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There are no other obstacles impeding the project, he said, as the company finalized its impact-benefits agreement with the Squamish First Nation, received its permits from the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission and permissions from the federal government to avoid punitive steel tariffs earlier this year.

Keane said the contract negotiations are largely focused on details right now and he remains confident the company will sign the contract in the coming weeks.

If all proceeds as planned, the $1.6-billion Woodfibre LNG project will follow in the footsteps of the Shell Canada Ltd.-led LNG Canada project near Kitimat, B.C. and begin construction, making it just the second such Canadian project of a list that at one point numbered 20 project proposals to take that step.

Woodfibre and its parent company have been quietly aligning all the pieces necessary to proceed with the project in recent months. Keane said the company has been negotiating with China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and an unnamed Japanese utility company for offtake agreements for the remaining two-thirds of the project’s LNG production.

Photo by Ben Nelms for National Post files

Woodfibre is designed to export 2.1 million tonnes of LNG per year, which would make it a smaller scale project compared with LNG Canada, which will have an export capacity of 14 million tonnes per year when completed.