Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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

By taking on the oil sands and fracking, two of the biggest areas of controversy in the oil and gas industry, Thomas Mulcair is positioning himself as a headline-chasing anti-oil crusader.
 
Mr. Mulcair’s strategy is politically astute. By providing a counterpoint to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pro-oil policies, the federal NDP leader is getting lots of attention. The problem is that he’s using big words while knowing little.

Not only is he alienating many potential voters who know better, including the vast numbers working in and for the oil and gas industry across the country, but his sinister view of energy development threatens to make him a political lightweight.
 
After trashing the oil sands for supposedly boosting the value of the Canadian dollar to the detriment of the manufacturing sector — a theory that had a short shelf life with the recent pullback in oil prices — Mr. Mulcair took on the sector’s main lobby group.

Read more

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.

WHITEWATER, MONTANA—Three years ago, when the Canadian pipeline people first came round Bob Math’s cattle ranch in northernmost Montana, the conversation was brittle.
 
The TransCanada emissaries were pleasant enough. But it soon became apparent their Keystone XL pipeline was more than a proposal. They were talking fait accompli.
 
“It wasn’t a request, it was an announcement: ‘This is what we’re going to do on your land,’” Math says of that initial overture to trench through his 600-head Black Angus operation tucked up tight on the Saskatchewan border.

Fast-forward to 2012 and Math is onside, having palmed a TransCanada cheque to seal the deal. And so the Canadians have this most important of neighbours — the first one on the American side — on board. And thousands more besides.
 
Two factors swayed Math to surrender permission on land homesteaded by his great-grandfather in 1915: The promise of KXL taxes for his local county government, which badly needs the help; and the fact that there is already a natural gas pipeline running beneath his property, one that hasn’t given him a speck of trouble since it was laid in the 1980s.

Read more

The 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.

CALGARY- Four days after a pipeline operated by Plains Midstream Canada spilled an estimated hundreds of thousands of litres of oil into the Red Deer River in central Alberta, local landowners are waiting for answers.

“People are tired of hearing platitudes,” said Bruce Beattie, the reeve of Mountain View County, one of the affected communities. “Tell us the facts. Don’t try to make a political event out of it.”

Any oil spill in Alberta is a sensitive issue because of the controversy surrounding the debate over the Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines, but Mr. Beattie pointed out there are safety concerns that have to be addressed. “They are going to have to be much more forthcoming about the processes that led up to this spill.” ‘

Alberta Premier Alison Redford held a press conference Friday at the Dickson Dam on the Gleniffer Reservoir, which has been the focus of Plains Midstream’s clean-up efforts. Gleniffer Lake provides the water supply for the City of Red Deer and it is a popular recreation area for fishing and boating.

Read more

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

This week, Royal Dutch Shell PLC began rolling out a strategy that will dramatically change the energy world. With revenues larger than the economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia combined, Shell is betting big on natural gas to replace oil as the world’s foremost transportation fuel.
 
This is the game-changer. It was only a handful of years ago when small independent oil companies proved that a technology called fracking worked and was able to blow up deep shale rocks to release natural gas. They sold out to majors who, in turn, sold reserves to super-majors like Shell that have fuel refining and retailing expertise and operations.
 
There have been pilot projects involving the use of natural gas, liquefied or compressed, as fuel in trucks, but this week Shell made a big move. The giant announced a partnership with an American gas station operator to supply liquefied natural gas (LNG) for heavy-duty trucks at 100 fuelling stations across the U.S. by 2013.
 
The company will build LNG plants to service this chain and others that will follow. In Canada, Shell has made a similar deal with a truck-fuelling chain along 1,600 kilometers of highway between Fort McMurray and Vancouver. Shell has called this its “Green Corridor project”.

Read more

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

Fort McMurray, economic centre of Canada? Torontonians and the rest of the country had better get used to the idea. The Canadian economy will increasingly spin around the northern Alberta oil town if an industry forecast that shows Canada’s daily volumes will more than double to 6.2 million barrels a day by 2030, largely from the oil sands, proves right.
 
Under the forecast, made public Tuesday by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canada will climb to the No. 3 or No. 4 spot in the world as a major oil producer (from No. 5 currently), trailing only oil heavyweights Russia and Saudi Arabia and likely running neck and neck with the United States, depending on what happens to its tight-oil chase.
 
