Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Mar 12/99) - As the Ikhil natural gas pipeline nears completion, Inuvik's fuel oil distributor, Arctic Dove's Paul Wiederman, says he will try to compete -- even in the area of being less burdensome environmentally.

"(We can compete) up to a point," Wiederman says. "If they give it away we can't compete but we will attempt to."

The expected price of natural gas has not been released but to get the biggest bang for the buck, organizers suggest buying new household appliances such as stoves and fridges as well as a new furnace.

Many residents, such as Vicki Billingsley, who compare current fuel bills, have noticed a giant drop in price during the past month.

Holding two fuel bills, Billingsley says one from a fill up on March 3 shows fuel cost her 40 cents per litre. One from a previous month this year shows she was charged 47.8 cents per litre for the fuel to heat her home.

"It means tremendous savings," she says, referring to fill-ups of a couple thousand litres.

"This is very timely in the month that we've just been hit with property taxes from the Town of Inuvik. It is really tough for property owners to be having to pay property taxes in the middle of March at the same time that heating costs are so high."

That said, Billingsley questions whether the price could go down further.

All Imperial Oil spokesman Hart Searle would say from Calgary is that his company responds to competitive forces and that could mean lower prices in Whitehorse or the onset of natural gas.

What Wiederman can say is that the cheaper cost of fuel in Inuvik is directly related to lower costs in Whitehorse.

But cost aside, Wiederman says fuel oil can compete with natural gas in another area -- fuel is more friendly to the environment.

"I can provide documentation that natural gas is not environmentally benign -- from well to furnace it is more harmful to the environment when compared with heating oil," Wiederman says.

He then goes on to say a molecule of methane, or natural gas, that leaks into the environment can produce as much as 30 times the greenhouse heating as a molecule of carbon dioxide.

His source for the statements comes from a study called "Relative environmental effects of fossil fuels and the critical contribution of methane," by Dr. Dean Abrahamson who served as a consultant for the U.S. federal power commission and the U.S. department of health and welfare.