When Premier Susan Holt was challenged last month over her government’s decision to reconsider natural gas development in New Brunswick, her answer was straightforward.
“Times have changed.”
The province launched a five-month public review on Aug. 26 into natural gas development and the conditions behind New Brunswick’s moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. The government says it wants to determine whether those conditions still reflect current science, technology, markets and regulatory practices.
The announcement marks a return to an issue that became one of New Brunswick’s biggest environmental and political fights more than a decade ago. A reporter at the Aug. 26 announcement challenged Holt over her previous description of fracking as “yesterday’s technology” and her earlier position that it would not restart under her government. Holt pointed to tariffs, changing international relationships and energy demand that she said has exceeded forecasts.
“The only responsible thing to do at this point in time is to revisit the conditions of the moratorium to determine if this is something that can benefit New Brunswickers or not,” Holt said.
The review is built around five areas: First Nations rights, interests and priorities; the size and nature of the natural gas resource; science, technology and environmental impacts; potential economic benefits; and public support.
Holt has stressed that the process has no predetermined outcome, saying it is “not a green light to get drills in the ground.”
But reopening the issue raises another question: what has actually changed since New Brunswick imposed its moratorium, and have the concerns that helped stop shale gas development the first time been addressed?
How New Brunswick got here
Jim Emberger, spokesperson for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance, traces the start of the fight back to around 2010. He said shale gas exploration was becoming more visible at the time, with companies testing private water wells and seismic equipment showing up in communities.
“People were starting to get a little suspicious about what this all meant,” Emberger said.
Environmental organizations began holding meetings while residents sought information from communities elsewhere in North America that had experience with shale gas development, Emberger said. Small local groups formed and eventually came together as the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance. Water became one of the central concerns, along with potential impacts on health and the environment, wastewater and public infrastructure.
Deborah Carr, now president of the alliance, remembers the uncertainty in Albert County.
“People were not sure what this would mean for their own communities,” she said.
Residents around Hillsborough formed a grassroots organization and began researching what other communities had experienced with the industry.
Opposition to shale gas grew beyond the local groups that had formed in the early years of exploration. Anglophone and Francophone communities, environmental organizations and First Nations became involved. Elsipogtog was at the centre of the conflict in 2013, when RCMP and opponents of shale gas exploration confronted each other near Rexton.
The debate carried into provincial politics. Shale gas was a major issue during the 2014 election campaign, with Liberal leader Brian Gallant promising a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing. After the Liberals formed government, they moved to establish the moratorium in December 2014. The prohibition against hydraulic fracturing came into force on June 26, 2015.
The province also set out five conditions that would need to be addressed before the moratorium could be lifted. They included: social licence; credible information about impacts to health, the environment and water, along with adequate regulation and enforcement; a plan for public infrastructure and wastewater; a process respecting the duty to consult First Nations; and a system to ensure New Brunswickers receive economic benefits, including an appropriate royalty structure.
More than a decade later, the government is examining the issues behind those conditions again.
Why reopen it now?
Holt’s case for reopening the issue is broader than whether drilling technology has improved. At the Aug. 26 announcement, she pointed to economic pressure, changing global relationships and growing energy demand. She also said energy security has become increasingly important as Canada’s relationship with the United States has become less predictable.
Part of that concern is how natural gas reaches New Brunswick. The Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline crosses the Canada-U.S. border near St. Stephen and has been used almost exclusively to import natural gas into Canada since around 2017. The Canadian Energy Regulator says the pipeline can carry gas produced in the U.S. Appalachian Basin or Western Canada, along with other supplies entering the system.
Holt said gas supplied to New Brunswick homes and businesses comes mostly from the Marcellus shale region in the United States.
Gilles Volpe, president of Liberty Utilities New Brunswick Gas, described his company’s contracted supply somewhat differently, saying most of it comes from Western Canada before travelling through the interconnected North American pipeline system and entering New Brunswick through Maine.
