In 2009, Shell Canada hired her, brought her back to Calgary and then sent her to The Hague in the Netherlands, where she lived for two years. to work on its various energy projects there. TransCanada eventually sent her back to the U.S. While still in graduate school, she took a sabbatical, travelled to Chile and worked for a Chilean company that was converting a coal-fired power plant to a natural gas plant.Īfter getting her master’s degree, she worked for a couple of technology companies in the U.S., then landed a job with Foothills Pipe Lines, which later became TransCanada. She then went on to get a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University from the School of Advanced International Studies, where she focused on energy and the environment. While still an undergrad, she got a job as an intern working for New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. But she ultimately followed her father into the resources field.Īfter graduating high school, she spent a few months travelling in Europe, then moved to Washington, D.C., to earn a bachelor’s degree in political communication from George Washington University. She had originally wanted to go into journalism or something in international affairs. The attack was one of the events that prompted her to re-evaluate her life and to come back to Canada.īorn in Regina, Pierce grew up in Calgary, where her father, a lawyer, worked for the oil and gas industry. “I lost a few friends in the towers,” she said. Prior to that, she lived in New York, and was there when the 2001 terrorist attacks took down the World Trade Center twin towers. Twelve years ago, she also worked on the original Keystone pipeline while living in New Jersey. LNG Canada is not the first major energy project Pierce has worked on.

In October 2018, the consortium partners formally announced a final investment decision. Her job would include getting the massive LNG project through the environmental review process and working with various stakeholders, government officials, community leaders and First Nations to get the social licence that has become such a critical part of any project in Canada. So she packed up her kids and moved to Vancouver to begin working for LNG Canada, a consortium of five companies with Shell as the biggest stakeholder. No school, house is half gone, my ex lives in Vancouver with his new wife.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Maybe that’s not a bad idea.’”

The school that her two children attended had also been so badly damaged in the floods that it was condemned. “The house that I just finished renovating, half of it got swept away by the floods,” she recalls. The job would be external relations director for a $40 billion liquefied natural gas project in British Columbia called LNG Canada. “He said, ‘Susannah, would you consider doing a job in Vancouver?’” It was Andy Calitz, a Royal Dutch Shell colleague whom she had known and worked with when she lived in the Netherlands, which she had left a few months earlier. One day in 2013, Susannah Pierce was in her hometown of Calgary, surveying the flood damage to the house she had just finished renovating, when she got a phone call.

Susannah flood wikipedia