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.

OTTAWA AND HALIFAX — TransCanada Corp. is expected to announce Thursday that it will push ahead with a major oil pipeline linking Western Canada with refineries and export terminals in the east, marking a significant step forward for Canada’s goal to tap new export markets.

The Energy East pipeline would deliver some 850,000 barrels of crude a day from Western Canada to Quebec and New Brunswick, serving the three refineries in the two provinces. The project – labelled a “nation builder” by New Brunswick Premier David Alward – has been endorsed by provincial and federal politicians, though Quebec Premier Pauline Marois said last week her province would have to study the proposal once TransCanada releases its detailed plans.

The planned pipeline is a strategic bid to open up new export opportunities for Canadian energy producers eager to diversify their markets beyond the oil-glutted U.S. Midwest. Alberta oil production is surging, but the province faces serious hurdles with other projects aimed at expanding crude-export capacity.

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

More than two months after bitumen mixed with water started seeping from its Primrose oil sands project, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. mobilized Wednesday to deal with the real out-of-control gusher — misinformation.

After saying little publicly about the incident, involving seepages that started on May 20, Canadian Natural issued an early morning news release, held an analyst call and then interviews with the media to confirm the leaks have been contained and the spill is being cleaned up.

No one got hurt, the company said, but 16 birds, seven small mammals and 38 amphibians were killed and that two beavers, two birds and two muskrats are being cared for prior to being returned to their natural environment. So far, 6,300 barrels of bitumen emulsion have been collected, while seepage from four locations has declined to fewer than 20 barrels per day.

Meanwhile, the company cut its forecast for 2014 production from the project to 100,000-110,000 barrels per day, about 10,000 b/d lower than targeted.

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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.

BALCOMBE, ENGLAND — With its million-pound homes and leafy estates, the village of Balcombe hardly looks like a hotbed of environmental activism. But this community of fewer than 2,000 has suddenly become the latest epicentre of the global debate over fracking.

For the past week, Balcombe villagers have been waging war with Cuadrilla Resources Ltd., Britain’s largest shale player, which is about to start test drilling in the area, hoping to extract oil from shale rock. Houses have been plastered with “Frack Off” signs, and dozens of people have lined the gates to the site, chanting, singing and trying to stop trucks from going in. Nearly two dozen people have been arrested.

The “Battle for Balcombe” has become a rallying cry for opponents of fracking everywhere as activists, celebrities and media have descended on the village, a short train ride south of London. Arrivals of serial, experienced veterans of the G20 demonstrations and the Occupy camp outside St. Paul’s have turned this town into an eco-cause celebre.

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

President Obama’s latest smug comments on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline suggest the Canadian project’s odds of being approved under his watch are waning.

Thankfully, Canada hasn’t stood still while the U.S. President dithered. So many new pipeline options have emerged that Keystone XL’s relevance is diminishing as each one gains momentum.

Sure, it will be hard to fill Keystone XL’s void and promise over the short term — perhaps a couple of years around 2016 and 2017 until new pipeline options are up and running.

But over the long-term, Canada is better off fast-tracking oil market diversification to global markets that are not beholden to U.S. anti-oil interests and that remain very motivated to buy Canadian supplies.

Two all-Canadian options — TransCanada’s Energy East project from Alberta to New Brunswick, and pipelines from Alberta to the West Coast — made big leaps forward in the past few days.

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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.

Regulators increasingly want governments to take more responsibility for oilsands projects and their consequences.

The proposed west-east oil pipeline is inching closer to reality. Last week the premiers discussed the feasibility of such a huge project at their annual get-together. And TransCanada Energy confirmed that it has already signed up major producers who want bitumen from the Alberta oilsands delivered to refineries as far afield as New Brunswick and possibly for export.

Meanwhile in Alberta, for the first time regulators have raised alarming red flags about the environmental impact of oilsands expansion and urged the federal and Alberta governments to step up their oversight of these enormous operations.

The strong words of warning came in a decision by a joint federal/provincial panel established to review an application by Shell Canada for expansion of its Jackpine bitumen mining operation about 70 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.

The proposal would increase production by a third to 300,000 barrels a day; tarry oil that needs the increased pipeline capacity that an east-west pipeline would provide if it is to reach refineries.

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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 — Canada is telling the U.S administration it will see a sharp increase in cross-border crude-oil shipments by rail if President Barack Obama fails to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

In a telephone interview from Washington, Canadian Ambassador Gary Doer said oil companies are increasingly turning to trains – and even trucks – as the construction of pipelines has failed to keep up with the boom in North American crude production, and that trend will grow if the President turns down Keystone XL.

“His choice is to have it come down by a pipeline that he approves, or without his approval, it comes down on trains. That’s just the raw common sense of this thing, and we’ve been saying it for two years and we’ve been proven correct,” Mr. Doer said Sunday. “At the end of the day, it’s trains or pipelines.”

The ambassador made his comments to The Globe and Mail after Mr. Obama questioned the much-touted economic benefits of the $7.6-billion project in an interview published in the U.S. on the weekend. The President also suggested Canada could do more to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to help win approval.

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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.

There is a sign marking the start of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway line south of Montreal, but it’s hardly needed: Simply look for the piles of discarded track and cracked and rotting ties amid the ragweed, out past the point where the Canadian Pacific Railway ends in a well-groomed rail bed.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to call the city to get them to clean up their tracks,” says Amélie Gervais, the owner of Bistro La Trinquette in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. Her quaint restaurant, with its vast courtyard patio, overlooks the Chambly Canal at the start of the MM&A line.

Railroads still count distances in miles, and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu stands at what was once Mile 20 of the mighty Canadian Pacific Railway’s “short line” extension from Montreal to the Atlantic Ocean, which helped knit Canada from Pacific to Atlantic for 105 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.

John Crosbie never met a hyperbole he couldn’t top. But the former Tory cabinet minister, whose colourful metaphors kept the House of Commons entertained during his stints in the governments of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, was barely exaggerating when he recently called the 1969 Churchill Falls hydro contract between Quebec and Newfoundland “one of the greatest public policy disasters entered into by any province or government in the history of Canada.”

More than four decades later, the deal signed by the legendary (and first) Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood remains the source of such bitterness on the Rock that it’s a miracle Ottawa hasn’t had to send troops to patrol the still-disputed Quebec-Labrador border. Hydro-Québec has the right to purchase all but a fraction of the 5,400 megawatts from the massive Churchill Falls project in Labrador for next to nothing until 2041.

In 1969, the deal didn’t seem so lopsided. Nuclear power was all the rage and many analysts predicted that Quebec, which had no need for power it could only transport by building hundreds of kilometres of never-attempted transmission lines, would end up losing its shirt.

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