Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

OTTAWA — The kids on Twitter were onside with Justin Trudeau’s call to decriminalize pot, but what will they make of his latest policy stance – that the CNOOC acquisition of Calgary oil company Nexen is “good for Canada”?

Opinion polls consistently show the public opposes the deal, but in an op-ed for Postmedia newspapers to coincide with a campaign stop in Calgary Tuesday, the Liberal leadership front-runner said that he supports the $15-billion deal because Chinese investment will create middle-class Canadian jobs.

“Foreign investment raises productivity and hence living standards for Canadian families. More fundamentally, it is in Canada’s interests to broaden and deepen our relationship with the world’s second largest economy,” he said.

Amen to all that. But it is somewhat surprising coming from a candidate that polls suggest could become Prime Minister, as long as he continues to mouth vacuous tinsel about hope and change. Very brave, as Sir Humphrey might have put it on Yes, Minister.

It seems Mr. Trudeau can’t resist frustrating his critics, be it in the boxing ring, or in the political arena. Just days after Martha Hall Findlay entered the leadership race with the provocative taunt: “It’s not good enough to talk about values and principles,” Mr. Trudeau has come forth with a bold call for a more coherent strategy to diversify our trade away from the United States and open up Asian markets.

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

 VANCOUVER, CALGARY — The federal government is not rushing to rule on whether state-owned foreign companies can buy Canadian resources without comprehensive examinations, even with a key deadline on the horizon.

Ed Fast, Minister for International Trade and for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, said he expects Ottawa to clarify the so-called net benefit test “very soon.” Foreign companies must prove their acquisitions will benefit Canada to obtain approval for proposed takeovers of domestic companies with assets of more than $312-million. Industry Minister Christian Paradis is currently reviewing two major deals involving state-controlled companies out of Asia.

“I would say this: With respect to the Chinese, Canadians expect us to exercise a high level of due diligence in our dealings with our trade partners, especially where state-owned enterprises are concerned. I would hope that the Chinese also understand how important this is to Canada that we get it right,” Mr. Fast said in an interview Thursday.

“I’m committed to getting it right and I know that the Industry Minister is committed to getting it right. … Our government is committed to getting it right. But we will not be pushed or hurried into making these kinds of decisions.”

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

LETHBRIDGE, ALTA.- Good morning, students. The results from last week’s history test have been transconducted into your NeuroPads. Now, if you’ll all please disengage your BrainFeeds and start listening, I’ll be talking today about one of the most misunderstood episodes in Canadian history.

This occurred over the first decade and a half of the 21st century. It was Canada’s global moment of arrogant pride – the Great Hubris, as it’s remembered today – our country’s moment of squandered opportunity. In those heady years, Canadian leaders and citizens alike became convinced that their country was an energy superpower possessed of powers unique in the world.

Canada, for a while, went mad. We believed we were above the laws of economics and politics and energy – a country that had magically resisted the First New Depression of 2008, and had an export so desirable that we could ignore ecological warnings and well-established international partnerships and blacken the good name Canada had earned the previous century. Our leaders bossed around the world, believing everyone wanted their controversial oil and would ignore its many serious problems if they simply branded it “ethical.”

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WILLISTON, N.D. — As the sun dips below a grain stubble horizon, the flares flicker into view, a dozen tongues of flame licking against a pink sky.

The flares are natural gas being burned off in the rush for a far more valuable resource – oil. Shining in the gathering dusk, they are industrial glimmers of a changed future for a nation whose long-faltering dreams of energy independence are being revived.

Oil is pouring out of North Dakota. In September, some 728,000 barrels a day flowed, up a startling 57 per cent from the year before. And it’s not just here: Similar fields in Texas and elsewhere are seeing similarly fast rises in oil output, prompting a near-euphoric re-examination of what’s ahead for a country that has long relied heavily on imported oil to fill its gas tanks and keep its economic engine running.

Now, as hundreds of drilling rigs employ technological advances to extract rich reserves of previously untapped energy, the oil renaissance is triggering some startling forecasts.

