Ghost (town) of a chance? Second Hudson Bay port plan seeks traction

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/10/2024 (372 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For many people who have been involved in realizing the vision of Churchill as the northern terminus of a mid-continental trade corridor, it’s almost blasphemous to entertain the notion of building another port on Hudson Bay.

It’s one of the hurdles supporters of the NeeStaNan Utility Corridor have to face as they promote the concept of a 1,000-kilometre, Prairies-wide link from the Alberta gas fields to Port Nelson, a ghost town a few hundred kilometres south of Churchill at the mouth of the Nelson River.

Although it’s received some public-sector support that’s typically not available for harebrained schemes, the promoters of NeeStaNan — mostly retired folks from the oil and gas sector and Indigenous leaders with solid track records in public policy and commerce — have a bit of do-it-yourself feel to it.

One of them, Robyn Lore, an experienced Alberta oil industry executive, said the project — which would include a 1,000-km corridor using mostly existing rail lines, a liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline and ideally a hydroelectric transmission line — would cost $50 billion to $100 billion and likely take a couple of decades to complete.

Among its goals is to shave thousands of kilometres from existing trade routes via the West Coast.

Lore was at a meeting with industry and First Nation officials in Alberta in 2019, when the idea was first hatched. Its inspiration is not anything novel. At first, it was Alberta liquefied natural gas sector representatives being pitched by officials in Germany about better access to Canadian LNG.

Interested parties from the Saskatchewan potash industry jumped on board, imagining the huge savings that would be possible cutting shipping distances in half out of Hudson Bay to Brazil (the largest importer of potash in the world).

From the beginning, it was conceived as a First Nations-owned venture with the utility right of way cutting through traditional territories.

The plan imagines using existing rail lines including the Hudson Bay Railway from The Pas to Amery, near Gillam, where the current railroad makes a left turn and heads north to Churchill. It’s that last stretch of the railroad across slowly melting permafrost that NeeStaNan wants to avoid.

Its proposal is to build 120 km of new rail track from Amery to Port Nelson, the site of a previous port abandoned in the early 1920s.

Lore said he was part of a group that had a letter of intent to buy the Port of Churchill and Hudson Bay Railway from former owner Omnitrax in 2018, but walked away from the deal.

“After looking at 14,000 pages of engineering reports, we determined it is a wonderful natural port, but it was not going to work for our vision of what the Prairie economy needs,” he said.

Lore and NeeStaNan board members (including former Winnipeg MP Dorothy Dobbie and Marshall Murdock, former CEO of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and a longtime financial services industry executive) proclaim their support of Churchill and maintain NeeStaNan would be complementary.

Currently, NeeStaNan has no financing in place to speak of. Dobbie’s publishing company has produced handsome literature on the proposed project.

The previous Manitoba Tory government had committed close to $7 million (contingent on financial contributions from the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments not yet materialized) toward a feasibility study that’s been budgeted at $26.5 million.

NeeStaNan reps have had to restart those discussions with the NDP government, which has not yet committed anything.

It’s noteworthy it is taking resource sector interest from Alberta to super-size the export potential for a Manitoba ocean-linked port that has been shepherded along at a slow and gentle pace for decades. But the realities of the global resource and shipping industries, like everything else, is changing.

Lore said the “wonderful natural port” in Churchill is just too small for the modern 400-metre container ships to manoeuvre.

As well, the concept is for a Port Nelson to be capable of receiving 1,000 rail cars per day.

Since Arctic Gateway Group took ownership of the Port of Churchill and Hudson Bay Railway in 2018, it has been focused on maintenance and repair. A one-time shipment of zinc concentrate from a Snow Lake mine — that took a couple of months and about 100 rail cars to ship — was the highlight of the current shipping season.

While Arctic Gateway has been working on a new business development plan, the trajectory of the tourism industry in Churchill has been going in the other direction, turning it into a bucket list destination for international travellers.

Although it’s not currently part of the thesis for NeeStaNan’s business plan, one wonders what would happen to Churchill as a tourism destination were its cargo port aspirations ever to materialize?

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca