Image credit | Energy Mix
Originally published in the Energy Mix on September 18th, written by James Wilt.
Last month, during a media conference celebrating the release of three studies on the feasibility of year-round exports from the Port of Churchill, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew made a strange but largely unnoticed aside about the risks of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) leak.
“LNG, people think about it like propane that we all use in our backyards when we’re barbecuing,” said Kinew, who has made shipping LNG from Churchill his flagship political project. “So, the idea of a leak or spill and the impacts on the environment, it’s not really the same level of concern.”
This claim of LNG’s supposedly innocuous properties is dangerously wrong. While distinct from an oil spill, which can cause years or even decades of ecological harm, leaking LNG can pose tremendous risks to workers and nearby communities.
Somewhat ironically given Kinew’s choice of comparison, this risk is well illustrated by the thousands of barbecue fires that occur in the United States every year, along with explosions caused by malfunctioning propane barbecues in Winnipeg and elsewhere in Canada.
When those chemicals leak at industrial scale, the hazards deepen. Enbridge’s August 28 Line 5 breach in Iron County, Wisconsin, starkly exposed these risks when a valve strike released 1.3 million gallons (five million litres) of natural gas liquids. No one was injured, but the resulting dense propane and butane plume forced evacuations and airspace closures.
In fact, propane is more explosive than methane, the main hydrocarbon in fossil gas. But LNG export facilities are far vaster in scale than individual propane tanks, greatly heightening the risks of fires, explosions, asphyxiation, and burns. Further, liquefying gas requires immense volumes of refrigerants, which carry an even higher explosion risk than gas alone.
A History of Explosions
Such incidents aren’t merely hypothetical.
In 2022, Texas’ Freeport LNG—one of the largest export terminals in the U.S.—experienced a massive fire and explosion, throwing people on a nearby beach off their chairs, shaking houses almost five kilometres away, and emitting large quantities of hazardous air pollution. This incident shut down the facility for eight months, and the company drew criticism long after the fact for failing to update nearby residents on what happened.
The Freeport LNG disaster followed a 2014 explosion at an LNG facility in Washington state that injured five workers, threw heavy shrapnel hundreds of feet, and triggered an evacuation of the area due to concerns about a second blast. A decade earlier, in 2004, a massive explosion at an LNG export terminal in Algeria killed 30 people and injured 70 more.
Several factors can cause fires and explosions at LNG facilities. Because fossil gas must be chilled to about -160°C to become a liquid, it quickly expands back into gas when released into the atmosphere. This “rapid phase transition” can cause shock waves, sonic booms, burns, and local damage, even without ignition. The addition of an ignition source, such as faulty electrical wiring, to a sufficient concentration of vapourized gas on water or the ground can trigger an uncontrollable “pool fire.”
Experts are most concerned about the prospect of a “vapour cloud explosion,” which can occur when gases become “congested” in buildings, equipment, or barriers, causing high pressure and a major explosion when ignited. A lack of wind can also create the conditions for a vapour cloud explosion by allowing a large, concentrated cloud of highly explosive gases to form. In particular, a leak of refrigerants used to chill and liquefy gas has the greatest potential to lead to a catastrophic vapour cloud explosion.
The likelihood of all factors—leaking pipes, low or no wind, and an ignition source—happening at once is low. But large oil spills are also relatively infrequent, and they’re still taken at least somewhat seriously as a risk.
Emissions, Air Pollution, Financial Risks… The List Goes On
Unfortunately, fire and explosions are only one of the many risks associated with LNG export terminals.
LNG exporting is extremely emissions-intensive due to methane leakage, venting, flaring, combustion of gas for liquefaction, and downstream consumption. These facilities also produce high volumes of air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds.
Building such infrastructure also carries massive financial risks. The first phase of the LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C., cost almost $50 billion, while Kinew has speculated that a Churchill facility could cost up to $80 billion. In B.C., the federal and provincial governments have awarded billions of dollars in public support to the sector, including tax breaks, discounted electricity, public finance, and infrastructure funding.
Yet this enormous spending may never be recouped. A recent report by the International Institute of Sustainable Development warned that Canada likely cannot compete in the global LNG market, given that today’s high prices will eventually drop as supply rises from projects already well under construction and demand declines with clean electrification.
Rather than advocating for an LNG export terminal, Kinew and his government should push for projects like renewable generation and energy storage, building retrofits and ground-source heat pumps, and electrification of transportation. Such investments would improve affordability, reduce emissions, and create good jobs—all without the risk of lethal fires and explosions.