Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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

The Falklands’ first commercial oil discovery will make the islands in the South Atlantic rich, bringing the British territory of 2,563 people US$10.5-billion in tax revenue over 25 years.

As the bounty transforms the fishing and tourism-dependent economy, tensions may worsen with Argentina, which claims sovereignty over the islands and their mineral wealth. The Latin American country last year threatened to sue any company involved in Falklands drilling and its foreign minister said yesterday the islanders have no right to self-determination.

The local government is already starting a wealth fund to manage the cash. On the agenda: paving the main highway from the airport to the capital of Stanley, improving the port to take larger ships and reimbursing the 60 million pounds ($90 million) the U.K. spends annually on soldiers, jets and ships to defend the islands, which Argentina attacked in 1982.

“In times of recession, it’s difficult for people in the U.K. to justify spending money on a small population on the other end of the world,” said Andrea Clausen, 41, who owns a transport business and is a member of the Falkland Islands Chamber of Commerce. “But as long as Argentina claims the Falklands in its constitution, the threat won’t go away.”

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

Canadian projects will be under more pressure than most to link to Henry Hub, given the current linkage with the U.S. market

Alarmed by the 13.4% jump in its natural gas import bill last year, Japan is planning a new energy strategy that could change how natural gas is traded around the world and put pressure on some of the proposed Canadian liquefied natural gas projects.

The world’s largest LNG importer, which paid a US$68-billion LNG import bill last year, is offering US$11-billion in loan guarantees to Japanese companies to source liquefied natural gas from the United States.

Tokyo is also eyeing a seat at the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiating table, as U.S. law only allows LNG exports to nations with which it has a trade agreement. Meanwhile, President Abe Shinzo has been pushing President Barack Obama to allow U.S. companies to export gas to his country.

The Japanese Development Bank estimates cheaper imports from the U.S. could shave as much as 20% of the Asian giant’s LNG import costs by 2020. Japan’s focus on U.S. shale sends a signal to LNG exporters that Asian countries are no longer willing to pay a premium on natural gas prices.

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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.

Maybe the best thing for Canada would be President Barack Obama’s ruling against the Keystone XL pipeline border crossing. A turndown would certainly be a bad thing for the Americans, but that’s their business. It might quite help us.

Mr. Obama himself probably doesn’t yet know how he will rule. He knows his environmental base has decided to draw a line in the oil sands, to make this the central action against climate change. The Sierra Club has decided to reverse a long-standing policy against civil disobedience to fight this cause. The New York Times has graciously told Canada to stop. A large portion of the Democratic caucus in Congress is opposed. Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair went to the United States to say that wouldn’t bother him too much.

When the President decides, you can bet domestic politics will weigh very heavily, and the rapidly expanding oil supply inside the U.S. makes our oil less important economically.

If he approves the pipeline, well and good. It would unblock the capacity problem that keeps our prices low, costing Canada as much as $30-billion every year by many estimates, $6-billion to the Alberta treasury alone.

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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.

NEW YORK — Randy Evans is neither an energy lobbyist nor an environmental activist. Like most ordinary Americans, the outcome of the Keystone XL pipeline project doesn’t keep him up at night.

But earlier this month, Mr. Evans, the editorial page editor for the Des Moines Register in Iowa, decided it was time to weigh in on the controversy. In restrained Midwestern fashion, his newspaper came down in favour of the pipeline.

“Stopping the pipeline will not stop oil drilling or consumption,” noted its editorial. “We need to find alternatives to oil rather than trying to cut it off at the source.”

Far from the heated debates of Washington, the middle-of-the-road view of Canada’s marquee oil project leans toward the positive. In local editorial pages across the United States, TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline is receiving broad – though not enthusiastic – support, with a few exceptions.

The Canadian oil sands industry considers the pipeline a critical conduit for moving its product to U.S. refineries, and a way to fetch better 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.

National Resources Minister Joe Oliver courts controversy with blanket claim that Exxon Valdez-type spill could never happen here.

OTTAWA—It was 24 years ago this past Sunday that the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska.

But from the northwest coast of British Columbia to the House of Commons, the tanker spill is being debated anew. Could it happen here? Not a chance, says the country’s natural resources minister, Joe Oliver. Opposition leaders and critics from the west coast say Oliver is making a claim of enhanced maritime safety that is all spin and little substance.

