Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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.

The last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven in 1885. This was a remarkable accomplishment pitting the indomitable will of our early railroad pioneers against the rugged Canadian terrain. In a country where gravitational forces often move north and south, this ribbon of steel has helped knit the country together both symbolically and economically.

It is time for another bold project, national in scope: A pipeline network extending from coast to coast. This essential infrastructure project would be good for all regions of Canada. It would be an extraordinary catalyst for economic growth. It would be a powerful symbol of Canadian unity.

Much has been made recently about who wins and who loses from Western oil sands. This is the wrong way to look at it. We should turn this challenge into a nation-building exercise rather than encourage a corrosive debate pitting one region against another.

Although the ripple effect of oil-sands development across this country is well documented, a national pipeline, subject to a thorough environmental and regulatory review, would put the issue beyond dispute.

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

Harper right to streamline ­pipeline regulations
 
Although this week’s amendment-packed “slumber party” to hold up passage of omnibus Bill C-38 focused on Stephen Harper’s alleged contempt for Parliament, perhaps the most contentious element of a contentious bill related to the streamlining of environmental regulation for new resource infrastructure, in particular pipelines.
 
This reflects the fact that the petroleum industry is more politicized now than at any time since the 1980 National Energy Program. Then, the issue was a fight between Pierre Trudeau’s Ottawa and Peter Lougheed’s Alberta over the spoils of higher oil and gas prices.

Now, it is a struggle between the Harper government’s aspirations to facilitate and enhance Canada’s status as a petroleum superpower, and an environmental movement that wants to kill the fossil-fuel industry. Meanwhile, old-style interprovincial jealousies have also been stoked by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s invoking “Dutch disease:” the suggestion that an oil-boosted Canadian dollar is costing manufacturing jobs.

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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.

A monster British Columbia well just south of the 60th parallel is pumping a tremendous volume of natural gas from a globally significant new play that stands to dramatically boost Canada’s gas resources.

Until Thursday, it was a secret, drilled in 2009 and kept under wraps while Houston-based Apache Corp. snapped up more potentially prolific land around it. Revealing results from the well, Apache called it “the most prolific shale gas resource test in the world.”

And the Liard Basin where the well is situated, about 150 kilometres northwest of Fort Nelson, B.C., stands to be the “best unconventional gas reservoir in North America,” the company said. Initial results show it contains enough gas to match Canada’s entire current output for nearly a decade.

That’s based in part on that single well from 2009, which produced 21 million cubic feet per day during its first month, after being “fracked” – a technique used to free shale gas – six times. In other shale gas reservoirs, companies use 18 fracks – and more – to cause even more gas to flow.

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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.

Something good is happening in the United States. All of a sudden, energy is getting much cheaper and cleaner. Dirty old coal-fired plants are shutting down because they no longer make economic sense. In fact, the U.S. appears to be the only major emitter that’s actually reducing emissions.

Since 2006, U.S. emissions have fallen by 7.7 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency – despite the absence of a global carbon treaty, or stiff new regulations, or a cap-and-trade regime. To be sure, the recession helped. But even when the economy comes back, greenhouse-gas emissions are set to fall even more.

You’d think that environmental groups would rejoice at this great news. Instead, they’ve gone to war. The main reason for the fall in greenhouse gasses is a new technology known as hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), which they claim is a menace to the planet. Fracking promises to unlock vast new reserves of shale gas, which emits roughly half as much CO2 as coal, and 30 per cent less than conventional oil. But environmentalists warn that fracking will poison the water, pollute the air and trigger earthquakes that will bring doom and destruction raining down on us all.

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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.

It’s hard to say at this point just how many times the world has ended. We’ve killed it off so often, it’s hard to keep up. Certainly, we have been predicting its demise since we’ve been around.
 
Depending on whom you believe, it’s apocalypse now, then or tomorrow. These days, the doomsayers tend to be environmentalists as well as religious cranks. Although one can dismiss the latter, not so the former.
 
The truth is that to deny global warming in 2012 no longer makes sense. The evidence is everywhere around us, like it or not. The effects are already catastrophic. But does that mean the end of life as we know it?
 
“We’re destroying the planet,” declared journalist, author and Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler. In Toronto to address the 13th annual Ideacity conference, he painted a bleak picture of the Earth’s condition. Running through a checklist, he made it clear we’re in bad shape.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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