Canada will be the world’s fastest growing petro-state, with production expected to jump from today’s three million barrels a day.
 
The implication is that the Canadian economy will continue to tilt toward Alberta, with the rest of the country providing goods, services and labour to support its big spending oil sector. Some may not like the power shift it represents, or what it does to the environment, or how it affects the rest of the economy.

Read more

The 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.

Federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is clearly a man who chooses to enrage rather than engage. In advance of his visit to Alberta’s oil sands last week, he declared that “their model for development is Nigeria.” That he had never been to either Nigeria or to the oils ands was clearly no impediment to that astonishing pronouncement.

Nevertheless, his Alberta hosts did their best to show him the great strides industry has made in reducing the environmental impact of oil-extraction operations, as well as the restored mine sites where wood bison and other wildlife now roam.

Mr. Mulcair would have learned that the entire disturbed area of the oil sands is 100 square kilometres smaller than the footprint of the City of Toronto and comprises just one-10th of 1 per cent of the Alberta northern boreal forest. He would also have learned that the oil sands produce only 5 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no sign that such information altered his characterization of the oil sands as a threat to local and global eco-systems, but surely his earlier declaration obliges him to next visit the Niger Delta.

Read more

The 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.

In 1980, a newly elected prime minister from Quebec, Pierre Trudeau, decided to mobilize the resource wealth of Western Canada in order to subsidize Eastern Canada. The result was the national energy program (NEP 1), which fixed domestic prices for oil and gas below world levels, levied an export tax to boost federal revenues and confiscated producing assets to give to Petro-Canada.

In 2012, a would-be prime minister from Quebec, Thomas Mulcair, has resurrected the idea of diverting Western Canadian income, but with an environmental gloss. According to statements by Mr. Mulcair and other leading members of the New Democratic Party, there should be a carbon tax to raise federal revenue, environmental controls to limit or even terminate oil sands production, and requirements to refine hydrocarbons in Canada rather than in other countries, even if it’s uneconomic. Call it NEP 2.

NEP 1 was an economic disaster that had to be repealed within a few years, but the political consequences lasted longer. It jump-started the development of Western separatism, previously a fringe phenomenon. A separatist candidate was elected in an Alberta by-election in 1982, and his party got over 10 per cent of the vote in the general election that followed within a few months.

Read more

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

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has had a couple of red-letter weeks. He moved into the mansion called Stornaway for Opposition Leaders, with its big expense account and Royal trappings.
 
He got tons of attention when he recycled the “Dutch Disease” phrase to blame the booming West for the beleaguered East. 
Then he toured the oil sands, Canada’s economic cornerstone, by helicopter and described them as big or “awe-inspiring”.
 
These recent events certainly serve to reveal the character of the latest actor on Ottawa’s stage who is in a major supporting role. Here’s my analysis of Mulcair based on his recent milestones:
 
1. On living in a mansion
 
Mulcair is the latest incarnation of what the British dubbed the “champagne socialist”. Stornaway is another symbol of inherited privilege, like the Monarchy, where status and perquisites are given away to the duly “crowned”.

Mulcair, if consistent with his ideology, should have declined the grand housing perq and diverted the excessive cost of his upkeep to some worthy cause.

Read more

The 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.

When Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall took on Thomas Mulcair – on Twitter, no less – over the federal NDP Leader’s controversial “Dutch disease” comments, he couldn’t have imagined the national debate his move would touch off.

Three weeks after the fact, the matter is still fuelling political discussion in Canada. While the resultant furor wasn’t specifically on the agenda at the Western Premiers’ Conference in Edmonton this week, it certainly provided a compelling backdrop for the gathering.

Perhaps more than anything, the affair seemed to confer on Mr. Wall a role with which he seems entirely comfortable: protector of the West. Given that he is the senior statesman among a group of Western premiers who have very little experience in their positions, he was the likeliest candidate for the part in any event.

Mr. Wall’s decision to tweet his feelings about Mr. Mulcair’s position was hardly some impulsive, late-night, regret-later move carried out with a glass of wine in his hand. Rather, it was a response to frustration that had been building for months.

It started, he says, when he learned that a delegation of NDP MPs was heading to Washington to “get in the way” of efforts

Read more

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.

