Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

Alberta set to reap the second highest resource bonanza in the province’s history – by Meghan Potkins (Financial Post – February 28, 2023)

March 1, 2023

Danielle Smith’s pre-election budget includes $68 billion spending plan and $2.4 billion surplus

Alberta’s first provincial budget under Premier Danielle Smith shows the government’s coffers will be buoyed once again by deluge of resource revenue, estimated to reach $18.4 billion in 2023 — the second highest resource bonanza in the province’s history.

The province will end the current fiscal year with a slightly smaller surplus of $10.4 billion than was projected in November, as energy prices softened and the new premier increased spending in recent months.

More foreign investment in our natural resources could ease financial burden on Canadians – by Mark Le Dain (Calgary Herald – January 22, 2023)

January 23, 2023

https://calgaryherald.com/

The Canadian loonie has been sitting near multi-year lows, making life more expensive for Canadians. In the past, our country had a natural mechanism that cushioned the inflation impact of a falling loonie.

As the value of the currency dropped, global operators would invest in and develop the country’s abundant natural resources. This would then lead to increased demand for Canadian currency and increased jobs and exports during critical periods when the low loonie suggested weakness in other sectors.

Ottawa’s climate policy will prolong Indigenous poverty – by Dale Swampy (Financial Post – January 17, 2023)

January 19, 2023

https://financialpost.com/

Many will be unable to pay the high cost of utilities and energy that will follow from the plan

Canada’s latest Environment and Climate Change report to the United Nations, submitted at the end of December, fails Canada’s Indigenous people yet again, consigning us to poverty, wiping out our path to prosperity and blocking our ability to bring traditional knowledge and wisdom to bear on protecting the land.
This is only the most recent instance in a long line of failures dating back hundreds of years. Proper consultation with Indigenous people before the report’s submission might have prevented that.

Liberals’ ‘just transition’ a fist to the mouth of Canada – by Rex Murphy (National Post – January 19, 2023)

January 19, 2023

https://nationalpost.com

A better name for the massive dislocation of the national economy and Canadian workers would be the ‘Great Disruption’

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — (a) select group of human beings … are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. … I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’” — John Kerry at Davos.

What’s really, finally, at the heart of radical environmentalism?

An insatiable urge, an unslakeable lust to govern the lives, habits and choices of everyone — everyone — who does not think like them, who chooses not to see the world as they prefer them to see it, who questions their furious dogmas and resists their sprawling imperatives into every corner of every person’s real life.

Premier Smith ‘sickened’ by staggering disruption planned with Trudeau’s Just Transition – by David Staples (Edmonton Journal – January 16, 2023)

January 18, 2023

https://edmontonjournal.com/

If you’re from Alberta, Saskatchewan or Newfoundland and Labrador, this plan might well strike you as madness, as a federal government that has lost all humility and common sense

The staggering scope of change that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals intend to impose on Canadians with their Just Transition program is made clear in a newly-released government document.

Such is the magnitude of the proposed change that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she “felt sick” reading it.

The Trudeau Liberals are about to tell Alberta workers where to go – by Rex Murphy (National Post -January 4, 2023)

January 16, 2023

https://nationalpost.com/

Will there be a ‘just transition’ for Canadian farmers, too?

National Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson plans to introduce “just transition” legislation early this year to help workers in the oil and gas sector move into green energy jobs. Help?

Well, that’s one way to start the New Year. Send out a second-tier minister, working in concert with another second-tier minister, Seamus O’Regan, and an NDP consort, Charlie Angus, to announce a peremptory, arbitrary, unnegotiated shutdown of a greatly productive province’s principal industry.

Europe has avoided energy collapse. But is the crisis over? – by David McHugh (Associated Press -January 10, 2023)

January 11, 2023

https://apnews.com/

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Europe has dodged an energy apocalypse this winter, economists and officials say, thanks to unusually warm weather and efforts to find other sources of natural gas after Russia cut off most of its supply to the continent.

Natural gas suppliers in recent days have increased their stocks at a time when they’re usually being drawn down — an unexpected boost that has relieved fears of gas used to heat homes, generate electricity and power factories running out by winter’s end.

The painful return to energy supply reality – by Gwyn Morgan (Financial Post – January 4, 2023)

January 5, 2023

https://financialpost.com/

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had presided over a seven-year anti-oil
industry pogrom, thwarting multiple export pipelines that could have
helped supply countries now dependent on Putin’s blood oil.”

Last year my year-end column, “Fossil fuel follies of 2021,” focused on the bizarre impacts of the Great March Greenward by net-zero zealots intent on replacing the 84 per cent of global energy supplied by fossil fuels with electricity from windmills and solar panels.

Some effects were so ridiculous as to be almost humorous. As 2022 made painfully clear, however, there’s nothing at all funny about the enormous damage currently being inflicted by pursuit of this technically impossible goal.

