Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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

Barack Obama downplayed any thoughts that his new climate change action plan is a straight choice between “the health of our children and the health of the economy.”

But it wasn’t just the 33 degree heat that made him wipe his brow continually. This was a defining moment in his presidency — a speech where he made clear he is a firm believer in man-made climate change and intends to match his lofty rhetoric with regulatory action.

What to make of Mr. Obama’s plan from a Canadian perspective? The president was as inscrutable as providence when he talked about whether or not he plans to approve the Keystone pipeline that would carry Canadian crude from the oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Obama made it clear he intends to take on the coal-generated power station industry, which accounts for 40% of the greenhouse gases produced in the United States. He said there are currently no limits to how much carbon dioxide power plants can emit — “It’s not right, not safe and it needs to stop,” he said. This is the president’s big target: four coal-fired power stations in the U.S. owned by one company generate 60% more CO2 than the entire oil sands.

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

In announcing his plan to restrain climate change Tuesday, United States President Barack Obama effectively named his price for approving the Keystone XL pipeline: no net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The surprise reference to the Canadian project was made in a speech at Washington’s Georgetown University, where he announced long-expected mandatory reductions of greenhouse gas emissions by operators of power plants, the biggest single source in the U.S., while continuing to promote green energy.

“This does not mean we are going to suddenly stop producing fossil fuels,” Mr. Obama added. “But our energy strategy must be about more than just producing more oil. And by the way, it’s certainly got to be more than just building one pipeline.

“I know there has been, for example, a lot of controversy around the proposal to build the pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf and the State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That’s how it’s always been done.

“But I do want to be clear. Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/

Andrew Nikiforuk is contributing editor to the Tyee, a Canadian online newspaper, and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.

For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America’s friendly northern neighbor — a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the United States — not as it is, but as it should be.

But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate. It’s no longer America’s better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent’s energy-soaked future.

That’s right: The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction — oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada’s government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout’s not just hooked on junk crude — he’s become a pusher. And that’s not even the worst of it.

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

TERRACE, B.C. – There were many times in the past when the people on the banks of the Skeena River wanted to be a part of something bigger.

They were swept up in gold rushes, logging rushes and settlement rushes. The town of Terrace was formed in the early 1900s, the result of a campaign for a station along the Grand Trunk railway by settlers eager to be connected to the rest of country. During World War I, the area’s Sitka spruce was used to build airplanes. During the Second World War, Terrace housed a major army base to guard the Northern Pacific Coast against a Japanese invasion.

Opportunity is knocking again today. It’s coming from Alberta, which is seeking permission to build the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline from Edmonton to nearby Kitimat to boost Canada’s oil trade with Asia. But opposition has been mounting since it was first proposed a decade ago.

Much effort and money has been spent to change views. Epic public hearings by the National Energy Board (NEB) and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) that weighed all aspects and all views wound down here on Monday, bringing to an end an 18-month trek on the proposed right of way.

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

CALGARY – ExxonMobil Corp. has joined the race to export liquefied natural gas from British Columbia with a monster proposal that would process the equivalent of nearly one-third of Canada’s current daily production.

The world’s largest energy company is seeking approval from Canada’s National Energy Board to export up to 30 million tonnes annually of liquefied natural gas, or four billion cubic feet a day, over 25 years from a prospective terminal in the vicinity of Kitimat and Prince Rupert, B.C., it said in an export application filed with the regulator Wednesday.

Exxon, which has optioned land from the B.C. government at Grassy Point, north of Prince Rupert, said the project would initially produce 10 million to 15 million tonnes of chilled fuel per year, beginning in the 2021-to-2023 time frame. At full capacity, the facility would include six processing units. It would draw gas from fields owned by Exxon and Imperial Oil Ltd., its Canadian subsidiary, the company said.

No capital cost for the project was given, but the application is the biggest export scheme proposed for Canada’s West Coast yet. It comes in the same week as the U.K.’s BG Group Plc asked Canadian regulators for permission to export up to 21.6 million tonnes of LNG per year, or roughly 2.9 billion cubic feet of a day. Canada’s natural gas production, by comparison, stood at 14.1 billion cubic feet per day in 2012.

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

We are not in 1974 anymore, says Maria van der Hoeven, as she scans the complex and multi-layered energy world.

That year OECD countries had hastily launched the International Energy Agency as a direct response to the Arab oil embargo that was hurting Western economies and had quadrupled crude prices. The Americans were concerned about their dwindling oil production and the Western world tasked the IEA to keep an eye on their fragile crude inventories.

But the world has moved on since then. “It has changed dramatically in more than one aspect,” Ms. van der Hoeven, who heads the agency, told a conference in Montreal last week. “The IEA has also been changing dramatically and has to change, because energy policy in 1974 was quite simple, although — how should I put it — not easy.”

The Paris-based autonomous IEA and its 28-member countries now have to balance climate change issues with economic development and the importance of non-OECD countries in the global economy — a far cry from just releasing crude stocks to counter OPEC’s machinations.

But one thing that is not going to change: the demand for oil. In 2010, fossil fuels made up more than 80% of the world’s energy, and despite the rapid deployment of renewable energy technologies, they will still command three-fourths of the market by 2035, according to the IEA’s estimates.

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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.

Attitudes toward Canada’s oil have shifted dramatically in the United States in recent years, as Americans increasingly view it as a key part of their own energy independence, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson says.

After four years in Ottawa, Mr. Jacobson steps down from his post next month with the fate of a key piece of cross-border energy politics, the Keystone XL pipeline, left hanging. In Washington, it is a charged and symbolic debate: For many environmentally-minded Americans, approving the pipeline amounts to approving more burning of Canada’s “dirty oil.”

