President-elect Donald Trump nominated Chris Wright, who runs a Colorado-based oil and natural gas fracking services company, to lead the Energy Department.
Wright, the chief executive officer of Liberty Energy Inc., has no previous Washington experience. He’s made a name for himself as a vocal proponent of oil and gas, saying fossil fuels are crucial for spreading prosperity and lifting people from poverty. The threat of global warming, he has said, is exaggerated.
Trump is placing energy as a priority. This will automatically increase the size and importance of Western Canada’s oilpatch
Donald Trump’s landslide victory has shaken Canadians and rattled the loonie, but on balance will be beneficial for the country, notably its natural resource sectors.
Trump has promised to impose tariffs on trading partners, but Canada’s biggest exports will spared for two reasons. First, the countries’ resource sectors are integrated as a result of cross-ownership and mutual supply chains that have been built over decades. So are their automotive industries. These binational oil and auto partnerships are the cornerstone of both economies.
Is there a natural resource project being built somewhere in Canada? Does it overlap with the title land, reserve lands, or other jurisdictions of a First Nation? If so, expect green NGOs to turn it into another dramatic episode so they can keep fundraising.
It has been 53 years since the infamous “Crying Indian” ad was released, but it still provides the template for how environmentalist NGOs co-opt and intrude into Indigenous affairs. Made by an American NGO called Keep America Beautiful, the ad showed a tear running down the face of a Native American, dressed like he was plucked from the set of a John Wayne movie.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House will refocus the nation’s energy policy onto maximizing oil and gas production and away from fighting climate change, but the Republican win in Tuesday’s presidential elections is unlikely to dramatically slow the U.S. renewable energy boom.
That is because a Biden-era law providing a decade of lucrative subsidies for new solar, wind and other clean energy projects would be near-impossible to repeal, thanks to support from Republican states, while other levers available to the next president would only have marginal impact, analysts say.
The existing plan he’s undermining would cut emissions by seven times what the environment minister is proposing
Steven Guilbeault has made clear that he plans to go out with bang, championing a record unsullied by compromise, pragmatism or achievement. The activist environment minister released the draft regulations for a cap on oil and gas emissions on Monday, under the cover of blanket U.S. election reporting.
The minister’s rationale is that regulation is needed because profits in the sector have soared. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Guilbeault has a “deranged vendetta against Alberta” and promised to fight the cap in court.
CALGARY — Investments in oil and gas production are important and must continue in tandem with increased investment in renewable and clean technologies, the deputy head of the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. Mary Burce Warlick made the comments in Calgary, the corporate heart of Canada’s oil and gas sector, just a week after the Paris-based IEA released its most recent forecast for global energy demand.
The IEA said in that forecast that demand for all three fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — is set to peak by the end of this decade. It also predicted a potential oversupply of both oil and liquefied natural gas in the second half of the 2020s.
The LNG revolution will be a boon for the province and its First Nations
Outside of small pleasures and personal adventures, life in British Columbia has offered little that can be celebrated as of late. For proponents of Canadian energy, however, B.C.’s transformation into a major player in oil and gas has been a triumph.
No, vast quantities of fossil fuels are not being extracted from the ground like in Alberta, but the westernmost province has become the great bridge that connects Alberta’s oil and gas to global markets. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities are springing up along B.C.’s coastline, driving technological innovation and unprecedented reconciliation with First Nations.
Almost three-quarters of Canadians consider oil and gas to be important to the country’s economy today
Despite a polarized energy debate and a torrent of criticism toward the oil and gas sector, Canadians’ opinion about the industry’s importance isn’t eroding like a sandcastle facing shifting tides. In fact, it’s growing stronger.
During a keynote address to open the Global Energy Show in Calgary on Tuesday, well-known pollster Nik Nanos says the data is clear: more Canadians are supporting the industry, as “meat and potato” issues such as affordability, jobs and inflation hit home.
