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.

CALGARY— For Alberta’s energy industry, Enbridge Inc.’s (ENB-T38.520.060.16%) plan to build a pair of major pipelines through the heart of North America promises to help break an export logjam that has severely discounted the value of crude surging from the oil sands.

At a cost of $3.8-billion, the Enbridge new pipes won’t be cheap. But for Canadian oil producers, that amount pales in comparison with what they are losing – by one estimate, $18-billion a year – as an export bottleneck weighs on prices for Canadian oil.

A shortage of capacity for moving oil out of the oil sands has stirred a broad rush to build new pipelines to all points of the continent – Kitimat, B.C., Quebec City, Houston.

The battle to build new pipes comes as energy companies seek to gain back some ground, after more than a year of “taking the short end of the stick … simply because we can’t move product,” said Lowell Jackson, chief executive officer of WestFire Energy Ltd. and chairman of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

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

What has the NDP wrought with the election of Thomas Mulcair as the party’s new leader? There was likely great wailing and gnashing of teeth among Bloquistes on his elevation, so we can assume that this is good news for the re-election of federalists in Quebec.
 
But what of the rest of the country? An article Mr. Mulcair wrote for Policy Option magazine, entitled Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Country, suggests that the new NDP leader is an irresistible force about to crash into the immovable object of Western public opinion. And there will be blood.
 
In his inaugural press conference as leader on Sunday, Mr. Mulcair softened his language — referring to the “oil sands,” rather than the pejorative “tar sands” that has been his normal shorthand. But did not back away from his commitment to “internalize” environmental costs to help cure the “Dutch disease” that has, in his view, driven up the value of the Canadian dollar and destabilized the balanced economy of East and West.

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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.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls the Honda Civic GX the world’s cleanest internal combustion vehicle. How clean? By EPA analysis, it reduces nitrogen oxide emissions by 35 per cent, hydrocarbon emissions by 50 per cent and particulate matter emissions by 95 per cent. For all practical purposes, it’s a zero-emissions car.

Yet, the Honda GX is neither manufactured nor sold in Canada. It’s made and sold only in the United States – where it exceeds the stringent pure-air standards of the famously tough California Air Resources Board and qualifies for carpool lanes that are open only to the cleanest of vehicles.

The Honda GX runs on compressed natural gas, the only alternative fuel so cheap that it doesn’t need government subsidies. Now sold in 197 dealerships in 36 states, it’s an assembly-line family car, the first mass-produced CNG vehicle. It lists at $26,000 (U.S.) and gets good mileage: 30 miles per (U.S.) gallon in city driving, 42 miles per gallon in highway driving.

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

Cynical as it may appear (and undoubtedly is), you can see why President Barack Obama’s decision to embrace the southern leg of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline project – suddenly announcing on Thursday that he would fast-track approvals – sounded like a great idea within the White House.

You can also understand why his environmental “supporters” are spitting bullets. (I put “supporters” in quotes because environmentalists, like unions, only support you as long as you do exactly what they want.) And why they’re being joined by their arch-rivals in Big Oil.

In a way, it’s a great bit of politics. You have to admire the architecture, even if you don’t like the result (which almost no one appears to). It gives Mr. Obama a comeback for accusations hurled at him from all the various camps. And it traps the critics in their own positions.

The background goes like this: TransCanada Corp. wants to build a pipeline from the oil sands in Alberta that will carry crude to the Gulf Coast.

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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— TransCanada Corp. is proposing a major shift in the way oil moves across Canada, urging the oil patch to consider a massive $5.6-billion new pipeline system that would carry large volumes of western crude to refineries in Ontario, Quebec and beyond.

The East Coast Pipeline Project, as TransCanada has dubbed it in presentations to energy companies, could do more than supply the east with fuels made from oil sands crude. It could serve as an alternative to Northern Gateway, the controversial West Coast export pipeline project from TransCanada competitor Enbridge Inc. that has faced a wall of opposition from first nations and environmental groups.

The TransCanada proposal would send 625,000 barrels a day across the country to Montreal, Quebec City and potentially Saint John, N.B., where Irving Oil Ltd. runs a large refinery. Tanker exports could then also take the crude to Europe or Asia.

The proposal is conceptual, and the company has not disclosed public details about a project that may never be built.

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http://www2.macleans.ca/

Suddenly Western money and influence are driving everything that happens in the nation’s capital

In July 2006 Stephen Harper had been Prime Minister for half a year and it was time to deliver his first speech to a foreign business audience. He picked a friendly crowd, the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in London. He told them British investors were taking notice of “Canada’s emergence as a global energy powerhouse—the emerging ‘energy superpower’ our government intends to build.”
 
Canada, he said, was the world’s fifth-largest energy producer, ranking third in gas production and seventh in oil production. Canada was the world’s largest supplier of hydroelectric power and uranium. “But that’s just the beginning.”
 
There was “an ocean of oil-soaked sand” in northern Alberta, more than in any country except Saudi Arabia. Getting it out would be “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.”

Fast forward to late last year. The future Harper described in London had become a reality. The oil sands were producing so much oil that the biggest challenge was simply to get the stuff to market.

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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.

Nouriel Roubini is chairman of Roubini Global Economics, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and co-author of the book Crisis Economics.

Today’s fragile global economy faces many risks: the risk of another flare-up of the eurozone crisis; the risk of a worse-than-expected slowdown in China; and the risk that economic recovery in the United States will fizzle. But no risk is more serious than that posed by a further spike in oil prices.
 
The price of a barrel of Brent crude, which was well below $100 in 2011, recently peaked at $125 (U.S.). Gasoline prices in the U.S. are approaching $4 a gallon, a damaging threshold for consumer confidence, and will increase further during the high-demand summer season.
 
