28 December 2010
Gasification Fan Seeking
Golden Opportunity
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Georgia O'Hara holds a sign of protest that blatantly expresses her feeling on the
proposed plant for Kamloops during a January 2010 rally. |
Golden British Columbia - Months of outrage, protest, and finger-pointing all came to ahead on
a blustery March night, when the president of the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corporation (ACC) stepped into Kamloops for public forum at Thompson Rivers
University.
Failing to sway the public's disdain for a planned gasification project, only a few days later ACC president Kim Sigurdson said his company was abandoning its
plans in Kamloops.
As the year draws to a close, there is little sign of the ACC in the city, and the public outrage has all but fizzled.
According to officials with the Ministry of Environment (MOE), the ACC is now looking at a site near Golden, by the Alberta-B.C. border, to set up its plant.
Jason Bourgeois, the MOE's environmental-management section head, said the last he heard was the ACC was making plans to reapply to the province for a permit
in that area.
Calls to the ACC were not returned by press deadline.
Though the ACC's permit is still on the books in Kamloops, Bourgeois said there has been no activity and the situation essentially remains dormant.
The controversy unfolded in the fall of 2009, when the Manitoba-based company announced it was seeking a permit to operate a gasification facility, where
creosote-treated railway ties would be chipped and incinerated as part of an energy-creation facility.
In the following months, a groundswell of opposition to the plan formed.
In January, the ACC was issued an air-discharge permit by the ministry.
The permit was appealed by Kamloops resident Ruth Madsen.
In September, the province's environmental appeal board indefinitely postponed her application.
In its decision, the board said it couldn't justify holding the hearing when "uncontested evidence is that the permit holder [the ACC] does not intend to
exercise its rights under the permit in that location."
The controversy also took a turn toward the bizarre when a revealing message appeared on the Facebook page of Bill McQuarrie, the executive director of
Interior Science Innovation Council, a group that had been working with Sigurdson and the ACC.
The posting referred to an unreleased announcement that the ACC was abandoning its plans in Kamloops.
It was addressed to someone named Kim, presumably Sigurdson.
The posting also claimed ACC's air-quality permit will remain valid until the company picks a new location.
It also had some unflattering assertions that someone named Terry, presumably Kamloops-North Thompson Liberal MLA Terry Lake, had been "giving [sic] his
marching orders."
McQuarrie maintained he never wrote the posting.
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