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.

You might think that humans have built enough oil and gas pipelines by now to get it right. And, fact is, they have. Oil and gas provide 60 per cent of the world’s primary fuel: a million tonnes of oil every hour, a quarter of a trillion cubic metres of gas every hour.

Almost all of it moves, at one time or other, in pipelines – the safest way, by far, to move it. And this is not inherently surprising. Pipelines are usually buried a metre underground. We’re not talking deep-sea drilling here.

But Canadian-made and Canadian-managed pipelines are in a class by themselves, either the safest in the world or indistinguishable from it. Canadian pipeline companies operate 100,000 kilometres of pipeline. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association puts the average annual loss of liquid fuels from these pipelines at two litres for every million litres moved. The safety performance of these companies, in other words, can be expressed as 99.999 per cent.

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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.

During four decades of environmental advocacy, actor and filmmaker Robert Redford has received numerous honours, including the United Nations Global 500 award.

Vancouver — Working in Vancouver for the past several months has allowed me to spend fall in one of the most spectacular cities in the world, amid the natural splendour and wilderness wonder of British Columbia.

It’s been a reminder to me of the close partnership Canadians and Americans have forged as neighbours, bound by geography, history and culture reaching back to our national beginnings. Over the generations, these bonds of common experience and identity have combined to create something even more important: the values we share around the need to stand up for the lands we treasure and love.

Today, together, we need to stand up once more, because the lands we treasure and love are imperilled by a threat we must meet as one.

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

TORONTO — Alberta Premier Alison Redford has a plan to move us beyond all the acrimony over Alberta’s oil sands and the pipelines that transport the black, carbon-intensive gold they contain. She calls it a “national energy strategy.” That’s strategy, not program, before you crack wise — and she’s going to grab this bull by the horns, not Ottawa.

“I see this as one big country with an awful lot of Canadians who have an interest in what our economic future will be,” Ms. Redford told reporters in Toronto on Wednesday.

Her big idea, outlined at a lunchtime address at the Royal York Hotel sponsored by the Economic Club of Canada, is that in a fact-based regulatory process, oil sands skeptics in the government and NGO communities will abandon their prejudices. They will agree to measurable targets for greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental goals, with results published independently and proactively. This calmer attitude would spread to Toronto, Ottawa, Nebraska, the White House and beyond.

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

With the proposed Keystone XL pipeline beached for 18 months thanks to environmental lobby opposition, pipeline companies are switching to a step-by-step strategy to push growing Canadian oil production down to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

It’s a tough chess game next to the door-to-door, Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL solution, but it could mean greater success and derail the greens’ goal to shut down the oil sands.

On Wednesday, Calgary-based Enbridge Inc., rival of Keystone XL proponent TransCanada Corp., announced the purchase of ConocoPhillip’s 50% interest in the Seaway pipeline for US$1.15 billion. Enbridge and its partner, Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners LP, owner of Seaway’s remaining 50%, plan to reverse the flow of the pipeline that currently moves oil from Freeport, Tex., to the Cushing, Okla., oil storage hub, where a glut has depressed Midwest oil prices below world prices.

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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

Choosing an alternative route for the Keystone XL pipeline will cost TransCanada Corp. time, money, and could send it through other environmentally sensitive areas, industry analysts say.

But it’s also the best chance that the Calgary-based company has to move forward on the massive $7-billion project. With a new route, some previous critics have melted away.

Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman, who had been an opponent, said he has asked the Obama administration to move quickly to push the project forward.

“Our most important objective all along was to move the route. So if we can expedite the supplemental environmental impact assessment and get moving on the construction of the pipeline, we’re all for that,” he said in a press conference in Nebraska Tuesday.

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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 year ago, with an election in the offing, Stephen Harper’s government nixed BHP Billiton’s bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan. Public opinion had turned against the Australian giant’s offer in the wake of Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s objections. The Harperites, reading the political mood and fearful of losing seats, swallowed their free-enterprise ideology and blocked the takeover.

So it’s a bit rich to listen to certain voices in the Harper government and among the chorus of lobbyists for the $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline decrying the Obama administration’s 11th-hour decision to further study the route through Nebraska. All politics, they claim, and thus all bad.

Of course, the delay was about Barack Obama’s precarious relationship with part of his party’s base. Environmentalists are disappointed in the President’s timid policies; postponing a decision on Keystone might assuage their disappointment.

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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.

WASHINGTON, OTTAWA AND CALGARY— A compromise between top Nebraska politicians and TransCanada Corp. to reroute the Keystone XL oil pipeline around a critical state aquifer has injected new life into the Canadian-led project and upended President Barack Obama’s plan to bury a political hot potato until after the 2012 election.

TransCanada’s decision to divert the pipeline away from the Sand Hills region, which sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, immediately won the support of Nebraska’s Governor and shattered the anti-Keystone coalition of state politicians and national environmentalists.

With leading Nebraskan legislators now calling on the U.S. State Department to “expedite” its approval of the controversial $7-billion (U.S.) project, the Obama administration faced new pressures from environmentalists to kill the pipeline altogether.

“Our most important objective all along was to move the route.

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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.