And British Columbia’s Coastal First Nations marked the anniversary with a dramatic television ad, complete with Simon and Garfunkel sound track and radio transmission from the tanker, airing explaining what would happen if a Valdez-style tanker spill occurred in this country.

Meanwhile, the Conservative government continues to blanket the airwaves with an ad of its own, part of a $9 million natural resources advertising campaign to tout its environmental record, featuring a mother and son walking along pristine coastline.

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

CALGARY – A coalition of Ontario municipalities is raising concerns about plans to reverse the flow of Enbridge Inc.’s Line 9 pipeline to Montreal, reviving the spectre of a 2010 rupture on the company’s Lakehead system near Marshall, Mich. that spilled more than 20,000 barrels of crude oil into local waterways.

Calgary-based Enbridge wants to send oil east along a 639-kilometre section of the 1970s-era pipeline from North Westover, Ont., near Hamilton, giving Quebec refineries owned by Suncor Energy Inc. and Ultramar Ltd. access to cheaper crude oil from Alberta and North Dakota’s Bakken formation. Enbridge has also applied to increase capacity on the entire Sarnia-to-Montreal route to 300,000 barrels per day, from 240,000 barrels today.

Major urban centres along the pipeline’s path, including the cities of Hamilton, Mississauga, Toronto and Kingston, have written to the National Energy Board expressing concern about the integrity of Line 9 and Enbridge’s ability to respond to an oil spill following the Michigan rupture. Their interest in the application reflects a lingering anxiety among municipalities about oil pipelines, more than two years after a report by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board criticized Enbridge’s monitoring procedures and training of control-centre personnel.

“That twigged a lot of concerns because that was quite a catastrophic spill that is still being cleaned up,” said Guy Paparella, director of growth planning in the planning and economic development department at the City of Hamilton, where he said the pipeline passes through several wetlands including the picturesque Beverly Swamp.

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http://www.torontosun.com/home

The front page of the Washington Post is generally reserved for news, but Monday it ran a headline more accurately called olds: “Within mainstream environmentalist groups, diversity is lacking.”

You don’t say. The Post gave the example of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, called the Waterkeepers. Kennedy was born into America’s most aristocratic political family and all their millions. They’re the Massachusetts elite.

Is it surprising that out of 200 waterkeepers in his club across America, only one is black? Kennedy’s club is whiter than the wheat board. They’re almost as white as the Klan. That’s not news.

Environmental extremism is a rich man’s game — many minorities can’t afford the luxury of hybrid cars or solar panels. Paying carbon taxes might not be a problem for multimillionaires like Al Gore, but they push ordinary people into energy poverty.

Which is why no Third World countries have ever signed on to binding carbon emissions reductions in United Nations treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

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http://in.reuters.com/

(Reuters) OSLO – Middle East-style oil wealth combined with a generous Nordic welfare model is slowly throttling big chunks of Norway’s economy, threatening western Europe’s biggest success story.

On the surface, Norway is the envy of the world: growth is strong, per capita GDP has exceeded $100,000 and the nation sits on a $700 billion rainy day cash reserve, or $140,000 per man, woman and child.

But it may just be too much money as Norwegians, more keen on leisure and family life are working less and less.

Immigration is not filling the gap in the skilled part of the workforce, so productivity is stagnating, wages are surging and firms are pricing themselves out of their own market.

“Oil is a metaphor for winning the lottery,” said Ivar Froeness, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. “Affluence has slowly crept into society… people just don’t really notice it because it’s been so gradual.”

“These days more people leave Oslo on Thursday afternoon than on Friday, taking long weekends,” he said. “We may take for granted that we have a house and a cabin in the mountain, and maybe another house on the beach.”

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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.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver carries the government’s torch on oil exports. We’ll know this year whether he can overcome historic opposition

OTTAWA—Stephen Harper’s pipeline preacher has not lost any of his zeal.

Joe Oliver takes to his pulpit daily, spraying statistics and “fact-based” arguments at his opponents, refusing to be slowed by recent heart surgery, perhaps the loudest and most determined environmental protest ever mounted on both sides of the border or native leaders who promise a long, hot summer followed by potentially years of court challenges.

He is unbowed by his government’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, its international vilification, the oilsands “branding” battle that, by his own admission, his government was losing when Harper tapped him as his natural resources minister.

He soldiers on resolutely in what has arguably become the country’s most important portfolio as his government ties the country’s economic future to the export of its deep oil reserves, but doesn’t even pay lip service to climate change in its budget.

