LNG Canada, Canada’s first large-scale LNG export terminal, didn’t load its first cargo of liquefied natural gas until June 2025, more than nine years after Sabine Pass LNG was up and running in Louisiana. But while the U.S. Gulf Coast had a big head start — and is now in the midst of another wave of LNG export project development — Canada is finally firing on all cylinders, with plans to more than triple its current export capacity of 14 MMtpa (1.8 Bcf/d) by the early 2030s. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll begin an examination of several planned projects on Canada’s west coast and why the U.S.’s northern neighbor is, at long last, building a lot more LNG export capacity.
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There are at least a few reasons why the U.S. went “from zero to 60 in 3.5” (as Rihanna put it in “Shut Up and Drive”) in developing LNG export projects in the mid-to-late 2010s. For one thing, the Gulf Coast in particular had a stockpile of LNG import terminals that had been constructed just a few years earlier, when the U.S. thought it would soon need to start shipping in LNG from overseas. Those terminals (and the natural gas pipelines built to move their imported gas to market) provided a good bit of the infrastructure that would be needed for LNG export terminals. Also, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and state regulators along the Gulf Coast were (and still are) supportive of LNG export development, and getting new pipelines built in Texas and Louisiana was (and still is) easy-peasy.
It was a different story in Canada, which had no LNG import terminals along the British Columbia (BC) coast to repurpose for exports and next-to-no gas pipeline capacity from its primary gas production region (the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, or WCSB) to potential export sites. In addition, LNG export projects needed to clear a number of Canadian and BC regulatory hurdles and were opposed by many indigenous First Nations groups whose ancestral lands would be impacted by pipeline and/or terminal development.
It took a long time — 14 years from project announcement to first cargo — but the 14-MMtpa (1.8 Bcf/d) first phase of LNG Canada (see photo below) was finally commissioned 14 months ago by co-owners Shell (a 40% stake and the project operator), Petronas (25%), PetroChina Co. Ltd. (15%), Mitsubishi Corp. (15%) and Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS, 5%). And it took almost 12 years for TC Energy (a 35% stake) and its financial partners (KKR and AIMCo; 32.5% each) to complete the 2.1-Bcf/d first phase of their Coastal GasLink system, a 416-mile pipeline that runs from the gas-rich Montney Formation in northeastern BC to the LNG Canada site in Kitimat.
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About the song
“Shut Up and Drive” was written by Evan Rogers, Carl Sturken, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Gillian Gilbert. It appears as the fifth song on Rihanna’s third studio album, Good Girl Gone Bad. The upbeat pop song uses cars and racing as a metaphor for sexual attraction. Back in the early 1960s, the Beach Boys used lyricist Roger Christian to ensure accuracy in the vernacular of the hot-rod culture the band was writing about. Bruce Springsteen should have used a similar method when writing “Racing in the Street,” where he sings: “I got a ’69 Chevy with a 396/Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.” A 396 is a big-block Chevy engine — Fuelie heads are for small-block Chevy engines only. Rihanna sings about a ’57 Cadillac with overdrive ... no such thing. The featured car in the video for the song is a 1959 Cadillac, not a 1957. She sings: “zero to 60 in three point five.” In a ’57 Cadillac? Probably not. Calling Roger Christian! “Shut Up and Drive” was released as a single in June 2007 and raced up the charts to #1 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart. It has been certified 3X Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Personnel on the record were: Rihanna (vocals), Espen Lind, Berta Rune Stray (guitar), Hanon Lane (keyboards, programming), Christopher “Tricky” Stewart (drum programming), and Mikkel Storieer Erikson, Rob Heselden, Makeba Roddick, and Carl Strurken (programming, production).
Girl Gone Bad was recorded in 2006-07 at Westlake Studios and Conway Studios in Los Angeles; Roc the Mic and Battery Studios in New York City; The Loft Recording in Bronxville, NY; Chicago Recording Company and Pleasure Studios in Chicago; Phase One Audio Group in Toronto; Lethal Studio in Bridgetown, Barbados; Sunwatch Studios in Saint James, Barbados; Espionage Studios in Oslo, Norway; and Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, England. Produced by Carl Sturken, Evan Rogers, Neo da Matrix, J.R. Rottem, Stargate, Tricky Stewart, Shea Tamar and Timbaland, the album was released in May 2007. It went to #3 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart and has been certified 7X Platinum by the RIAA. Five singles were released from the LP.
Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty) is a Barbadian singer, songwriter, actress and businesswoman. After signing with Def Jam Recordings, she released her debut album, Music of the Sun, in 2005. Rihanna has released eight studio albums, a soundtrack album, three EPs and 53 singles and has sold over 250 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists in history. She has appeared in eight motion pictures and has won 13 American Music Awards, 12 Billboard Music Awards, nine Grammy Awards and seven MTV Video Music Awards. Rihanna has been appointed an Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary for Barbados. She continues to record, with “Friend of Mine,” a single from the Smurfs movie soundtrack, released in May 2025.
"About the Song" -- written by Mickey McMahan , RBN Director of Musicology