The International Energy Agency predicted this week that the U.S. is set to become the largest oil-producing nation on earth, more prolific even than Saudi Arabia. One day, the IEA said, the U.S. could drive away most foreign imports.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

A group of Canadian businessmen has obtained the blessing of Alaskan tribes and Canadian First Nations to build a railroad through their lands that could carry up to five million barrels per day from the oil sands to the super tanker port in Valdez, Alaska.

This is truly a nation-building project that must be seriously evaluated by all governments and the oil industry. Preliminary feelers have been placed and it’s clear that the concept is the most viable and pragmatic solution for Canada’s logistical problems.

The proposed 2,400-kilometre railway would link Fort McMurray, Alta., with the Alaska oil pipeline system then on to the Valdez for export. The proposal, conceived a few years ago in studies commissioned by Alaska and Yukon, would liberate the stranded oil sands and bypass opposition to new pipelines in both countries.

Other solutions have been proposed, but this is the best for many reasons: The group promoting this realizes that any major infrastructure project is a non-starter without a social licence. So they began by seeking and obtaining local support.

“The greatest strength of our Alberta-Alaska railway concept is the support it has received from First Nations along the route and from the Assembly of First Nations across Canada,” said consortium CEO Matt Vickers.

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The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

The Associated Press – NEW ORLEANS—A day of reckoning arrived for BP on Thursday as the oil giant agreed to plead guilty to a raft of criminal charges and pay a record $4.5 billion in a settlement with the U.S. government over the deadly 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Three BP employees were also charged, two of them with manslaughter.

The settlement and the indictments came two and a half years after the fiery drilling-rig explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The settlement includes nearly $1.3 billion in fines — the biggest criminal penalty in the United States’ history. As part of the deal, BP will plead guilty to charges involving the 11 deaths and lying to the U.S. Congress about how much oil was spewing from the blown-out well.

“We believe this resolution is in the best interest of BP and its shareholders,” said Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP chairman. “It removes two significant legal risks and allows us to vigorously defend the company against the remaining civil claims.” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said the deaths and the oil spill “resulted from BP’s culture of privileging profit over prudence.”

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The energy industry and Canadians opposed to its plans seem to be speaking in different tongues. One side is focused on economic climate, the other on climate change. One brandishes impressive employment numbers, the other embarrassingly high CO2 emissions. One talks about provincial and federal permits, the other highlights the absence of a ‘social licence’.

A common gripe among industry executives is that the average Canadian doesn’t comprehend the economic benefits and job creation the industry brings to the table, nor does he or she trust the safety of the technologies deployed.

“It’s an image of ships passing in the night, going in opposite directions,” said Michal Moore, professor of economics at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary.

Prof. Moore, together with colleagues André Turcotte and Jennifer Winter, wrote a report aimed at measuring Canadian energy literacy. Released Oct. 31, it surveyed more than 1,500 Canadians to determine their understanding of energy issues.

“The survey revealed that Canadians have a good general knowledge of energy use and relative cost but lack detailed knowledge about sources of energy fuels, as well as sources and linkages with environmental impacts,” the report says.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Tom Mulcair cast himself as a latter-day Sir John A. Macdonald when he talked in Calgary about his vision of Western Canada oil being shipped by pipeline to central and eastern provinces to be processed and then sold domestically.

It would be a nation-building project on a par with railway construction in the 1800s, “a win-win situation,” he said.

But the net effect of supplying Eastern consumers with cheaper Western oil would be closer to a less celebrated federal initiative — Pierre Trudeau’s late and unlamented National Energy Program.

Mr. Mulcair was not specific and it’s not clear how much government intervention in the process he is proposing. But if he is talking about landlocking Canadian oil and supporting the domestic refining industry with discounted Western crude, it starts to look very much like a back-door transfer from one group of Canadians to another.

The New Democratic Party leader said he is not opposed to exporting Canadian oil, as long as the country’s own energy needs are taken care of first. Ottawa’s command and control of the oil industry didn’t end so well last time out: Albertans still blame the federal government for a 40% drop in house prices in Calgary and Edmonton, and a bankruptcy rate that rose 150%.

