The next major new LNG project on the docket for Canada’s West Coast is Ksi Lisims LNG. The PRGT pipeline needed to bring gas to the proposed floating liquefaction plant was granted regulatory approval in June 2025. The LNG export facility itself was granted the green light by a joint BC and federal environmental review process last September. Two months later, the Carney government designated it as a “Major Project” for fast-tracking. 

All that awaits now is a “final investment decision” by the private sector owners of the proposed project, and construction will get underway. So what’s the hold up?

Ksi Lisims LNG, if built, would reside off a small island at the mouth of the Nass River north of Prince Rupert. The facility would receive fracked gas via pipeline from BC’s northeast, supercool the gas, and produce 12 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) each year. This liquid gas would get put into ocean tankers, where it would be shipped to Asia, and once burned there, would produce about 32 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, roughly equivalent to half the total annual emissions of British Columbia — hence its apt description as a "carbon bomb.” Much of the floating facility itself will be built in modular form in South Korea, before being towed to the Nass. According to the project proponents, the project would employ 800 people during peak construction. Once built, the number of permanent jobs would be somewhere around 200.

Ksi Lisims gets billed as an Indigenous-led LNG project — a partnership between the Nisga’a Nation, Rockies LNG and Western LNG. But in fact, it is 100 per cent American-owned. The associated PRGT pipeline is currently owned 50-50 by Western LNG and the Nisga’a government. But the LNG plant itself is fully owned by Texas-based Western LNG. Western LNG is, in turn, financed by Wall Street private equity firms, mainly Blackstone (the world’s largest asset manager, headed by Steve Schwarzman, a close advisor and major donor to President Trump) and Apollo (another massive asset manager, headed by Marc Rowan, whom Trump recently appointed to his misnamed “Board of Peace”). The role of the Nisga’a Nation is that of landlord — they own the land where the Ksi Lisims facility will be located (although the island in question is actually outside the Nisga’a’s formal treaty territory), so they will collect rent on the project. But the Nisga’a do not........

© National Observer