Bloomberg: Petronas Offers Canada Band Almost $1 Billion to Back LNG

The Petroliam Nasional Bhd-led group planning a natural gas export terminal on Canada’s Pacific Coast is offering one aboriginal community C$1.15 billion ($950 million) over 40 years to approve the project.

Pacific NorthWest LNG, led by the Malaysian state-owned energy producer, is offering the payments to the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation so it can build the unit on the community’s traditional lands at the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, the native group said on its website. The deal also includes incentives from the provincial government and gas pipeline developers.

“It’s the going rate,” Art Sterritt, executive director of Coastal First Nations, an alliance of aboriginal communities on British Columbia’s northern coast, said Friday by phone from Prince Rupert. “Certainly, other communities that have LNG terminals in their territory are seeing proposals of this size.”

The Prince Rupert facility is part of a C$36 billion plan by Petronas, as the company is known, to ship gas reserves from Canada’s westernmost province by tanker to growing energy markets in Asia. Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is obtained by chilling the fossil fuel at ultra-low temperatures to maximize the amount that can be loaded into vessels. MORE