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Nally promoting natural gas in Asia

0105 nally jlh
Morinville-St. Albert MLA Dale Nally, left, shakes hands with newly sworn-in Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Nally has been appointed as associate minister for Natural Gas.

Morinville-St. Albert UCP MLA Dale Nally is off to Asia for a week to promote natural gas to new markets.

The Alberta associate minister of natural gas will be in Japan and South Korea from Nov. 15 to 23 to promote Alberta gas and speak with stakeholders.

“We're meeting a number of companies on LNG (liquid natural gas) issues, but we're also meeting with petrochemical companies, just because there's a ton of opportunity to build and get better facilities here,” Nally said.

Nally will be attending the GZERO Summit, which is a world-leading conference where leaders and experts from government, industry and media will discuss how global challenges are spilling over into domestic politics.

The total estimated cost of economy class airfare, meals and ground transportation for the associate minister, his chief of staff and associate deputy minister is approximately $31,000.

On top of advocating for natural gas in Asian markets, Nally has been working to stabilize the gas market in Alberta.

Nally said the industry is important to Alberta, and in southeast Alberta there are 66,000 dry gas wells. If the industry collapses, Nally said the job losses would have a major impact on society and municipal tax bases.

The associate minister said his ministry started tackling the natural gas industry’s report on a path to recovery and so far has started or completed 56 per cent of them.

One of the recommendations was to allow natural gas producers to inject natural gas into storage while the pipelines were under maintainance. Before the changes, producers had to continue making their product while end users were bidding gas prices down, and Nally said he saw the price of gas drop so low they hit negative values of around -$0.10.

“(Natural gas companies) have been hemorrhaging cash for a long time. And they couldn't change that protocol because you had to get industry consensus,” Nally said.

The associate minister met with 118 companies and got enough support to allow for gas to be stored so it would not be bid down to extremely low prices. As of Oct. 1, the new protocols have kicked in and Nally said natural gas hasn’t dropped below $2.

Nally departed for his trip to Asia Friday and will return Nov. 23.


Jennifer Henderson

About the Author: Jennifer Henderson

Jennifer Henderson is the editor of the St. Albert Gazette and has been with Great West Media since 2015
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