The Montney Play in British Columbia contains an estimated 447 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, just under half of Canada’s total natural gas resources. Photo courtesy Tourmaline.

Almost a month ago, on September 14-15, a couple hundred people who control more than $100 trillion descended on Toronto, where provincial premiers prostrated themselves before the kings of finance in the hopes that they might see fit to invest in the 167 projects included in the Carney government’s Canada Investment Summit “pitchbook.”

The “pitchbook,” officially known as the Canada Investment Summit Prospectus, contains a wide range of projects in an equally wide range of stages: some exist as little more than a hastily constructed website and a press release (complete, in one instance, with a CEO reachable at a Gmail address). Others are already operating and seeking capital for expansions. Four of them are liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects—and a handful more are LNG-related—including two that would be the first proposals outside British Columbia in years.

The federal government has set an ambitious and arguably impossible goal of building 100 million tonnes per year (mtpa) of LNG export capacity over the next decade. Impossible or not, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Energy Minister Tim Hodgson have both made it clear that LNG exports are one of their top industrial policy priorities, to the point that they are willing to throw massive amounts of public finance towards their development.

Much of the government’s strategy so far has been about hype: they seem to hope they can blow enough hot air into the LNG industry that private investors will take it from there. But that strategy has seen limited success so far, and they are increasingly turning towards innovative forms of public financing and subsidies for these projects. It is beginning to look like the full backing of the federal government may be enough to get one or more of these projects to the point of breaking ground after all.

Given that, it is worth checking in on where the industry is at and what the implications of this push are not just for BC, where Canada’s LNG export industry has so far been concentrated, but increasingly for the whole country. What is the status of existing projects, and what Carney-backed projects are on the horizon? Which of the rapidly growing number of proposals are actually viable, and what would their construction mean for Canada?

What is LNG and where does it come from?

Methane gas—commonly called natural gas—is a widely produced fossil fuel. It is often extracted as a byproduct of oil production, but the fracking boom has increasingly driven the exploitation of gas-primary deposits like the Montney Play in BC. Methane gas can be transported through pipelines relatively easily but marine shipping is more difficult: its energy density is so low that it can’t be shipped profitably without freezing it into a much denser liquid form, LNG, first. Freezing gas into a liquid form requires cooling it to -162ºC, an energy-intensive process usually powered by burning about 10 percent of the incoming feed gas at the liquefaction facility (although in BC some projects are under construction that intend to use grid-supplied electricity to power that process).

In 2025, LNG accounted for about 14 percent of global methane gas use, though this number had been climbing in recent years as LNG export capacity has grown.

Alberta has long been the heartland of Canada’s oil and gas industry, but production from BC’s Montney deposit has expanded rapidly over the last decade and a half thanks to the rise of fracking, and the province now produces almost as much gas as Alberta. The Montney has become the primary driver of growth in Canada’s gas production and if demand continues to grow—whether because of LNG export facilities or gas-fired power plants for AI data centres—production will keep climbing.

The Montney is one of the largest gas deposits in the world, and Canada’s biggest “carbon bomb.” Earlier studies suggested the deposit holds commercial reserves that, if fully exploited, would emit roughly 13.7 Gt of CO2 equivalent, nearly 20 times Canada’s annual emissions. If current resource estimates turn out to be correct, the deposit’s reserves would emit 24.6 Gt of CO2 when burned, equivalent to nearly half a year’s emissions for the entire planet.

Part of the reason the Montney hasn’t been more heavily exploited up to this point is that Canada’s gas market is cursed by low prices, and there’s no point drilling if you often can’t sell your gas at a profit. LNG exports are seen as a solution to this problem. So are AI data centres, as one of Carney’s advisors recently pointed out explicitly. If these industries continue to grow, Montney gas production will boom;........

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