Bechtel, a private contractor with deep ties to the U.S. government, military and oil industry, has been selected to lead construction on the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline across Indigenous lands in northern B.C.

Now that Premier David Eby’s NDP government has given a green light to the PRGT pipeline, construction prep along the 750km route could start any day. What should communities in Bechtel’s path know about the U.S. company behind this pipeline?

War profiteering

With the Trump administration on the brink of war in Iran, it’s worth remembering the role Bechtel played the last time the U.S. launched a major war – in Iraq. Days after the 2003 U.S. bombing campaign, Bechtel won a no-bid contract from the Pentagon to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure that had just been targeted by American jets.

The company earned billions from the war, facing accusations of profiteering. Bechtel board member (and former Secretary of State) George Schultz was a leading advocate for the U.S. invasion of Iraq – and private reconstruction strategy.

20 years earlier, Schultz had sent Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One project on the table was a proposed Bechtel oil pipeline across Iraq. But it never went forward. In 2003, Rumsfeld was the U.S. Defense Secretary in charge of the invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein.

Future U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lobbied Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on behalf of Bechtel.

“The company is so fully embedded within the ‘deep state’ that runs the U.S. military-industrial complex,” writes San Francisco historian Chris Carlsson, “that it’s difficult to know the boundary between the company’s interests and the policies pursued by the U.S. government.”

Lethal force in Bolivia 

Bechtel is also notorious in connection with the so-called “water war” in Bolivia in 2000. After convincing the Bolivian government to pass a law privatizing water, a Bechtel subsidiary took over water delivery in the city of Cochabamba. The company put meters on homes and businesses, then jacked up water prices until people erupted in mass protests.

The Bolivian government unleashed a police and military crackdown that left dozens of protestors with bullet wounds and killed a 17-year-old student, Victor Hugo Daza. Daza was shot in the face by a Bolivian army captain who had trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, and was disguised in civilian clothes.

People in Bolivia protest Bechtel’s privatization of their water supply.

Daza’s death was a turning point, forcing Bechtel executives to flee Cochabamba as the water privatization scheme fell apart. Days later, the Bolivian government agreed to declare water a “social good” and repealed its law making water a private commodity.

A few years after its humiliating retreat from Bolivia, the Times reports Bechtel hired ex-special forces soldiers to protect its construction managers in Iraq.

This is now common practice in pipeline construction. When the Coastal GasLink project was forced through Wet’suwet’en territory, the security team included ex-soldiers and reservists who had fought in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

53,000 miles of pipeline

Bechtel builds intercontinental ballistic missile launch systems, components for U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers. It operates nuclear power plants, weapons test sites and nuclear waste dumps around the world. It’s worked on 20,000 projects across 140 countries – but fossil fuel has always been key to Bechtel’s business.

Since 1929, when Bechtel started building pipelines for Standard Oil in California, the company claims to have built 53,000 miles – or 85,000 km – of pipeline. That’s enough to circle the globe twice.

Bechtel is now a big player in the global LNG game, building gas export infrastructure in Australia, Africa and the U.S. Gulf Coast. Executives from some of those projects are now involved in the Ksi Lisims and PRGT projects in B.C. 

Ksi Lisims 100% American-owned

Incorrectly described as “Indigenous-owned” by B.C. Premier David Eby, the Ksi Lisims gas terminal project is in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of Texas-based Western LNG. 

The pipeline feeding the terminal is a separate project, co-owned by Western LNG and the Nisga’a Nation. At the moment PRGT appears to have little or no cash value, but has retained Bechtel – one of the largest construction companies in the world.

TC Energy is the pipeline company that originally proposed PRGT and sold the designs and permits to Western LNG and the Nisga’a. TC Energy executives told shareholders: “Initial proceeds from the transaction are not expected to be material to TC Energy, with the potential to receive additional payments contingent upon the project achieving final investment decision and commercial operation.”

In other words, TC Energy sold this stalled project to Western LNG and the Nisga’a for next to nothing – but if billions in bank loans come through, TC will get a taste. 

Mystery cash

In its most recent financial statement, the Nisga’a Nation wrote: “During the year the Government received $16,309,407 of budgeted funding in connection with infrastructure projects. This amount has been included in restricted cash and deferred revenue as at March 31, 2024 as the related projects have not yet commenced.” 

The statement does not say where the $16 million in cash came from, or what the Nisga’a government has spent on PRGT. The pipeline sale closed in June 2024, and preliminary construction began last August. A statement for that fiscal year has not yet been posted on the Nisga’a website.

PRGT work camp under construction on Nisga’a Lands, August 2024.

As of last year, the Nisga’a government owned tangible capital assets worth $27.7 million dollars, more than half of it “buildings and mobile homes”. “Contributed land, natural resources and cultural resources” are valued at one dollar each.

The Gulf of America

Western LNG is led by Davis Thames, a former Senior Vice President at Cheniere Energy. Cheniere owns the massive Sabine Pass LNG plant, built by Bechtel. But Western LNG has never built a project. The company was formed in 2015, right before gas prices dropped and a wave of LNG projects were cancelled.

The Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana, built by Bechtel for Cheniere Energy

Duane Bertrand, a former Vice President at Bechtel, was listed as a Senior Vice President at Western LNG when the Ksi Lisims project was announced – but all names of senior management have since been scrubbed from the Western LNG website.

Bechtel’s PRGT pipeline cannot proceed without approval of the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal. The B.C. government is weeks away from a decision. Send Premier Eby a letter today, urging him to reconsider his support for this American-owned project.

All in the family

Bechtel has always been a secretive, privately-held corporation. It is now run by Chairman and CEO Brendan Bechtel, the great-great-grandson of founder Warren A. Bechtel, and the fifth generation of the billionaire Bechtel family to lead the company.

Through lobby groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Business Roundtable, Bechtel continues to exert influence on Capitol Hill. In 2020, Brendan Bechtel was appointed by President Trump to his advisory panel on economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

ProPublica reports that Bechtel lobbied hard in Trump’s first term for an obscure tax break that saved Brendan and his siblings $111 million on income taxes the following year. Now the Bechtel family is poised to profit from the administration’s “drill baby drill” agenda – and the LNG deals pieced together by their fellow MAGA billionaires.

Brendan Bechtel, the fifth-generation billionaire CEO of Bechtel Corporation, tapped to build the PRGT pipeline

Given Bechtel’s sheer power, wealth and deep connections to the U.S. government, it is naive to imagine that local regulators – whether from the Nisga’a Nation or Province of B.C. – will be able to hold this American behemoth accountable.

Turning Bechtel loose on the lava beds and salmon rivers, old-growth forests and ancient village sites of Northern B.C. is a mistake. And it sets up a terrible conflict between Bechtel’s security forces and Indigenous people trying to defend their water, land and traditional governance.

With just weeks until the B.C. government makes its decision on the American-owned Ksi Lisims LNG proposal, now is the time to send a clear message to premier David Eby: don’t sell us out to these MAGA billionaires. Send your letter today!