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http://www.timescolonist.com/index.html

MONTREAL – Quebec’s environment minister is expressing reservations about private-sector plans to import crude from Alberta’s oil sands to Montreal refineries, insisting Quebec will retain sovereignty over its land no matter what is decided by federal regulators.

Speaking to reporters in Quebec City Wednesday, Daniel Breton would not say outright if his Parti Québécois minority government opposes plans by Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp. to ship Alberta oil eastward to Montreal. Rather, he attempted to flex a little muscle by saying nothing will move forward without Quebec’s blessing.

“There are some environmental risks with oil,” said Mr. Breton, a former environmental activist who helped found Quebec’s Parti Vert. “Given what happened [on the Kalamazoo River] in Michigan, we can’t take this lightly…. This is a question of protecting the environment that’s on our territory.”

A pipeline belonging to Calgary-based Enbridge ruptured at that location in 2010 in a spill the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency later estimated at larger than one million U.S. gallons. Cleanup costs have topped US$585-million.

Enbridge is planning a significant expansion of its pipelines that carry crude from the oil sands and the Bakken shale oil field to refineries in central Canada and the U.S. Midwest.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Predicted U.S. oil boom no threat to Canada

There is more for Canada to celebrate than bemoan in the U.S. oil boom highlighted by the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook. The boom will provide a welcome boost to the economy of our most important trading partner. It will also provide benefits to our service industry. If there is any threat to Canadian exports to the U.S., it comes not from increased U.S. production but the policies of President Obama.

According to the IEA, U.S. oil output is set to surpass that of Saudi Arabia by the early 2020s. “[O]ne remarkable feature of the market, to which we draw attention this year,” declares the report, “is an energy transformation in the United States. Due to a combination of new technology, free markets and policy action, the United States is well on the way to becoming self-sufficient in energy, in net terms.” But it’s only remarkable if you don’t believe in free markets or human ingenuity. You won’t find the words “free market” anywhere else in this 690-page digital doorstop.

While U.S. oil production is projected to grow, the U.S. will continue to be a major oil importer. Canada, after all, is more than self-sufficient in oil but still imports, mainly to Eastern markets. The U.S. boom in North Dakota is certainly having an impact on Canadian export revenues, but that is because of a bottleneck at Cushing, Okla., which is being addressed by new pipelines to the Gulf Coast.

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA, CALGARY – The United States is on track to become the world’s biggest oil producer by the end of the decade, a stunning turn of fortune that threatens to stifle the growth prospects of Canada’s oil exporters.

America’s rising oil output is “nothing short of spectacular” and will exceed that of Saudi Arabia or Russia by 2020, the International Energy Agency said in a report that starkly illustrates why the Canadian industry – and the federal and Alberta governments – are determined to build pipelines that would serve Asian markets.

The U.S. currently imports about 10 million barrels per day of crude, and Canada accounts for nearly 30 per cent of that total. But oil companies are using new technologies to extract vast amounts of crude from the U.S. Midwest. The IEA forecasts the Americans will be producing 11.1 million barrels per day by 2020, up from 8.1 million last year.

At the same time, the IEA expects American demand for petroleum products to decline significantly. The double-edged forecast has the potential to cause upheaval in the oil patch in Western Canada, which drew $40-billion in investment last year and is a major driver of economic growth and jobs in the country.

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA – Canada may be unique among nations: It possesses a scarce and valuable resource hugely in demand that it’s unable or unwilling to sell, putting the country’s economic future at risk.

This conclusion arises out of World Energy Outlook 2012, published Monday by the Paris-based International Energy Agency. The report projects a radically different energy future from the conventional assumptions that many Canadians still embrace.

“Energy developments in the United States are profound,” the report observes. Hydraulic fracturing and other unconventional forms of extraction, coupled with improving energy efficiency, will make the world’s largest economy also the world’s biggest oil producer by the end of the decade.

Within two decades, the U.S. will be virtually energy self-sufficient and a net oil exporter. The most reliable market for Canadian oil could soon become much less reliable. Even if President Barack Obama does approve the revised Keystone XL pipeline proposal next year, a continued American market for oil sands bitumen is uncertain.

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