Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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

The energy-short ­democracies will become top producers

The energy-short democracies — the United States, most European Union nations, Japan and Israel — are today mostly on the defensive, while energy-rich countries run by strong men — Russia, various Middle Eastern states, and Venezuela — are flexing their muscles.

Within a decade, this energy order could flip. Many of the Western democracies are likely to become major oil and gas producers, helping to glut the world and collapse energy prices. And today’s energy-rich countries, most having undiversified economies, will then lose the lion’s share of their revenues and become neutered politically.

The game-changer is “unconventional fossil fuels,” much of it trapped in shale — rock that often contains oil or gas. In the case of gas, the U.S. is developing so much, so fast in so many places that the domestic price for natural gas has more than halved.

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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.

Canada hardly rates a mention in Daniel Yergin’s new book

When a “global energy superpower” starts delivering tough talk to its potential customers, that superpower had better be sure that people will listen. It has also better be sure it is in fact a superpower; otherwise, it may find itself talking tough to the wind.

In recent weeks, Canada — a self-proclaimed global energy superpower — has been trying to throw its weight around over the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion project to ship oil sands production from Alberta to Texas. In Houston on Tuesday, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver let the Americans know that Canada had other options. “What will happen if there wasn’t approval [of Keystone] — and we think there will be — is that we’ll simply have to intensify our efforts to sell the oil elsewhere.”

Canadian oil executives, who have a lot invested in the superpower notion, are also issuing aggressive-sounding statements aimed at the United States. A headline in The Globe and Mail Friday sounded like a threat: “Oil patch to U.S.: OK pipe or lose our oil.” The story didn’t quite back up the headline, but the sense was that Canada was developing alternatives and that China is the big alternative.

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

Susan McArthur is a senior investment banker at Jacob Securities Inc.

$100-billion ­investment needed over 20 years

The continuing controversy in the U.S. surrounding TransCanada’s proposed Keystone pipeline may just be the best thing that ever happened to Canada. Perhaps it will force us to finally just say no to being hewers of wood and drawers of water. While Keystone’s success is important, it’s time Canada comes of age and starts to transform more of its resources into value-added products at home.

When it comes to our oil resources, this is no small undertaking. The price tag to build the infrastructure and refining complex scaled for our vast oil reserves could be as much as $100-billion and could take 20 years.

We have the resources, the natural proximity to ports, rail infrastructure and voracious customers south of the border and within 36 hours of our export terminals. All it takes is vision, capital, know-how, tenacity and chutzpah. And a big bold plan.

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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

OTTAWA—A last stand or a lost cause. Nebraska residents and their politicians are mounting an 11th hour stand against the Keystone XL pipeline, offended by the proposal to build it straight through a sensitive aquifer.

Racing against the clock, the state legislature will debate a motion in a bid to give Nebraska lawmakers the power to control the routing of the controversial pipeline. Its supporters are hoping to get it passed before the U.S. State Department issues its own ruling — promised by year’s end — whether the pipeline can be built.

“We feel that if we have a . . . law in place before the presidential permit is granted across the Canadian-U.S. border we’re on sound constitutional ground,” Nebraska state Senator Ken Haar said in an interview.

“We’ve been late getting this done but we still need to get it done.”

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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, CALGARY – Canada’s oil sands companies are warning that a U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline would slam the door on their plans to expand exports into the lucrative American market.

In a measure of the substantial national and corporate interest riding on the controversial TransCanada Corp. project, both supporters and opponents are attempting to raise the stakes on a Washington approval verdict that had been expected by year-end, although it may now be delayed.

For industry, that has translated into increasingly dire warnings over the consequences of a decision on the $7-billion project to be made by U.S. President Barack Obama, who earlier this week said he will personally weigh in.

This week, some of the highest-ranking executives in the Canadian oil patch publicly detailed potential alternatives to Keystone XL amid a sharpening rhetoric that included a blunt caution: For some, an unfavourable decision will effectively close off the U.S. to future crude export growth, shutting down an option that has long underpinned Canada’s oil sands expansion plans.

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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— As Nebraska considers the first attempt to divert the Keystone XL project, TransCanada Corp.is cautioning that any change to the pipeline’s route stands to delay its construction by as much as three years.

It’s the sternest warning yet from TransCanada, which has spent 38 months battling through a lengthy environmental review process on Keystone XL. The $7-billion pipeline would carry crude from the oil sands and northern United States to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and is a major plank in industry plans for expanding Canadian oil output. TransCanada has spent $1.9-billion to secure land and equipment for the project. It has readied itself to begin construction in the new year, in the belief that the State Department will grant its blessing in December.

But Nebraska, where the pipe would cross a delicate ecosystem called the Sand Hills, is contemplating new rules that could dramatically unsettle TransCanada’s plans.

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

The signs are there: the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline has festered into an uncomfortable election issue for the U.S. president, Barack Obama. The upshot for Canada: a decision on whether to grant a Presidential permit, promised by year end, could once again be delayed.

The reality is that anything short of a go-ahead in December for Keystone XL would plunge the oil sands sector into disarray until new solutions move forward. The worst-case scenario? Stranded oil sands — for years.

Keystone XL, with a capacity to carry up to 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to Texas, was due for startup in early 2013. There is no backup on the same scale or timeline.

