It takes sheer bloody-mindedness to descend the 500 kilometres of Quebec's untamed Romaine River by canoe. Even trying such a feat earns Nicolas Boisclair and Alexis de Gheldere credentials as modern day coureurs des bois.

Unlike their coureur forefathers, though, Mr. Boisclair and Mr. de Gheldere are not looking for booty. The goal of the 48-day journey they began on July 11 is to assemble video footage of the Romaine, one of Quebec's last pristine big rivers, before it's forever altered by man.

By this time next year, Hydro-Québec hopes to have begun construction on an $8-billion hydroelectric project that involves building four large dams on the Romaine, erecting 500 kilometres of transmission lines, flooding 280 square kilometres of virgin forest and carving out more than 150 kilometres of roads.

As with all things Hydro-Québec, the Romaine project is not just about electricity. The provincially-owned utility has always been used as a motor of economic development and the latest hydro project would pump $3.5-billion into the local economy during the 10-year construction phase, while the new roads would open the remote, untouched area between the St. Lawrence River and the Labrador border to mining prospectors and forestry.

Needless to say, the hard-pressed communities on Quebec's North Shore are delighted, having been promised jobs and $100-million in direct payments to the regional government. If the aim of the Romaine project is regional development - a policy that usually pays political dividends - then it's easy to justify. Economically and environmentally, it's another matter altogether.

The ultimate beneficiaries will be the aluminum smelters that buy the power at cut-rate prices - and the remote communities that rely on the smelters for jobs - rather than the taxpayers who own Hydro-Québec. Make smelters (or residential users) pay the true cost of the power they consume and the need to dam yet another river would evaporate.

The economics of the 1,550-megawatt Romaine project aren't nearly as favourable as those of past projects, such as the massive 17,000 MW James Bay complex or the $5-billion Rupert River project that is currently under construction and will add 900 MW to the grid.

Hydro-Québec estimates the Romaine's four hydro plants will produce electricity at about 9.2 cents per kilowatt-hour once they start to come on stream in 2014. That is more than twice the rate at which the utility sells power to the smelters and other large industrial consumers.

Neither Hydro-Québec nor the government mentions smelters when they talk up the project. Rather, they point to lucrative export opportunities. The problem is, the more electricity Hydro-Québec exports, the less it gets for it. It's a good deal if it can sell during consumption peaks, when prices spike in the spot market. But the utility's environmental impact statement (EIS) stipulates that, between 2014 and 2020, only 60 per cent of the Romaine's power could be exported during peak periods. Non-peak prices would likely be below Hydro-Québec's cost of production.

That will all become moot anyway. The EIS reveals that by 2020, Hydro-Québec will increasingly need power from the Romaine to satisfy domestic needs. That's Hydro-speak for the hundreds of new megawatts the Charest government recently promised Alcan and Alcoa.

The utility insists the Romaine project's environmental impact remains slight compared to similar-sized hydro complexes. Still, mercury embedded in the soil will enter the river once the land is flooded, likely making fish from the Romaine inedible for at least two decades. The Rivers Foundation, a Quebec environmental group, also fears the dams will destroy spawning grounds for Atlantic salmon and slow the flow of nutrients to sea life in the St. Lawrence estuary. Forests flooded by the project will destroy the habitat of several species, especially woodland caribou, and release millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Indeed, while hydroelectricity has been promoted as a cleaner alternative to greenhouse gas-producing coal- and gas-generated power, its image has been tarnished in recent months as international attention increasingly focuses on the impacts of China's vast Three Gorges dam-building exercise and plans in Chile to erect five dams on two pristine rivers in Patagonia.

That could prove a bad omen for Hydro-Québec's export plans. Back in 1994, it was pressure from American environmental activists that led the New York Power Authority to nix a contract to buy power from Hydro-Québec's proposed (and ultimately beached) Great Whale complex.

Messrs. Boisclair and de Gheldere - who are dictating a blog of their journey via satellite phone - plan to make a documentary on the Romaine with all the footage from their trip. If the unspoiled scenery caught by the coureurs' camera doesn't get Hydro-Québec to reconsider, maybe basic economics should.