It’s interesting what you can learn from taxi cab drivers. On my last trip to Quebec City I was not completely surprised to learn that our driver had understood from the media that shale gas was much more dangerous than natural gas and he didn’t want to use it. When informed that shale gas was actually just natural gas, he too was not completely surprised to find what he had learned from the media was misleading. Our taxi cab driver said that natural gas stoves were the very best way to cook and he liked it. We earned one more supporter in Quebec for shale gas that day, only a few million to go!
When the oil and gas industry made the name ‘shale gas’, we were talking about the rock, not the gas. Shale gas is natural gas that is produced from shale rock. It is not, as many opponents have implied, a different kind of gas. It is just natural gas delivered by Gaz Metro through the same pipelines and used for exactly the same things in Quebec as it always has been. Quebec is already using shale gas mixed in with all the other natural gas delivered by the Trans Canada Pipeline from Western Canada.
That’s why the real choice for Quebeckers is shale gas from Western Canada or shale gas from Quebec.