Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image – Page 133

Ottawa to unveil sweeping changes to [resource development] environmental oversight – by Shawn McCarthy and John Ibbitson (Globe and Mail – April 17, 2012)

April 17, 2012

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.

OTTAWA – The Harper government is about to dramatically shrink the federal oversight of proposed natural resource developments, handing over environmental reviews for many projects to the provinces and cutting back the number of smaller construction projects that are subject to any environmental assessment.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is expected to unveil a sweeping legislative plan on Tuesday that will focus Ottawa’s role in environmental assessments to projects it deems to be of national significance.

Since taking office as a rookie minister last summer, Mr. Oliver has promised to streamline and overhaul Ottawa’s environmental assessment process, which the government insists is too cumbersome, duplicative and subject to tactical delaying efforts by environmental groups who are determined to block development.

Russians follow Chinese into Canada’s oil patch – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – April 17, 2012)

April 17, 2012

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

Another superpower, Russia, has bought a piece of Canada’s oil patch, making Alberta the meeting point for all the world’s top power brokers and the focus of a new oil age based on technological advancements.

Russia’s largest oil firm, Rosneft, purchased a stake in the hot Cardium tight oil play as part of a landmark alliance with Exxon Mobil Corp. announced Monday.

The Russian giant joins China’s top oil companies, the top U.S. oil companies and the top European oil companies in establishing a Canadian presence. All are producing or learning to produce oil and gas from technologically challenging unconventional plays — from tight oil, to shale gas, to the oil sands.

Under the deal, RN Cardium Oil Inc., a Rosneft subsidiary, is acquiring 30% of Exxon Mobil’s stake in the Harmattan acreage. Exxon Mobil holds 56,000 acres in the play, which is operated by its Canadian affiliate, Imperial Oil Ltd. Rosneft subsidiaries also gained 30% stakes in ExxonMobil projects in West Texas and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

Innovate or die: How Canada is courting long-term failure [with resource development] – by Richard Poplak (Globe and Mail – April 14, 2012)

April 16, 2012

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.

Richard Poplak is a Canadian writer currently based in Africa.

For policy wonks, this season’s equivalent of tween thriller The Hunger Games is a book called Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. The pundits are giddy about its mixture of deep historical context and forehead-slapping common sense. Authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, economists by day, insist that functional political institutions lead to successful economic institutions, and not the other way around.

Antagonizing libertarians, geographical determinists and the Ottawa chapter of Atlas Shrugs Rulz! alike, the authors claim that any smart economic policy will necessarily arise from an inclusive political system, where all is governed by rule of law, property rights are protected and hard work is rewarded by a paycheque subsequently taxed.

So far, a gold star for Canada (and a dunce cap for China) – until we slam into the following statement: “Sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics.”

Free, prior and informed consent for certainty, prosperity [resource development and First Nations] – by Shane Maffat (Greenpeace Blogpost – April 13, 2012)

April 14, 2012

http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/

A lot of effort has been made, by Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver and others, to portray the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for industrial development in traditional Indigenous territories as somehow obstructionist, an impediment to “progress”. This is as intentional as it is disingenuous.

Enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canada has formally endorsed, the principle arose from a shared experience of Indigenous communities around the world whereby “consultations” have almost exclusively constituted a rubber stamp for unfettered resource exploitation to benefit a wealthy few and large corporations. The broader global context, Greenpeace and others would argue, is one of environmental, economic and social unsustainability which has in great part been caused by the heedless exploitation of lands where Indigenous peoples have been ignored, and their authority eroded.

How to address the recurring phenomenon of rubber stamp consultations, which has, and continues, to produce such negative results for people and planet alike? After more than two decades of multilateral negotiations between Indigenous peoples (including many of Canada’s own Indigenous leaders), UN member-states, observers from UN organs and specialized agencies, the finely balanced principle we now know as FPIC has emerged as the internationally recognized minimum human rights standard for solving the conundrum.

Head start in race to China – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – April 13, 2012)

April 14, 2012

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

CALGARY – With the future of the proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline proposed by Enbridge Inc. looking bleak because of hardening opposition, competitor Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP surged from behind Thursday with a plan for a better-looking replacement – a $5-billion expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to Vancouver.

The expansion would increase the capacity of the 62-year-old line – the only one moving oil from Alberta to the West Coast and Asia – to 850,000 barrels a day, from today’s 300,000.

The expansion is bigger than under previous plans, which called for a $3.8billion, 600,000-bpd project, and would reduce the need for Northern Gateway, with a capacity of 550,000 bpd, at least for now. If approved by regulators, the expanded system would be operational by 2017, years before Northern Gateway’s planned startup.

The Kinder Morgan plan is backed by 20-year commitments from existing and new shippers after a so-called open season. They suggest that producers, refiners and offshore interests are backing a new horse in the race to diversify Canada’s oil market in Asia.

Technology boosts cache of known reserves [Canada oil and gas] – by Paul Brent (Globe and Mail – April 13, 2012)

April 14, 2012

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 whole game has changed,’ experts say as Canada’s oil and gas stockpile rises due to new techniques and ‘good work’

You wouldn’t know it by looking at gas prices at the pumps, but Canada’s oil and gas industry is in the midst of a technological revolution that is allowing access to previously unavailable petroleum deposits.

