Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Following up on my Member’s statement earlier today about the situation that we’re dealing with in Inuvik, my questions today are for the Minister responsible for the NWT Power Corporation, or the Minister of Finance. He made a statement in his budget address for the ‘13-14 fiscal year, and he had mentioned that there was $100,000 that was allocated to advance the liquid natural gas solution for the community of Inuvik with the situation that they find themselves in right now. I’d like to get an update on how that $100,000 has been spent and where we are in terms of where we are in finding a solution to that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The Minister of Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are on track to have liquid natural gas in the community of Inuvik by this fall, running the electrical requirements through the Power Corporation, and all the pieces are in place for various contracts. There’s some construction work to do. LNG contracts have been signed. So we’re on track to provide that through NTPC. As well, we’re working with the town to see if there’s an opportunity to piggyback in terms of supply, should the community itself want to look at changing from synthetic natural gas to liquid natural gas. Thank you.
I think that’s great news for the residents of Inuvik that in the fall time we should have something up and ready.
In terms of storage, I think we had about 20-some days where the road was closed during the wintertime. I’d like to ask the Minister, with this liquid natural gas in terms of storage, what is the plan on putting to storage and how many days can we see this LNG be stored for should we have a road closure? How many days will we have a supply of liquid natural gas to the community of Inuvik? Thank you.
The requirement for storage is going to be minimized partially by the extension of ferry service in Inuvik, which is going to keep the ferries open much longer than what has normally been the practice up until now, because of the improved equipment that’s going to be used there. We also have full redundancy with diesel. So, once again, the requirements for expensive storage of liquid natural gas are somewhat mitigated by those two factors. We’re looking at storage of up to a month, if necessary. Thank you.
A lot of really good answers there and very positive. The situation, as I mentioned, January, February, March were almost disastrous to some of the families that have to deal with the high costs that they experienced. I guess my next question is the timeline. The Minister did mention the fall time, but for any residents, we want to put them at ease. Is there an exact date? Are we looking at August, September, October that we’ll have this type of system in place before it gets cold and we start experiencing the cold of the winter months? Thank you.
The Power Corporation intends to be on-line with liquid natural gas by October, providing everything rolls out smoothly and it looks like all the pieces and planning are proceeding at a pace to hit that date. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
