A flurry of activity is raising optimism that Royal Dutch Shell Plc and its partners are ready to go ahead with the nation’s largest infrastructure project: a $40 billion liquefied natural gas terminal that could at last unlock energy exports to Asia.

“I would put money on it — it’s going ahead,” says Phil Germuth, mayor of Kitimat, who recently hosted a banker from Barclays Bank Plc visiting from the U.K. to examine the project. Germuth also met a group of officials reporting to the board of Mitsubishi Corp., one of the project’s five partners, who visited the site in May.

LNG Canada, as the project is called, is stunning in scale. It proposes to eventually ship as much as 28 million tons a year out of Kitimat, the equivalent of 10 per cent of global LNG supply in 2017, according to reports by…. CLICK for the complete article