How the U.S. became a global leader in LNG – and why Canada has fallen behind – by Brent Jang (Globe and Mail – November 19, 2022)

November 21, 2022

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The war in Ukraine has reshaped the world’s energy markets. Canada hasn’t kept up.

As Highway 27 winds around Calcasieu Lake in southwest Louisiana, massive storage tanks tower over the wetlands in what is shaping up to be a new global epicentre for exports of liquefied natural gas.

Near the town of Hackberry, Cameron LNG is eyeing expansion of its already-huge terminal, which opened in 2019. Along the highway and down other roads, there are three new proposed export terminals fronting the lake, which is just south of the small city of Lake Charles. One, Driftwood LNG, has more than 200 people working on early-stage site preparation.

Teck Resources’ oilsands exit will allow it to lean into ‘low-carbon metals,’ says CEO – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – October 27, 2022)

October 27, 2022

https://financialpost.com/

Miner sells its 21.3% stake in Fort Hills oilsands site to Suncor for $1 billion

Teck Resources Ltd. announced its long-telegraphed exit from Alberta’s oilsands Thursday, in a deal to sell its 21.3 per cent stake in the Fort Hills project to Suncor Energy Inc. for $1 billion.

Fort Hills, the most recently constructed oilsands mine located north of Fort McMurray, Alta., has been plagued by a series of operational and market glitches that restricted it from full production since operations started in 2018. When the deal goes through, Suncor will own a 75.3 per cent stake in the project with France’s TotalEnergies SE holding the remainder.

OPINION: With its OPEC cuts, Saudi Arabia won the battle but will lose the war – by John Rapley (Globe and Mail – October 24, 2022)

October 24, 2022

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and a senior fellow of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Heading into an intense midterm election year, with soaring oil prices resulting from the Ukraine war, U.S. President Joe Biden felt no choice in July but to fly to Saudi Arabia, tail between his legs, and beg the country he’d called a “pariah” to open the oil taps.

A lot of good it did him. In return for the fist bump seen (and scorned) around the world, Saudi Arabia, in a move co-ordinated with Russia, spearheaded an OPEC+ output cut to raise prices.

Fortress North America – by Diane Francis (Diane Francis Blog – October 20, 2022)

October 20, 2022

https://dianefrancis.substack.com/

Germany’s decision to scrap nuclear plants by the end of 2022 made the country – Europe’s engine of growth – dependent on Russia for energy, facilitating Vladimir Putin’s energy blackmail and war against Ukraine. The nuclear ban, promulgated by Greenpeace, never made sense because nuclear technology is safe and emissions free.

But anti-nuke criticism was stoked by Moscow as was this month’s OPEC price hike designed to kick the West and developed world in the teeth as they cope with war, costly sanctions, and energy hyper-inflation. Finally, Berlin reversed course this week and announced its nuclear plants will reopen indefinitely, a policy shift also undertaken by oil-poor Japan.

Diane Francis: Canada is a lightweight nation – by Diane Francis (Financial Post -October 17, 2022)

October 19, 2022

https://financialpost.com/

OPEC kicked the United States, the West, and the world’s poorest nations in the teeth recently with oil production cuts that will raise prices to help finance Russia’s war against Ukraine and Europe. And what has Canada done to help allay this situation, given that it is a country with one of the biggest oil and gas reserves on the planet?

There’s no indication that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau phoned President Joe Biden immediately offering to help the global economy and war effort by shipping two million more barrels of oil a day to the U.S. Has he offered to build a natural gas pipeline and LNG projects in Eastern Canada to help Germany and Europe permanently replace Russian gas?

Freeland’s political rhetoric ignores Canada’s reality – by Lorrie Goldstein (Toronto Sun – October 12, 2022)

October 13, 2022

https://torontosun.com/

Sounding like a reborn cold warrior, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday that Russia and China are despotic regimes inimical to our way of life. As a result, she said, Canada stands ready to help our democratic European allies weather the energy crisis provoked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Freeland called on liberal democracies to unite economically to counter the threat posed by Putin starving Europe of natural gas in retaliation for Western economic sanctions against Russia.

Let’s get serious about a Putin-era strategy for energy, economy, climate: Freeland – by James McCarten (Canadian Press/CBC Politics – October 12, 2022)

October 13, 2022

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/

Chrystia Freeland is in the U.S. this week for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF

Canada’s deputy prime minister urged the world’s democracies Tuesday to confront the hard economic truths of a perilous new world order and seek common cause in the shared values of prosperity, energy security, protecting the planet, and free and fair trade.

Chrystia Freeland delivered an eloquent obituary for the relative peace and stability of the 33 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Russia’s “barbaric violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty in late February of this year.