Company agrees to shift pipeline from sensitive Nebraska area

OTTAWA, WASHINGTON AND CALGARY – For the oil sands industry, Plan B for Keystone XL looks a lot like Plan A.

After being handed a major setback by the U.S. move to sideline the $7-billion project until at least 2013, TransCanada Corp. appears to have put the project back on the rails with an agreement with key Nebraskan legislators to re-route the line.

Assuming the deal is passed by the full legislature, TransCanada will work with the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to identify a new route to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills area.

“It’s our sincere hope that with this agreement, we’ve put everybody in a place where they can support the new pipeline route,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president for energy and oil pipelines, said in an interview from Lincoln, Neb..

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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.

Now that Barack Obama has kicked the Keystone project down the road, anti-pipeline activists are rejoicing. “This is what it means to change the conversation,” said Naomi Klein. “This is an amazing victory for our movement,” crowed Bill McKibben and his 350.org team.

In fact, the decision to re-review the pipeline route is an amazing victory for political expediency. By ensuring that nothing will happen until after the 2012 election, Mr. Obama buys himself a reprieve with the environmentalists. But nothing else will change.

The U.S. will not consume a litre less of oil if Keystone is never built. It will simply buy the oil from somewhere else. Nor will this decision threaten the long-term future of the oil (oops, tar) sands. If the U.S. doesn’t buy our oil, the Chinese will.

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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

TransCanada Corp. and Nebraska agreed Monday to re-route the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline away from a vast underground water source in the state.

The move is sure to re-ignite the fierce debate over environmental concerns about the 2,700-kilometre pipeline versus the appeal of millions dollars in taxes and thousands of jobs for the stagnant U.S. economy.

The massive pipeline, if built, would deliver 700,000 barrels a day of crude from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in Texas.

The proposed route would have crossed six states, including Nebraska’s ecologically sensitive Sandhills region and the Ogallala aquifer, which provides water for millions in the area.

“If all of this is about the aquifer, that’s an easy thing to fix.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran is the editor and columnist for the Financial Post section of the National Post.

The power to expropriate property to make way for pipelines is weakening

There are a lot of donkeys on whom to pin the blame for the U.S. State Department’s decision to kick TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline into another political time zone, all of them valid.

One could start, possibly, by fingering the million-dollar public relations team that decided to nickname a sensitive oil-carrying and carbon-emissions facilitating project “XL”, as in extra large—implying bigger, wider and therefore more menacing than your average pipeline.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial titled “The Keystone Cop-Out,” also nailed the White House and President Barack Obama as culprits. Here’s a president who wants job creation, favours “shovel ready projects” and less U.S. dependence on oil sources controlled by dangerous foreign potentates.

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

Oil from Canada offers the United States energy security into the indefinite future.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico coast offered the immediate promise of 20,000 American construction jobs and many more jobs in oil refining and distribution.

Yet this week, the Obama administration delayed approval of the Keystone pipeline into 2013 — a delay that may well kill the project altogether, at great financial loss. Why?

One theory credits local opposition in the state of Nebraska, by Nebraskans who worry that a fractured pipeline might spill oil and contaminate the state’s aquifer. Nebraska is one of two states that splits its electoral votes, and in 2008 Nebraska contributed one to Barack Obama’s 365 electoral-vote landslide. Supposedly, Obama is eager to protect that single vote.

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

“Frankly, Canada and Alberta have badly handled the public
relations when it comes to Keystone and remediation could
help the situation because the White House has opted in
favour of its environmental wing at the expense of the
organized labour one.” (Financial Post Columnist – Diane Francis)

President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing until 2013 – after the next U.S. election – permission to build Canada’s Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas.

This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever. It’s being billed as a temporary setback, but it’s a major and devastating development.

The excuse is a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles midAmerica. The reality is the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada’s oil sands, has become the environmental movement’s line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.

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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 end, it came down to a conversation between two of the most powerful people in the world.

Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke with President Barack Obama about a pipeline set to run from Alberta’s oil sands down through the U.S. Midwest to reach refineries on the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Pipelines are usually mundane affairs, but this one was different. A year ago, few had ever heard of Keystone XL. But in the space of just a few months, the quietly planned pipeline erupted into a high-profile international debate about the oil industry, the environment, and the role Canada’s oil sands plays in both.

Actors and activists whipped up support against the project, garnering national attention in the U.S. as they linked hands in a human chain around the White House in protest. Opponents from across the country descended on Nebraska, denouncing the pipeline as a serious risk to an environmentally sensitive area of the state, and winning state political support along the way.

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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 AND CALGARY— In a move that reflects a widening rift with Canada’s largest trading partner, a senior Harper government minister is warning that Washington’s decision to postpone a review of the Keystone XL pipeline could doom the project and speed up Ottawa’s efforts to ship oil to Asia instead.

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty delivered this message from the sidelines of the APEC summit in Honolulu as U.S. foot-dragging over the $7-billion Canadian pipeline’s fate becomes the latest in a string of trade irritants between Canada and the United States.

“The decision to delay it that long is actually quite a crucial decision. I’m not sure this project would survive that kind of delay,” Mr. Flaherty told Bloomberg News.

“It may mean that we may have to move quickly to ensure that we can export our oil to Asia through British Columbia.”

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