New drilling techniques, particularly the marriage of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of rock formations using high pressure water, have unlocked oil and natural gas from deposits that were uneconomic to tap even just a few years ago.

The result has been a dramatic decline in the price of natural gas in North America, a widening of the spread between oil prices in land-locked North America and the rest of the world, and expectations that there is much more oil and gas to be exploited on the continent.

The new technologies and discoveries of suddenly accessible “tight oil” and natural gas in shale deposits has U.S. politicians proclaiming that American energy independence is on the horizon and has pushed worries of Canadian energy depletion well into the future.

Resources ‘R’ Us [Canada] – by Philip Cross (National Post – April 13, 2012)

April 14, 2012

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

Philip Cross is the former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada.

There seems to be more than the usual disconnect between the business community and economists in Canada these days. Open any business page or stock market report and they are positively gushing with stories about our natural resources: oil prices hitting near record highs, new plans for pipelines on what seem a daily basis, a revival of mining development on an epic scale, and land prices on the Prairies at stratospheric levels.

The trend is so pronounced, even governments have sat up and taken notice. Western Canada has long tied its economic development to natural resources. Newfoundland lifted itself out of “have not” status by adopting this strategy, starting with offshore oil and gas and more recently mining in its interior.

In their latest budgets, the federal and Quebec governments have clearly embraced natural resource projects as the road to prosperity, however ill-conceived their attempts to subsidize a booming sector. While the Premier of Ontario equivocates about the possibility of “Dutch Disease” in its manufacturing sector, investments in energy and mining in the real world of Ontario now total twice as much as in its manufacturing sector.

As natural gas prices collapse, producers pin hopes on Asia – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – April 12, 2012)

April 12, 2012

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

For natural gas producers in Western Canada, these are the best of times and the worst of times.

On the bright side, the opening of a new export market for liquefied gas from the British Columbia coast is so close they can smell it. A consortium led by Royal Dutch Shell PLC seemed close Wednesday to a go-ahead decision on a $12.35-billion gas liquefaction terminal in Kitimat, while another proposed LNG project secured a federal export permit. The developments provide solid support for the takeoff of an LNG industry that promises richer prices for Canadian gas from Asian consumers, a reason to develop massive shale gas deposits that are now stranded, and fuel merger and acquisition activity.

But a dark side is also haunting the consortium. North American gas prices sank below US$2 per million British thermal units in New York Wednesday, the lowest point in a decade and far below what it costs to produce it, threatening gas producers’ ability to survive long enough to capture the pot of gold on the other side of the Pacific.

According to a report in the Tokyo-based Nikkei business daily Wednesday, Shell and partners Mitsubishi Corp., China National Petroleum Corp. and Korea Gas Corp. are close to completing terms on a project to start shipping gas around 2020 at an annual rate of 12 million tonnes.

Reality lost in big pipeline debate – by Diane Francis (National Post – April 7, 2012)

April 10, 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper

Talk recently about the possibility of Chinese workers building a pipeline through British Columbia threatens the project’s future more than does any statements by First Nations leaders, Robert Redford, Greens or New Democrats.

It’s also an indication that the private sector does not get it. The pipeline will only be built if Albertans, British Columbians and B.C. First Nations make a deal.

This must be an Alberta-B.C. negotiation. This is not about the federal government or regulators. And there’s no room for foreigners or those financed by them such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club or groups that are fronts from rival oil producers in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or Russia. It’s apparent to me that some opaque “environmental groups” don’t disclose their donors or real agendas and have targeted Canada’s oil sands. I have written about ending foreign intervention in the regulatory process and foreigners are being excluded. This is not about what companies and their foreign customers want to do. Here is the playbook for a deal:

1. A pipeline through B.C.’s pristine territory must be built and operated with a minimum of environmental impact. The pipeline should be buried, have sensors all along and lands post-construction should be returned to their original state.

Bashing Western Canada, once again – by Conrad Black (National Post – Apr 7, 2012)

April 10, 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper

One of the points I was trying to make in last week’s column, in general support of Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to make both official languages present in all parts of the country, was that in any federal state, some concessions to particular regional concerns are necessary or the country will fall apart, or even atomize. In a little over a century, this fate has split Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Czechs from the Slovaks and, most painfully, the Sudanese and South Sudanese.

This was what made the Quebec separatist threat so dangerous; though there was never much prospect of heavy violence, there was a danger of the permanent diminution of the country after a prolonged and immobilizing constitutional crisis. Of course, the separatist leaders greatly and treacherously underestimated the complexities and problems of any such step, and aggravated the problem with trick referendum questions about seeking authority to negotiate sovereignty and association with Canada: Simultaneously to eat and retain the same rich cake.

My fear in those days was that the federal Progressive Conservative leaders, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark, were men of such goodwill, but such limited familiarity with the devious Quebec nationalists and with the French language, that they could not win the federalist argument in Quebec. Trudeau thus emerged as the temporarily indispensable horse for that race.