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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.

When Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver announced plans this week to strengthen Canada’s oil-spill defences, critics were swift to disparage the proposed measures.

It was just a cynical effort to deflect widespread criticism the government was receiving in Vancouver for closing the apparently much-loved Kitsilano Coast Guard station, some groused. It was a too-late PR ruse designed to salvage the Northern Gateway pipeline initiative, others said. B.C. New Democratic MP Nathan Cullen maintained that the initiatives were an exercise in greenwashing – a term for efforts designed solely to propagate the perception that an organization’s goals are environmentally friendly.

Intentional or not, Mr. Oliver’s news conference served to illustrate just how poisoned energy policy debate is in Canada, particularly as it pertains to the construction of oil pipelines.

As things stand, there is almost nothing that the federal government can say on this subject – at least in British Columbia – that isn’t going to be immediately denounced. Mr. Oliver can assert that his plan would bring Canada closer to a “world-class” system for oil tanker safety, but few care and fewer still believe him. He could promise that every oil tanker entering the port of Vancouver, or leaving the port of Kitimat, would have eight tugboats surrounding it to guarantee it would never run aground; it wouldn’t matter.

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

I am really not sure what the endgame for all this is, to be perfectly honest

Trust an oil company to dive headfirst into a region where the asset resource is untested, political and security risks are elevated and the supply routes are controlled by a bitter rival that deems all contracts illegal. Moreover, some of the companies have not even been paid despite actively producing the asset.

Welcome to Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous part of the troubled country of Iraq, a nation divided politically, ethnically and now along oil interests 10 years after being invaded by the United States.

“When Talisman went into Kurdistan in 2008, they were mindful of the fact they were taking a certain amount of risk,” said Richard Herbert, executive vice-president of exploration at Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc. Despite the challenging political and geological landscape, the company has found at least 115 million barrels of oil and 1.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from its two blocks in the region.

For many oil operators, Iraq has lived up to its expectation as one of the last remaining low-hanging fruits in the conventional oil sector, with operating costs of US$2 to US$3 per barrel, compared to US$25 to US$30 in Canada, according to the International Energy Agency.

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

CALGARY • Domestic crude oil production in the United States is on track to surpass imports, Washington’s energy fact-finding arm says, in another sign of shifting market conditions that have punished Canadian energy stocks and cast doubt on multibillion-dollar oil sands expansions.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Wednesday monthly crude oil production in the Lower 48 could surpass net imports this year for the first time since 1995. By the end of next year, the gap between how much oil the U.S. imports and what it produces could grow to roughly two million barrels per day, as domestic oil output climbs past eight million barrels per day, the highest level since 1988, the EIA said.

Led by production from North Dakota’s Bakken and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas, U.S. oil output is expected to climb to 7.3 million barrels per day this year from an average of 6.5 million barrels last year, rising to 7.9 million in 2014, according to a short-term energy outlook. At the same time, the share of total U.S. consumption of liquid fuels met by net imports, including crude oil, is expected to decline to 32%, the lowest level since 1985, from 40% last year, the EIA said.

The numbers belie an uptick in Canadian crude exports to the United States, as U.S. refiners capitalize on a flood of cheap Alberta oil. “There’s still a six-million barrel-a-day import market available to the Canadian producers,” Robert Mark, a director and research analyst at MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier Inc. in Toronto, said in a telephone interview.

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

CALGARY — It speaks volumes about the NDP leader that a Trudeau now boasts better odds of making gains in the Conservative stronghold of western Canada than Thomas Mulcair.

Two premiers — Brad Wall of Saskatchewan and Alberta’s Alison Redford — took the federal NDP leader to task again on Monday over the Keystone XL pipeline. As the western premiers have become the line’s lead champions, Mr. Mulcair has become their chief antagonist.

Mr. Mulcair went to Washington Wednesday to all but discourage the Americans from approving the contentious pipeline. He suggested the Conservative government was “playing people for fools” on Canada’s environmental record — prompting Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, to note: “The Canadians don’t want the pipeline in their own country.”

Not only were Mr. Mulcair’s actions “decidedly unhelpful to the Canadian interest,” Mr. Wall said on Monday, they were also untrue.

Alberta has a carbon tax, an environmental research fund and supports carbon capture and storage research. Further, Mr. Wall noted, Canada has regulations on the real carbon dioxide emitters — coal-fired electricity plants — that are in many cases far tougher than what’s in place in the U.S.

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