The two descriptions are not necessarily contradictory because the pipeline carries gas from multiple supply basins. What is clear is that the pipeline route serving much of the Maritime market crosses the Canada-U.S. border, which Holt has identified as an energy-security concern.
Natural Resources Minister John Herron has pointed to another potential change. He said the science and technology surrounding natural gas development have changed over the past 12 years and that the review will examine what methods could be used with New Brunswick’s geology.
“A significant part of this review will be doing the work to make sure we have a thorough understanding of what methods and tools could be used in New Brunswick’s specific geology,” Herron said.
The province has not concluded that those changes have resolved the environmental concerns behind the moratorium. Herron said development will not proceed if the government cannot be confident it can happen safely, meaning the review itself is supposed to determine whether current science and technology support a different decision.
Opponents say the changes point the other way
Megan Mitton, MLA for Tantramar, was part of the movement against shale gas development before entering provincial politics. She says the debate may be back, but the changes over the past decade have only added to her reasons for opposing fracking.
“Things have changed,” Mitton said. “We have even more evidence of the harms of fracking.”
Mitton pointed to a worsening climate crisis and falling costs for renewable energy and battery storage as reasons New Brunswick should move away from further fossil fuel development.
Emberger also argues the evidence against shale gas has grown stronger, pointing to research examining health effects, water use, wastewater, methane emissions and induced seismicity.
There is considerably more published research on potential health effects associated with unconventional oil and gas development than there was when New Brunswick’s moratorium was introduced. A 2024 review of epidemiological studies found research reporting associations with a range of health outcomes, while also identifying significant gaps in the evidence and relatively little research from Canada.
Earthquakes are another area that has received more study. Canadian researchers have linked some earthquakes to hydraulic fracturing, but the risk is not the same everywhere. Natural Resources Canada says local geology and tectonic conditions play an important role in where induced earthquakes occur.
That does not mean every concern raised during the original debate has been conclusively settled. For opponents such as Emberger and Mitton, however, the additional research and changes in competing energy technologies have strengthened, rather than eased, the case against development.
A different energy system
Michelle Robichaud, president of the Atlantica Centre for Energy, sees another set of changes. She pointed to increasing electricity demand, electrification, population growth and industrial development, along with a greater focus on energy security and domestic supply.
“I think the conversation is back because the energy context has changed,” Robichaud said.
Natural gas is already part of New Brunswick’s energy mix, supplying homes, businesses and industry while also being used to generate electricity. For Robichaud, those existing uses matter as the province deals with growing energy demand and more uncertainty over where its energy comes from.
But she also acknowledged that the environmental questions behind the moratorium have not disappeared.
“Those environmental questions that led to the moratorium are real questions,” Robichaud said. “They were legitimate then, they are as legitimate now.”
She pointed specifically to water protection, emissions, wastewater and land use. When asked what technological changes make shale gas development different today, Robichaud said she is not an engineer, geologist or environmental scientist and that the review should draw on scientific expertise to determine how technology and regulation have changed.
Her argument, then, is not that the old concerns have vanished. It is that they are now being weighed against a different set of energy pressures.
Having gas does not mean it makes economic sense
Even if the environmental questions can be answered, another major uncertainty remains: whether New Brunswick’s natural gas can be produced at a competitive price.
Volpe said there is believed to be a significant amount of natural gas underground in the province, but the size of the resource alone does not establish whether there is an economically viable industry.
“That’s what we don’t know,” Volpe said. “We think there’s a lot, right? Geologists tell us there’s lots of gas, but we don’t know how much it costs to take it out of the ground.”
Volpe said Liberty currently pays about $11 per gigajoule to bring natural gas into New Brunswick. He used that figure to illustrate the competition a local producer would face.
“If we can extract gas for less than $11, then there’s a market for it,” Volpe said. “But if the gas that’s in the ground will cost $25 to get out of the ground, but you can get $11 gas out of Boston on the pipeline, who’s gonna buy the $25 gas?”
The $25 figure was hypothetical, not an estimate of what New Brunswick gas would cost to produce.