All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black – by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Globe and Mail – April 7, 2012)

April 10, 2012

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 Homer-Dixon is director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont.

Ontario, we’re told, is Canada’s new rust belt. The high dollar is pummelling the province’s exports. Big manufacturers are fleeing. The Liberal government is slashing spending to maintain the province’s credit rating. And to top it off, it’s wasting money promoting green energy. There’s just one problem with this pop wisdom: It’s largely nonsense.

Ontario certainly faces huge challenges. Its main trading partner – the United States – is only now emerging from the economic doldrums that followed the 2008-09 financial crisis. And since that crisis, the world economy has been struggling with depressed consumer demand, wary investors and aggressive deleveraging by households, businesses and governments.

Ontario wasn’t ready for this new reality. From the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, a weak loonie made Ontario’s products artificially competitive outside Canada, so companies deferred investment in new factories and technologies.

Home And Native Land – by Cooper Langford (Financial Post Magazine – April 2012)

April 10, 2012

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

In many respects, the city of Kitimat is an iconic Canadian community. Situated in a wide, flat valley at the head of the Douglas Channel in northwestern B.C., it has, for the past 60 years, been home to one of the world’s great hydroelectric and aluminum smelting projects. A technological marvel when it was built by the Aluminum Company of Canada during the industrial boom that followed the Second World War, the project brought the modern world to a resource-rich wilderness and became the foundation of a prosperous frontier city.

More recent history, however, has been less kind to the Kitimat region. Technological advances mean the smelter, now owned by global mining giant Rio Tinto, no longer employs as many people as it once did. The businesses — methane, ammonia and paper — that followed it into the deep reaches of the province are no more. Kitimat is a community looking to re-stake its claim on the future. And there is a new prospect on the horizon: Calgary-based Enbridge has identified the community as the terminus for its proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project to ship bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to the Pacific coast and, potentially, new markets in Asia.

Northern Gateway — if it goes ahead — will be a groundbreaking project in its own right, a 21st century statement of Canada’s role as a global energy supplier. But getting to that point is far from certain. Whatever technological and business innovation it may represent, the pipeline has become the centre of an iconic debate.

Fidel Castro attacks Stephen Harper over environmental damage from oilsands [and Canadian mining] – by Oakland Ross (Toronto Star – April 10, 2012)

April 10, 2012

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.

Canada may be Cuba’s leading source of tourists, an important economic partner, and one of just two countries in the region never to have broken off diplomatic ties with the island — the other is Mexico — but Fidel Castro says he doesn’t even know Stephen Harper’s name.

In a column that appeared Monday in Granma, official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, the island’s former ruler says he believes the Prime Minister goes by the name Stephen Harper — but it’s hard to be sure. In other words, Stephen Who?

Devoting his 1,100-word column almost entirely to Canada and its alleged shortcomings, Castro, 85, finds much to criticize and lament about this “beautiful and extensive country.” Are we a colony, a republic, or a kingdom? According to the man with the famous beard, we apparently don’t know ourselves — and neither does he.

Worst of all, however, is the human and environmental damage that Castro says is being inflicted upon many Latin American countries by rapacious Canadian mining companies.

Stephen Harper’s Illusions [including Castro’s thoughts about Canadian oilsands and miners] – by Fidel Castro (Cuban News Agency – April 8, 2012)

April 10, 2012

http://www.cubanews.ain.cu/principalingles.htm

I think –and I do not intend to offend anyone- that this is how the Prime Minister of Canada is called. I deduced it from a statement published on “Holy Wednesday” by a spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry of that country. The United Nations Organization membership is made up by almost 200 States –allegedly independent States. They continuously change or are forced into change. Many of their representatives are honorable persons, friends of Cuba; but it is impossible to remember the specifics about each
and every one of them.

During the second half of the twentieth century, I had the privilege of living through years of intensive erudition and I realized that Canadians, located in the northernmost region of this hemisphere, were always respectful towards our country. They invested in areas of their interest and traded with Cuba, but they did not interfere in the internal affairs of our State.

The revolutionary process that began on January 1st, 1959, did not introduce any measure that affected their interests, which were taken into account by the Revolution in maintaining normal and constructive relations with the authorities of that country where a significant effort was being made in the interest of its own development. Thus, they were not accomplices of the economic blockade, the war and the mercenary invasion that the United States launched against Cuba.

Fidel Castro blasts Harper over oilsands environmental impact [and Canadian miners] – by Mike Blanchfield (iPolitics.ca – April 9, 2012)

April 10, 2012

www.ipolitics.ca

Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro is criticizing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government for environmental damage caused by the extraction of crude from the Alberta oilsands.

The father of Cuba’s communist revolution of more than half a century ago offered the observation in a characteristically rambling new essay on the state of hemispheric affairs that was published over the weekend.

The ailing octogenarian handed the Cuban presidency to his brother, Raul, four years ago, but still periodically offers up his musings on the world in postings on his government’s website. “Stephen Harper’s Illusions” is his latest instalment.

In it, Castro claims that the United States — a country he loathes because of its economically crippling embargo — is forcing Canada to extract oil, which is causing irreparable damage to the environment.