Is it Kitimat or Star Trek’s Delta-Vega? | Robin’s Weir

“There’s something familiar about this place.”

I was on a bus tour of Kitimat’s giant $40 billion LNG Canada facility on Saturday, July 8.

I’ve never been on site, but had this strange feeling I had seen it before.

The LNG Canada Liguified Natural Gas project, is the largest industrial construction project in Canadian historythe , which, of course, is still under construction with the completion of the two “trains” to process the natural gas into liquid form so the volume shrinks so it can be loaded into LNG tankers for tansport to Asia, with each shipment worth millions of dollars.

The project is somewhat controversial, given a number of factors, such as whether or not LNG which is bascially methane, is a transition fuel to wean the world off coal and oil or whether it is a dangerous addition to the atmospheric crisis since methane is itself a green house gas. Other controveries are the emmissions from the plant itself (low by previous standards) and the increase in ship traffic on Douglas Channel. Local indigenous First Nations are split on the construction, with some opposing the Coastal Gas Link pipeline that will bring the natural gas from northern British Columbia while many indigenous people and communities are prospering from the jobs and other opportunities to get out of poverty that come from the project.

To actually see the huge project, albeit on a three hour bus tour, the visitor will briefly leave the controversies behind, as you are awestruck by the gargantuan size of the facility and the complexity of the various components of the project. For someone who was a kid in the 50s and 60s, the LNG Canada project really is something out of the dreams of science fiction of the Golden Age.

As the bus left, Something about Star Trek, I thought.

So here is another strange prescient item for the Star Trek timeline, the Albert Whitlock matte painting of the lithium cracking station on Delta-Vega, created for the second pilot of the Star Trek Original Series Where No Man Has Gone Before.

The units that will process the natural gas are gigantic steel modules, built overseas and brought to Kitimat on large ships. It was those modules that resemble the…