Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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.

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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.

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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.

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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— 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.

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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.

Anne Golden is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board of Canada. Glen Hodgson is Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist of The Conference Board of Canada.

In recent weeks there has been a recurring debate on whether the economic success being felt in much of Western Canada is hurting the rest of the country. The debate has centred on the oil sands and whether they have caused so-called “Dutch disease”, specifically in the manufacturing sector based largely in Central Canada.

The argument that good news for oil sands is bad news for the rest of the Canada is not supported by evidence.

Contrary to widespread opinion, the oil sands are not a significant share of the Canadian economy, and are not crowding out other sectors. Total energy and mining production as a share of Canadian GDP is actually smaller today that it was in recent decades – 4.6 per cent of GDP today, versus 5.1 per cent in 1990 and 5.9 per cent in 1980.

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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.

LONDON, ONT.— The impacts of reversing the flow of an Enbridge oil pipeline between Sarnia and Hamilton are “minimal and manageable,” the company’s lawyer told a National Energy Board hearing Wednesday.

But aboriginal groups disagreed – both inside and outside the hearings at a London hotel.

Traditionalist members of the Six Nations reserve near Brantford forced the hearings to adjourn for several hours just as they got going Wednesday morning, as they complained the hearings were illegitimate and undemocratic.

Once the hearings had resumed in the afternoon, Chief Christopher Plain of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia complained that his members “have not been consulted in a meaningful way” in the energy board process.

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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.

CALGARY—NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair might as well have declared war on the West. That’s the way it sounded from this end of the country when a couple of weeks ago he told a CBC radio program that something needs to be done about rapid oilsands development.
 
According to Mulcair, it has artificially inflated the Canadian dollar and thereby delivered a bruising blow to central Canada’s export-dependent manufacturing sector.
 
Mulcair might as well have said that the western resource-based economy is the enemy of the eastern-based manufacturing sector and must be stamped out at all costs.
 
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s team and the western premiers were quick to defend the West’s right to profit from its resource wealth. But the ensuing war of words created such a fog it obscured much more fundamental issues.

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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.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is right with one part of his critique of Western Canada’s oil-driven economy, and wrong about all the rest. On balance, it’s a poor batting average for someone who, some day, hopes to become prime minister.

Mr. Mulcair has been chastising the oil industry, and the governments that regulate it, for not making the industry pay the full cost of emissions that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Even Exxon-Mobil in Houston (and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers) thinks there should be a price on carbon – through a tax or, less preferably, a market-trading system for emissions. Alberta has such a tax, but it is set way too low to be very effective. So Mr. Mulcair is correct that pollution costs should be factored into the product’s final cost. Otherwise, all of society loses from the pollution.

To say, however, that Alberta and Canada are acting like Nigeria in regulating the industry is political nonsense.

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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.

Thomas Mulcair says it was never his intent to spar with the leaders of the Western provinces as he blames Alberta’s oil sands for the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada’s other economic sectors.

“I have far too much respect for provincial premiers or for provincial politicians, having been one myself for so many years, to ever want to be interpreted as trying to dismiss them,” the Leader of the federal New Democrats, who was once a provincial cabinet minister in Quebec, said on Friday in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

“And if that is the way it was interpreted, of course,” he said, “I regret it.”

But Mr. Mulcair continues to press his belief that allowing development of the oil sands to proceed without demanding a greater price for the toll on the environment is driving up the dollar and hurting a wide range of industries including manufacturing, fishing and forestry. New Democrats say that without the oil companies paying the true cost of environmental remediation, their profits are unrealistically high and that is driving up the dollar.

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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.

For most Canadians, the 700,000 km of crude oil and natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the country are out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Until the massive energy infrastructure intersects with international politics, the economy and environmental activism.

Projects like Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 9, Northern Gateway bristle with controversy (despite U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pledge Friday to approve Keystone on his first day in office).

But the pipelines that carry millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of natural gas could transport Canada itself into the ranks of the world’s energy super powers.

But only if we move beyond our single biggest customer, the U.S., and begin supplying energy to the rest of the world – particularly energy-gobbling emerging markets, soon.

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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— Ottawa has placed 905,000 hectares of the northern offshore up for bids, clearing the way for energy companies to snap up exploration rights for an area half the size of Lake Ontario. The scale of the offer indicates eagerness in the oil patch to drill for new finds in Canada’s northern waters less than two years after such plans were put on hold following the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a major Arctic drilling safety review.

The Arctic exploration auction resumes as the Harper government is promoting greater development of the country’s resources. It has taken steps to speed regulatory approvals for major energy projects such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, promising to limit the ability of environmental groups and other opponents to block or delay new developments.

The prospect of further northern drilling fits squarely with that mandate, said Jason MacDonald, spokesman for John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, which oversees the northern land auction.

“The bid call reflects the potential that we see for resource development,” he said.

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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 a joint announcement two weeks ago, the United States and Japan (along with ConocoPhillips, the U.S.-based multinational oil company) announced the world’s first successful field trial (in Alaska) of a technology that uses carbon dioxide to free natural gas from methane hydrates – the globally abundant hunks of porous ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in deposits, onshore and offshore, around the world. It’s a neat feat. You use CO2, which isn’t wanted, to produce natural gas, which is. But it’s more than neat – much more.

Methane hydrates constitute the world’s No. 1 reservoir of fossil fuel. Ubiquitous along vast stretches of Earth’s continental shelves, they hold enough natural gas to fuel the world for a thousand years – and beyond. Who says so? Using the most conservative of assumptions, the U.S. Geological and Geophysical Service says so.

The U.S. now produces 21 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas a year. But it possesses 330,000 tcf of natural gas in its methane hydrate resource – theoretically enough to supply the country for 3,000 years (give or take). Using less conservative numbers (for example, a methane hydrate resource of 670,000 tcf), the U.S. is good to go for 6,000 years (give or take).

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