But the outgoing U.S. envoy said Americans’ perception has changed in many ways – including the dawning realization that energy from north of the border, seen by many Americans as akin to domestic supply, is very important to the U.S.

“One of the ways it’s changed is that I think a lot more Americans understand how much of our energy comes from Canada,” Mr. Jacobson said in an interview at his Ottawa residence. “Clearly, there is an issue with respect to the oil sands, and I don’t want to diminish it. But I think another piece of the public perception in the United States is just how important a foreign supplier of energy Canada is.”

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

TERRACE, B.C. – One of the most consequential choices facing Canada today is coming to a head in a modest hotel banquet room just off the CN railway tracks, where a few dozen people have assembled for a final shot at influencing a decision on whether the proposed Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline should reshape the country’s economic future or be cast aside for the angst it has provoked.

After 10 years of planning, recrimination and debate, proponent Enbridge Inc., First Nations leaders, union and provincial government interests, environmental organizations, are putting forward final oral arguments before a joint panel of the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

In contrast to the pomp and ceremony that ushered the hearings’ beginnings in nearby Kitimat 18 months ago, the first day of the final hearings Monday was all business after an exhaustive process that drew in all those affected around the right of way, pitted Albertans against British Columbians and has cost Enbridge alone so far nearly half a billion dollars.

In its final words to the panel, Enbridge said the proposed oil sands pipeline from Edmonton to the northern B.C. Coast is making enormous and costly commitments to avoid accidents and that the biggest risk to the country would be to not approve it.

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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 — The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project has spurred fierce national debate about whether heavy oil spilled in sea water floats or sinks, how much disaster insurance pipeline projects should carry and the economic rewards of shipping oil sands bitumen across the ocean to foreign markets.

On Monday, forces for and against the $6.5-billion project will gather at a hotel in Terrace, B.C., for the beginning of two weeks of final arguments.

While it’s by no means the end to the wrangling, it’s the last opportunity for arguments to be heard before the joint review panel – an independent body mandated by the Environment Minister and the National Energy Board – withdraws to write a report that will recommend for or against the project.

The report, due by the end of year, will help shape a federal cabinet decision on whether to green light the project. But even Ottawa’s approval, if eventually granted, could simply mean the beginning of years of legal appeals by First Nations and environmental groups trying to stop the project.

Northern Gateway lies at the centre of broader debates about treaty rights, the relationship between provinces and whether oil supertanker traffic will become part of the view in the coastal city of Kitimat, B.C.

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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.

ROME — In sweeping terms, the economic model of countries in North Africa, parts of West Africa and the Middle East comes down to this: Trading hydrocarbons for carbohydrates.

The oil-out, wheat-in formula has worked rather well for decades, the odd land war and revolution notwithstanding. Egypt is the world’s biggest single buyer of imported wheat. Saudi Arabia is giving up on its gruesomely expensive experiment to grow wheat in the desert; it is happy to swap oil for much of its food consumption. Ditto Nigeria, whose population is exploding and which produces almost no wheat itself.

And then came the shale revolution. Shale oil and gas production in the United States is soaring and American oil imports are falling fast. Oil and gas prices are down and the forecasts are bearish, a remarkable turnaround from 2007 and 2008, when $200 (U.S.) a barrel oil seemed somewhere between possible and likely (the benchmark Brent price is now about $104). The shale revolution is about to hit Britain and other parts of Europe.

What is good for the United States and Europe – less imported oil and gas and lower prices for both – is bad news for some of the one-product wonders in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

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

As a budding exploration geologist in the 1970s, Donald Rae worried about his career choice. Convinced that Alberta was running out of oil, oil companies were laying off geologists and engineers in big numbers and Peter Lougheed, Alberta’s premier at the time, wanted to diversify the economy.

Mr. Rae stuck with it, pioneered the discovery of tight oil in Canada, and is now is at the controls of another hot junior, Coral Hill Energy Ltd., focused on a play in the Swan Hills area of west central Alberta that could hold up to four billion barrels of light oil.

Meanwhile, Alberta is producing more oil than ever. “It’s the thrill of the hunt,” Mr. Rae, 63, said in explaining why he started another company. “I love what I do and I have great people with me, so we have a lot of fun.”

The enthusiasm may seem disconnected from the bad news beating up the Canadian oil patch today – anti-oil activism, weak prices, pipeline bottlenecks, disinterested investors.

Far from ceding the field to energy alternatives, Mr. Rae is one of the entrepreneurs working on new ideas to keep expanding the business – from finding oil and gas in new places to squeezing more out of old ones, from arranging new transportation options to using new financing models that don’t involve public markets.

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http://thetyee.ca/

Report details how industry, climate change could ‘eat up’ the Mackenzie River Basin and its vital ecological services.

The Mackenzie River Basin, which occupies and protects one-fifth of Canada’s fresh water, could be severely destabilized by climate change as well as unbridled resource extraction, including hydraulic fracturing, hydro dams and oil sands mining.

That’s the uncomfortable conclusion of a new report by the prestigious University of California-based Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy on what it calls “Canada’s northern Amazon.”

The scientific report, based, in part, on extensive input from First Nation elders, strongly recommends better environmental monitoring as well as industrial performance bonds for mining operations. It also calls for economic limits to development that give “due consideration” to the basin’s essential water-making and carbon saving ecological services.

The Mackenzie River, the longest flowing northern river on the continent, meanders through an expansive northern boreal forest and muskeg. The storied basin, the scene of gold rushes and oil booms, occupies parts of three provinces and two territories — an area three times the size of France.

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