up for sale as groups seek to balance the books.”

Hira said the push for new pipelines and LNG infrastructure is a symptom of a “bifurcated” conversation.

“On one hand, there’s a perception by the public and by most policy-makers that we just need to double down on oil and gas in the wake of the U.S. tariff war,” he told The Mix. But “we’re already losing billions of dollars in climate change costs on a yearly basis,” enough that any GDP or job gains from oil and gas “are overshadowed by losses due to climate change. And those losses only accumulate and accelerate over time.”

Even at a relatively low estimate for the cost of a tonne of climate pollution, “you end up with a $71-billion annual deficit right now, increasing over time, when you take those things into account,” he said. Yet “what the oil and gas companies in Alberta are deciding to do, and what [Prime Minister Mark] Carney is deciding to do, is to take the limited public investment we have and put it into a declining industry, which means we miss the boat on the possibility of becoming competitive in the emerging industry, which is clean technology.”

Hira contrasted the emphasis on fossil fuel infrastructure in Canada and Trump’s United States with the strategy in China, where the national government is heavily promoting electric vehicles and solar panels in southeast Asia and Africa, and in Denmark, where industrial policy supports renewable energy leaders like wind developers Ørsted and Vestas. He said Canada’s geographically dispersed renewable energy sector lacks a strong political champion, leaving the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers as ‘by far the most active lobbying group in the landscape.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s any basis for the fossil lobby’s demands, Hira stressed. “For us to make 30- or 40-year bets on an industry that by all predictions is going to decline just doesn’t make any economic sense,” he said. But at the moment, “we have a prime minister who is an economist, who is going against all of the economic indicators.”