The economic benefits from building facilities and exporting gas at a premium price are substantial and it helps to reduce coal use in Asia
After years of planning and construction, the first major liquified natural gas (LNG) project in British Columbia — LNG Canada’s export terminal in Kitimat — is about to be completed. The $18-billion investment is supplied by a pipeline from northeastern B.C.
The terminal’s imminent completion is already stoking interest in other LNG projects, including the Cedar LNG project also at Kitimat (a joint venture of the Haisla Nation and Pembina Pipeline Corp.), the Woodfibre LNG terminal near Squamish, Ksi Lisims LNG on Pearse Island, a floating export facility, as well as a possible Phase 2 of the LNG Canada project.
(Bloomberg) — Russia’s fortress economy has proved remarkably resilient to an onslaught of Western sanctions. Two years after the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, it continues to fund a costly war and to prop up President Vladimir Putin. But there’s at least one spot where the pain is very real.
The Novatek PJSC-led Arctic LNG 2 facility, on the icy Kara Sea, is a key part of Moscow’s plans to boost exports and replenish coffers. For months now, it has been ready to ship liquefied natural gas to new markets, alternatives to the once-lucrative European pipeline trade.
It is the kind of project that Canada no longer seems to be able to build
The completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) was not commemorated by an iconic photograph, such as the one taken one a wet November morning in 1885 in the mountains of British Columbia. What Pierre Berton, in his epic story of the building of the country’s first transcontinental railway, billed as The Great Canadian Photograph has a sense of occasion, as a white bearded old gentleman, Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) director Donald Smith, hammers home an iron railroad spike: The Last Spike.
“Canada had accomplished the impossible — a job done with a remarkable blend of financial acumen, stubborn perseverance, political lobbying, brilliant organization, reckless gambling, plain good fortune and the toil of a legion of ordinary working men … the unknown soldiers of (CPR general manager William) Van Horne’s army,” Berton wrote.
If this pipeline is so great for the economy, wouldn’t having more pipelines be even better?
After more than a decade of jurisdictional squabbling, political grandstanding, activist obstructionism, legal wrangling and bureaucratic delays, the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion gained final approval earlier this week and began shipping oil on Wednesday.
Despite coming in years behind schedule and nearly $27 billion over budget, the pipeline is being hailed by some Liberals as a triumph of Big Government, with the “golden” or “final” weld on April 11 drawing parallels to the Last Spike driven into John A. Macdonald’s Canadian Pacific Railway on Nov. 7, 1885.
Stepping up liquefied natural gas exports would help Asia lower emissions by getting off coal and boost Canada’s economy at the same time
Pierre Poilievre‘s Axe the (carbon) Tax campaign is a spectacular success. But the Conservative party needs its own plan to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Paradoxically, it’s a fossil fuel that provides the answer. Canada’s rich endowment of natural gas offers us the chance to both reduce global emissions and also rescue a Canadian economy ravaged by the Liberal government.
How? By exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, Japan, South Korea and the other coal-dependent Asia Pacific countries. Switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 emissions by 50 per cent while also eliminating the toxic compounds and lung-clogging particulates that shorten the lives of millions living in smog-stricken Asian cities.
There has never been a more urgent time to aggressively develop Canada’s massive resource wealth. An increasingly competitive world is organizing into new alliances that are threatening our traditional Western democracies.
Weaker or underperforming countries may be left behind economically and, in some cases, their sovereignty may be compromised. We cannot let either scenario happen to Canada. Looking inward, our country has posted among the weakest economic growth of all G20 nations over the past decade — we are at real risk of delivering a materially diminished standard of living to our children and subsequent future generations.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
The federal government has launched its long-awaited Indigenous loan guarantee program, a move advocates say will help Canadian critical minerals infrastructure get built more quickly, and facilitate increased direct First Nations ownership in resource projects.
Ottawa’s budget released Tuesday outlines a program that would provide up to $5-billion in loan guarantees and be “sector agnostic” – meaning that oil and gas projects could be eligible. In the months leading up to the budget, advocacy groups including the First Nations Major Projects Coalition had worried a federal loan program might rule out oil and gas projects because they don’t line up with Ottawa’s plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
