Report - Agence canadienne d'évaluation environnementale

Territorial context of the project
project is to be set up. It also should be noted that nearby there are many peat bogs
including one, the Grande Plée Bleue, which is quite large.
Socioeconomic context
The general project location area overlaps the limit separating Lévis and Beaumont.
The land for which the proponent took an option to buy is located at the eastern end
of the Desjardins borough of the City of Lévis, and it is adjacent to Beaumont.
Since January 2002, Lévis comprises ten former municipalities. The new city takes
over from two previous MRCs, namely Desjardins and Chutes-de-la-Chaudière.
Moreover, Lévis is part of the Communauté métropolitaine de Québec (CMQ) which
also includes the MRC de L’Île-d’Orléans, the urban agglomeration of Québec, and
the MRCs de La Jacques-Cartier and de La Côte-de-Beaupré. The municipality of
Beaumont belongs to the MRC de Bellechasse which is not part of the CMQ. The only
official administrative entity common to Lévis and Beaumont is the administrative
region of Chaudière-Appalaches, to which Lévis and the MRC de Bellechasse both
belong.
In 2006 1 , the CMQ had a population of 718,740 and Lévis had a population of
129,521. Of this population, the borough of Desjardins accounted for 50,818. The
MRC de Bellechasse in turn had a population of 34,238. Beaumont, with a population
of 2,291, is both the most densely populated municipality in the MRC and the one
whose growth was the greatest in the previous half century. Across from Beaumont
and Ville-Guay, the MRC de L’Île-d’Orléans had a population of 6,781, including 1,034
at Sainte-Pétronille, 1,576 at Saint-Laurent, and 897 at Saint-Jean.
With respect to proximity to the project site, the inhabited area forms a low-density
residential strip along highway 132, between the limit of the Lévis urbanized
perimeter, at the level of Lallemand road, and the heart of the village of Beaumont, to
the east of Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie power lines. The projected LNG terminal
shoreline and land facilities would be located on both sides of the residential strip
along highway 132 which the cryogenic pipes would cross in linking the jetty to the
LNG storage tanks.
In the absence of demographic data for Ville-Guay and western Beaumont, the
proponent’s count of residences points to 66 units in a one-kilometre perimeter
around the projected facilities and 328 within a 2.5-km perimeter. Without any
speculation on the seasonal or permanent nature of the residences and by using the
average number of people per household in the Québec Metropolitan Area 2001
1. Data from the population decree for 2006 [On-line: www.mamr.gouv.qc.ca].
96 Rabaska Project – Implementation of an LNG Terminal and Related Infrastructure