Volpe said locally-produced gas could reduce dependence on supplies from outside the province and cut some transportation costs if it could be produced competitively. Producers could also seek customers outside New Brunswick, but that opportunity would still depend on whether local gas could compete with supplies already available through the North American pipeline network.
The provincial review is intended to examine both sides of that equation: how much gas can actually be accessed and whether developing it would make economic sense.
The debate reaches Tantramar
The renewed provincial discussion comes as Tantramar is dealing with a separate natural gas project. ProEnergy’s proposed Centre Village project is a 500-megawatt generating station planned for the municipality.
The province announced conditional approval for the project on Aug. 28 following an environmental impact assessment review, with 45 conditions imposed as the project moves forward.
The timing puts two natural gas debates in front of Tantramar at once, but there is no established link between the province’s decision to review the moratorium and the Centre Village project.
Volpe said a generating station of that size could significantly increase natural gas demand in New Brunswick.
Mitton sees the generating station and the renewed discussion around shale gas as part of a broader direction in provincial energy policy.
Terry Jones, a Tantramar resident who has been active in opposition to the Centre Village project, also sees the timing as significant. She worries the generating station could eventually be used as part of the case for producing natural gas within the province.
“There is a moratorium in place that people fought hard and long to get and it’s looking like they’re chipping away at that,” Jones said.
Robichaud cautioned against assuming the two developments are connected.
“I don’t necessarily think that one is going to open the door to the other or shut the door to the other,” Robichaud said.
Holt was also directly asked at the Aug. 26 announcement whether a private-sector natural gas developer was waiting to proceed if the review resulted in the moratorium being lifted. She said no, adding that there was no proponent involved in the review.
For Tantramar, the overlap still gives the provincial discussion a local dimension. Questions about how much natural gas New Brunswick may consume in the future and whether the province should produce more of its own are unfolding at the same time.
The question of trust
One of the original conditions of the moratorium was social licence, and more than a decade later, public acceptance remains difficult to measure.
Carr said the people she knows who opposed shale gas development during the original debate remain opposed.
“The people who were opposed before are still opposed. Nothing has changed in that regard,” she said.
But she also pointed to something that has changed: who lives in the area. Carr said Albert County has seen new residents arrive since the original shale gas debate, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she does not know how the wider community feels about development today.
Robichaud also sees public trust as central to any attempt to revisit the issue.
“It’s all about gaining social licence, and that’s really about being transparent,” she said. “It’s about building trust.”
First Nations rights, interests and priorities are the first of the five areas in the province’s new review. The original conditions behind the moratorium also included a process respecting the duty to consult First Nations.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Keith Chiasson said First Nations representatives are participating in the new process, but stressed that participation “is not an endorsement or a commitment.” The province says a leadership table and technical working group involving First Nations have been established.
When reporters asked Chiasson about chiefs’ views on natural gas development itself, he said they would have to ask the chiefs directly. That distinction matters in a debate where First Nations played a central role the last time around: participation in the government’s review should not be read as support for developing the resource.
What has changed since the moratorium?
A decade later, the people involved in the debate disagree on what those changes mean.
The Holt government points to greater energy demand, economic pressure and concerns about energy security. The energy sector points to the continuing role of natural gas and a changing electricity system. Opponents point to additional health and environmental research, climate change and falling costs for alternatives such as renewable energy and battery storage. Even some of the communities that lived through the original fight have changed.
What the province has not established is whether those changes resolve the questions that led New Brunswick to impose the moratorium in the first place. It still has to determine whether additional natural gas development can meet its standard for protecting health, water and the environment, and it has not established how much of the resource can be economically recovered or what it would cost to produce.
Social licence and consultation with First Nations, two issues at the heart of the original moratorium, also remain part of the test. The Holt government says it intends to make a final decision in January.
Theodore Ramharack holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Western University and a diploma in Broadcast Journalism. He recently completed an internship with CBC News’ The National.
Originally from Ontario, he moved to Sackville to join CHMA as a local journalist and is excited to get to know the Tantramar region and share stories from the community.
