Every major infrastructure project begins as an argument about the future. Before crews move earth or steel meets a right-of-way, someone has to decide which customers will need capacity, which markets they will want to reach, what they will commit to, and how much uncertainty a contract can bear. Chris Scherman has spent his working life moving closer to that decision.
He did not arrive there through the customary opening scene of an energy operator in a hard hat. His first lens was legal. Scherman practiced corporate, energy, and mergers and acquisitions law at a Canadian business law firm. The work trained attention on promises: who makes them, what makes them enforceable, and how a transaction behaves when circumstances stop matching the forecast.
That is useful preparation for an industry in which assets can operate for decades while politics, prices, technology, and customer demand keep changing around them. A pipeline is physical. Its economics are a stack of negotiated expectations.
The education of a strategist
Scherman earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Calgary and a Juris Doctor, with distinction, from the University of Saskatchewan. He joined Pembina Pipeline Corporation in 2012. Over the years, his titles became a tour of the company’s institutional nervous system: business development and commercial operations, general counsel and corporate secretary, marketing, and strategy.
Each role asks a different version of the same question. Legal asks whether the arrangement holds. Governance asks whether the decision was made properly. Marketing asks where the molecules can earn their best return. Strategy asks which capabilities should exist next. Scherman’s route combined them rather than treating them as separate professions.
Corporate, energy, and M&A law in private practice.
Joined Pembina, later serving in business development and commercial operations.
Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.
Appointed Senior Vice President, Marketing and Strategy Officer.
Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, with corporate strategy, business development, new ventures, and marketing in his brief.
The progression looks neat in retrospect. Inside an operating company, it would have felt less like climbing a ladder and more like widening a field of view. The lawyer sees clauses. The corporate secretary sees the board. The commercial leader sees customers and competitors. The strategist must see all of them at once, then decide what deserves capital and management attention.
“They’re not off the shelf, they’re not vanilla, and they just simply take time.”Chris Scherman on large project development
That remark is an unusually compact account of infrastructure work. Bespoke projects resist the clean rhythm of software releases or consumer launches. Engineering has to meet geography. Commercial terms have to meet customer calendars. Regulatory work has to meet public obligations. The schedule depends on parties beyond the developer’s control.
The chain is the strategy
Pembina’s business runs through a physical sequence. Hydrocarbons are gathered and processed, moved through pipelines, separated or stored, and delivered toward customers and export markets. Value does not reside only in one pipe or facility. It grows when the links reinforce one another.
process
interconnect
store
markets
Cedar LNG makes that logic visible. The floating liquefied natural gas project in Kitimat, British Columbia, is a partnership between the Haisla Nation and Pembina. For Pembina, it extends the chain from gas processing toward global LNG buyers. For the Haisla Nation, the ownership structure carries economic participation and a direct say in a project in its territory. Construction followed a positive final investment decision in 2024, with operations targeted for late 2028.
Scherman’s public discussion of Cedar focuses on the connected system: existing customer relationships, upstream services, pipeline access, liquefaction capacity, and end markets. He has also spoken about optimization and possible expansion. The vocabulary is revealing. This is not a lone terminal at the edge of the map. It is an extension whose worth depends on everything connected behind it.
“The market is calling for more of those products off the West Coast.”Chris Scherman on LNG and LPG export demand
Canada’s traditional energy trade has pointed south. West Coast export capacity introduces another direction and another set of buyers. Scherman has described Pembina as positioning itself as much as possible off that coast. The commercial attraction is diversification: more routes can give producers and infrastructure owners choices when tariffs, regional pricing, or geopolitics disturb an established flow.
Optionality is not indecision. In infrastructure, it can mean owning interconnections and commercial positions that make several futures workable.
Houston changes the angle
Pembina is headquartered in Calgary. Scherman’s public professional profile places him in Houston, with experience spanning both cities. The arrangement fits the map he is asked to read. Western Canada supplies the resources and many of Pembina’s assets. Houston concentrates customers, traders, project developers, capital, and global commodity intelligence. A cross-border vantage makes it harder to mistake a regional market for the whole market.
It also sharpens a distinction inside his title. Marketing in midstream energy is not an advertising function. It is the commercial work of matching supply, transportation, processing, storage, and demand. Strategy is not a separate slide deck placed on top. It emerges from what customers need, which bottlenecks persist, and where an existing network can be extended without losing financial discipline.
That logic now reaches beyond familiar pipeline projects. Pembina has pursued the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a proposed natural-gas-fired power project northeast of Edmonton associated with potential data-center demand. Scherman has discussed it as part of a broader business-development backlog, while carefully noting the limits of Pembina’s control: the company is concerned with power generation, while customers must advance their data-center and fiber work.
That division of responsibility sounds mundane, but it is the heart of project judgment. A developer can control its engineering and negotiate its commercial terms. It cannot manufacture another company’s readiness. The art is to line up linked decisions without pretending they are the same decision.
Patience with gates
Scherman’s public language is practical. Projects “progress.” Engineering and regulatory work “advance.” Final investment decisions sit behind gates. Customer timelines matter. These are not verbal fireworks. They are the grammar of people who must keep enthusiasm from outrunning evidence.
His legal background likely makes that register familiar, but his career also shows a shift from protecting the enterprise to creating options for it. A general counsel is trained to identify what can break. A strategy officer must also identify what can compound. The most useful version of the job carries both instincts: skepticism about weak assumptions and curiosity about adjacent opportunities.
There is a community thread, too. In 2018, while serving as Pembina’s Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Scherman co-chaired the company’s United Way campaign. Calgary staff contributed 1,000 volunteer hours across 11 agencies during the company’s largest volunteer event to that point. His comment was characteristic of a manager setting a repeatable standard: “We set the bar higher for ourselves every year.”
The phrase works beyond a campaign. Infrastructure companies are judged over long spans by operational reliability, safety, relationships, and capital allocation. A single announcement may move attention for a day. Trust is built through the less cinematic work of doing what was promised, learning, and raising the standard again.
Reading the blank parts
The next version of North American energy will not be drawn by one clean transition. Natural gas demand, LNG exports, petrochemicals, industrial power, emissions constraints, and new sources of electricity load are arriving on different clocks. Existing assets will matter alongside new ones. Partnerships will matter alongside ownership. Contracts will keep translating uncertain demand into buildable commitments.
Scherman’s career has prepared him for the spaces between those categories. He understands the agreement and the asset, the governance process and the customer, the Calgary system and the Houston market. His job is not to predict every turn. It is to help Pembina own enough useful connections that several credible futures can produce value.
This helps explain why his portfolio places marketing beside strategy. The market provides the correction mechanism. A strategic idea may look elegant inside a company, but customers reveal whether it solves an expensive problem. Their willingness to sign, reserve capacity, or coordinate a build supplies a harder test than internal conviction. Business development turns that signal into a proposed structure. Legal work defines the obligations. Engineering discovers what the structure demands in the physical world. Capital allocation decides whether the return is worth the risk.
Scherman has occupied enough seats around that loop to recognize where an attractive narrative can come loose from execution. His comments on Greenlight acknowledged the work controlled by Pembina and the work controlled by a prospective customer. His comments on West Coast exports linked market interest to infrastructure positions that already exist. His descriptions of project gates preserve room for optimism while keeping the unfinished work in view. It is a style suited to assets that cannot be patched after launch with a software update.
That may be the most transferable lesson in his route from law to strategy. Careers compound when each role expands the next one. Companies do, too. The contract becomes a relationship. The relationship supports an asset. The asset opens a market. Then the map changes, and the work begins again.