The reason is fear. Not only are oil supplies plentiful, but demand in the U.S. and Europe has been lower, owing to decreasing car use in the last few years and weak or negative GDP growth in the U.S. and the eurozone.

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

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.
 
President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling
 
— off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants),
 
— off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there),
 
— in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30% below pre-moratorium forecasts),
 
— in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles Airport),

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

CALGARY • It’s been almost a decade since scores of highly skilled Venezuelan oil workers like Petro Pereira, fired and blackballed by dictator Hugo Chavez for protesting his tightening grip on the national oil company, made their way north to Alberta.
 
Today, word that an aggressive cancer may soon put an end to his dictatorship and potentially reactivate Venezuela’s once-mighty oil industry has many reassessing the future.
 
Mr. Pereira, a world expert on heavy oil who is now a scholar at the University of Calgary, is so engrossed in research to improve oil sands upgrading he plans to stay put.
 
But the state of Mr. Chavez’s health is a hot topic in the colony of expats, and many are talking about returning if there is regime change in the South American country, he said.

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

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.

I’m lucky to be going to Fort McMurray, Alta. this weekend with colleagues from CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. I have a great wish to see what the green Jeremiahs deem to be the greatest blot on the visage of Mother Gaia, and to meet some of the soulless folk who work there. After all, environmentalists might ask: Who would take a job on a site that threatens the destiny of the planet, except people whose souls have been bought off with oil-company lucre?
 
Outside Fort McMurray, it is impossible to escape the furor over the Alberta oilsands. Its product is routinely described, lazily and slanderously, as the dirtiest on the planet. The Premier of Ontario, a province that owes much of its prosperity to its huge automobile industry shivers when he looks at Alberta, mutters about the dark forces of the “petro-dollar,” and implied (until he was scolded and half-recanted) that somehow Ontario’s fretful financial state is Alberta’s fault.
 
It’s almost a fantasy disconnect. Dalton Mcguinty can throw billions at General Motors and urge the feds to do the same, all to save the automobile industry. He ignores that four decades or more of Ontario’s prosperity wasn’t founded on windmills: It was based on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.

Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”

 That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.

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

I’ll admit to sharing some British Columbians’ concerns about shipping oil from Alberta’s oilsands to Asia using tankers leaving from a port on that province’s north-central coast. The Pacific coast is a special place, with salmon, eagles and grizzlies. Befouling it with crude oil from a tanker spill would be a horrible ecological tragedy.
 
Still, it should be possible to build a port at Kitimat and run tankers in and out of the Douglas Channel without incident. The key is not merely devising the right rules for tanker operation, but also maintaining vigilant enforcement for as long as ships filled with oil navigate through the sensitive waterway.
 
The problem with the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding was not that Alaska had too few safety regulations at the time, but rather that the company had become lax in following them and government enforcers had stopped monitoring company compliance.

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

While Canadians seem more concerned than ever about the costs and risks of pipelines, the Far North is feeling the pain of not having one.
 
With the Mackenzie Gas Project on ice because of low natural-gas prices, the Northwest Territories is searching for other ways to fuel its economy, while dealing with the human toll resulting from lack of opportunity.
 
As N.W.T. leaders met in Calgary this week to take stock of Arctic oil and gas activity, or more precisely the lack of it, they had this advice for Northern B.C. communities trying to kill the proposed Northern Gateway project: Be careful what you wish for.
 
For decades, the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline from Inuvik to Alberta faced many of the hurdles that are troubling the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline today: unsettled aboriginal land claims, worries that development would alter traditional ways of life, warnings about the environmental impacts, concerns that the pipeline’s fuel would be used to support the growth of Alberta’s oil sands.

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

COSIA is the latest oil sands initiative to enter a now-crowded field 

Last week, 12 leading oil sands producers came out of the gate at a big ceremony in Calgary, apologizin’ hard. The Dirty Dozen (as they want, under no circumstances, to be known) were announcing the formation of yet another environmental initiative, the Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, COSIA. Steve Williams, president and CEO-designate of oil sands pioneer Suncor, expressed a “genuine desire to do better.” Than what? Sure, the oil sands are big, but where are objective measures of their impact? Indeed, are objective measures even possible? Everybody knows that a flock of ducks died four years ago at Syncrude due to failure of a warning system, but more birds are mangled by wind farms every few minutes.
 
Nobody denies that the oil sands have potential problems with pollution and tailings ponds, but the new organization, which is headed by Dan Wicklum, a well-regarded former CFL linebacker, aquatic ecologist, and Environment Canada bureaucrat, will also look at greenhouse gas emissions. According to Mr. Wicklum, ­“COSIA is a science organization, run by scientists for scientists.” So will COSIA address the science of climate change? Not on your life.

Mr. Wicklum was also quoted as saying “We don’t see COSIA playing a role in a flashy media campaign, we want to stick to our knitting, which is accelerate the pace of improvement around environmental performance.”

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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.

OTTAWA— Ottawa is headed for a legal showdown with British Columbia first nations if it insists on proceeding with the Northern Gateway pipeline, the leader of the Yinka Dene Alliance warns.

Chief Jackie Thomas, of the Saik’uz First Nation, was part of a delegation in Ottawa Tuesday meeting with opposition members of Parliament to build support for their anti-pipeline stand. She said her group will pursue a legal challenge if Ottawa approves the pipeline over their objections.

Along with other first-nation communities, the Dene alliance has taken a firm stand against Enbridge Inc.’s plan to build a crude oil pipeline across their land to transport oil-sands bitumen to the B.C. coast for export to Asia.

“We will defend our rights, no matter what bully tactics the federal government throws at us,” she said. “Our decision has been made: Enbridge will never be allowed in our lands.”

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