“Everybody in the industry is thinking about this,” said Bob Dunbar, president of Strategy West Inc., an oil sands consultancy based in Calgary.

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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— TransCanada Corp. faces new hurdles in its marathon race for approval of the $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline, including a congressional demand for an investigation into the U.S. state department’s permitting process.

The Calgary-based pipeline giant is hoping to get the final nod from the Obama administration by the end of next month, but opponents continue to throw up obstacles both in Washington and in Nebraska, where the pipeline would cross environmentally sensitive terrain.

In a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama released Wednesday, Senator Bernard Sanders urged that no decision on the pipeline be made until an independent investigation into conflict of interest allegations can be completed by the state department’s Office of the Inspector General.

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

Will Canada walk away from a $14-trillion resource? That’s the question John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, is asking environmentalists who believe that blocking the Keystone pipeline would somehow cap Canada’s oil sands development.

“There is this argument that if somehow we can stop the pipelines coming to the U.S., we are going to stop oil sands development in Canada,” says Felmy, who works at the Washington-based trade association of American oil and natural gas producers.

“What are the oil sands worth? $14 trillion — at around $80 a barrel. Canada’s GDP is about $1.4 trillion – the notion that they wouldn’t develop a resource that is ten times their GDP! In all likelihood it is is going to be developed,” says Felmy, noting that if the oil sands don’t come to the U.S. they will generate even higher emissions as they will need to be shipped, probably to China, where they may be processed less efficiently.

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

In meetings with oil and gas executives and the media in Calgary last week, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark spoke about how energy development in her province fits well with her family-focused agenda.

Family agenda? The typical oil pitch – whether from a politician or an industry executive – tends to boast about the benefits to Canada of being an energy superpower, expands on the efforts to shrink the environmental footprint, warns about the need to diversify markets. It is loaded with jargon such as “environmental stewardship,” “supply mix” and “portfolio of opportunities.”

“Families are the most important structure in any healthy society” is the way the B.C. Premier chose to explain why she wants more energy projects in her province. “I recognize that for families to be able to do a good job, they need to have a job. All the wealth-creators I met here in Alberta are interested in creating wealth, but are also interested in creating jobs. When jobs are created, when economic activity is enabled, it’s good for families.”

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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— When Jennifer Keesmaat began thinking about how to transform the boomtown heart of the oil sands into a thriving centre, she grew slightly despondent.

“When we started in Fort McMurray, the very first thing we said is, ‘This is the twilight zone. No rules that apply anywhere else apply here,’ ” said Ms. Keesmaat, an urban planner with Toronto-based Dialog, which has been hired to help fix the city. But she returned from an initial visit to the area this spring questioning how to do it.

“I came back and held my head in my hands and thought, ‘Oh my, finally I’ve met my match. This nut is too big to crack.’ ”

But as Fort McMurray faces a future of explosive growth, it is nonetheless trying to do exactly that. It has employed a network of consultants, and petitioned its own people, in an attempt to figure out how to remake a modern-day hinterland gold rush town into an entertaining, vibrant city.

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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.

Nebraska’s governor has ordered a special session of the state legislature to examine potential new oil pipeline rules, a reversal of course that opens the possibility of substantial delays to the controversial Keystone XL project.

Republican Governor Dave Heineman made a surprise announcement on Monday, calling the Nov. 1 sitting, which he said in a statement will “determine if siting legislation can be crafted and passed for pipeline routing in Nebraska.”

Such a rule would give the state the power to approve or deny the pipeline’s intended path. Draft siting legislation has been underway for many months, but needed a special legislative session to be enacted before construction begins on the pipeline.

There are questions about whether such a rule can withstand legal scrutiny. If passed, it will present the most formidable obstacle to the Keystone XL project to date. It could take several years for Keystone backer TransCanada Corp. (TRP-T43.65-0.30-0.68%) to gain approval for an amendment of the current route.

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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.

OTTAWA—The camera pans across bucolic images of the U.S. Great Plains — a rancher astride a horse as cattle graze in the background, grasslands, wheat fields, scenic landscapes.

“The bread basket of America. But today these lands are threatened by big oil and its plan to run a pipeline straight through this American heartland,” says the narrator. But not just any narrator.

The voice belongs to actor and director Robert Redford, who used a three-minute video this week to implore U.S. President Barack Obama to deny approval for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline, proposed by Canadian energy giant TransCanada Corp., would run 3,134 kilometres, from Alberta across six states, carrying half a million barrels of oilsands crude a day to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas.

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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.

OTTAWA – The Conservative government — along with TransCanada Pipelines and the Alberta oil sands — are at risk of being dragged somewhere they don’t want to be.

The politics surrounding the giant Keystone XL pipeline means Stephen Harper and his cabinet have become major players in an issue that is becoming increasingly emotional, an issue that is becoming a political dilemma for U.S. President Barack Obama.

Opponents of the pipeline are determined to make it an issue in the presidential election. Obama has promised a decision by year’s end on the $7 billion, 2,700-kilometre pipeline that would ship Canadian oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, traversing six U.S. states.

The Conservatives didn’t set out to become a player in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. They have been doing what governments are supposed to do.

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