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GREEN RESET
Mark Carney’s Brookfield in Purchase Mode of Oil and Gas Pipelines
24 November 2021
CRC—Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance at the recent UN Flop 26 Glasgow Summit is now facing a serious conundrum as Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based conglomerate Carney works for, has recently been buying up oil and gas pipelines on 3 continents! Here is a short list of acquisitions and recent bids by Brookfield as it rapidly expands its foray in oil & gas: Firstly, there was the 2020 successful acquisition of a 49% stake in Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s gas pipelines with lease rights to 38 pipelines. ADNOC will hold the majority stake of 51% and will retain ownership of the pipelines. Brookfield was part of a Consortium that included Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Korea’s NH Investment & Securities, and European gas infrastructure owner and operator SNAM. The deal was the single-largest energy infrastructure investment in the region, and the biggest in the world in 2020, according to CNBC. This Autumn Aramco invited this same Brookfield Consortium to submit a bid for a network of Saudi gas pipelines with that transaction also using a lease-back agreement, like the one in the ADNOC deal, to sell a 49% stake in the Saudi gas pipelines. The winning bid will be announced before the year-end. Earlier in 2021 Brookfield lost its bid on a similar deal, this time involving Saudi oil pipelines. “In 2016, Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and other institutional clients of Brookfield Asset Management acquired a 90 per cent stake in Nova Transportadora do Sudeste S.A., a system of natural gas transmission assets in the southeast of Brazil from Petróleo Brasileiro S.A., better known as Petrobras, for approximately US$5.2 billion.” Finally, in Western Canada, BIP in late October finalized the purchase of Inter Pipeline marking an important entry in oil sands operations for Brookfield whose assets in Alberta were mostly gas-related. This of course, will no doubt raise eyebrows and questions from Members of Parliament who returned to Ottawa this week for the reopening of Parliament after a long hiatus following the September 20 federal General Election. Gilles Gervais |