A group of 30,000 Ecuadorans who won an $18.3 (U.S.) billion judgment against the oil giant Chevron in Ecuador for polluting the rainforest are asking Ontario’s courts to help them collect.

But the company is not yielding quietly in the two-decades-old case, claiming that the legal actions against it are a “multi-billion-dollar scam.” A Chevron executive has accused lawyers and consultants for the plaintiffs of trying to “extort a multi-billion dollar payment from Chevron through fabricated evidence and a campaign to incite public outrage.”

The Ecuadorans’ Canadian lawyer Alan Lenczner says he’s not re-trying a case that’s already been decided, however – he’s simply trying to enforce a judgment rendered in Ecuador.

The Ontario claim, filed Wednesday, hasn’t been tested in court. Statements of claim are subject to challenge, and material may be amended or deleted. The claim names Chevron Corp., Chevron Canada Ltd. and Chevron Canada Finance Ltd.

Read more

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.

OTTAWA – Tom Mulcair brazenly parachutes into enemy territory Wednesday. The NDP leader is backed only by a tiny band of subversives, his energy critic, Peter Julian, his environment critic and deputy leader, Megan Leslie, and his lone Alberta MP, Linda Duncan.
 
As he journeys to Fort McMurray, he drags with him accusations he is “lecturing” Alberta on the oilsands, is seeking to divide the country and is carving up the nation in some Ottawa bunker, pitting region versus region, rubbing his hands in glee as he counts central Canadian seats on his way to forming the next government.
 
He is on the agenda of the western premiers’ meeting in Edmonton and is the subject of a politically motivated government motion condemning him in the British Columbia legislature.
 
Enough already with the wedge politics. Mulcair is a federal leader and, as such, he has the right — indeed, the obligation — to question federal environmental policies.

Read more

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

The re-education of Thomas Mulcair starts this week, when the federal NDP leader is scheduled to visit Alberta’s oil sands after launching a series of offensive attacks on the resource’s place in Canada.
 
Like thousand of oil sands bashers before him who made the trip to Fort McMurray — from Hollywood celebs such as James Cameron to international politicians and media representatives, Mr. Mulcair will find the view on the ground doesn’t quite match the spin of the environmental extremists who seem to have his ear.
 
No question, the oil sands are a massive project that is impacting the environment and the communities around it. But to paint them as a Canadian economic and environmental scourge is politically immature — certainly for an aspiring Canadian Prime Minister.

When he visits Alberta Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Mulcair will also find one of the earth’s most diverse and productive workforces, human ingenuity at its finest, scores of young people in leadership roles, a commitment to technological innovation, enterprising First Nations and a lot of unfilled, well-paying jobs.

Read more

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

As if the great debates over proposed pipelines to export oil to the United States and Asia weren’t convulsing Canada enough, a new one is about to divide the country. It involves the future of TransCanada Corp.’s historic Mainline.
 
For more than half a century, the Mainline has been a reliable workhorse that over winter peaks moved as much as seven billion cubic feet a day (bcf/d) of natural gas from Western Canada — roughly half of its total production today — to warm up homes and energize factories in Eastern Canada.
 
But its use has fallen off sharply during the rest of the year because of the emergence of alternative supplies nearby, pushing pipeline tolls and tempers at both ends of the system through the roof. Indeed, tolls are so high they exceed the price of the natural gas it transports.
 
While recent oil sands pipeline debates have pitted the oil producing community against the environmental movement, the restructuring of the Mainline is rubbing many old wounds between the energy-producing West and the consuming East.

Read more

The 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.

CALGARY— In the midst of the largest auction of Western Arctic oil and gas rights in Canadian history, two giant rectangles of land up for grabs in the northeastern stretches of the Beaufort Sea are particularly mysterious.

No oil and gas company has ever drilled there, and why any company would want rights to the area is difficult to understand – unless it had access to a new trove of data quietly compiled by a Texas company over the past half-decade.

Though the economic and technical hurdles to plucking oil from the Arctic remain high, that data is altering the energy industry’s view of the potential in Canada’s Far North, pointing to a resource that now looks larger than formerly believed. It is, in the words of data collector ION Geophysical Corp., “a world-class play.”

Six years ago, the Houston-based company launched a multiyear program to peer into the subsurface below the Beaufort Sea, using sophisticated seismic and gravity equipment to identify structures that could contain oil and gas.

Read more