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.

EDMONTON — Tom Steyer is a man at odds with himself. He made his fortune by founding a hedge fund with a keen interest in the energy sector, including leading oil, pipeline and mining companies. The firm also gobbled up stock in BP a year after its Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. All this should hardly make him a darling of environmentalists.

Yet there’s a green streak to Mr. Steyer – one that led last year to something of an existential crisis: Climate change, the American billionaire decided, was the “defining issue of our generation.” And so he left the firm he had spent a quarter-century building, Farallon Capital Management, because it valued a company’s bottom line, not its carbon footprint.

“I have a passion to push for what I believe is the right thing,” Mr. Steyer, 55, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail this week. “And I couldn’t do it in good conscience and hold down a job – and get paid very well for doing a job – where I wasn’t directly doing the right thing.” The Harper government and Canada’s oil patch might have wished he had stayed at Farallon.

Mr. Steyer has since set his sights on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. He has waded into the Democratic primary in Massachusetts by lampooning a pro-Keystone Democrat, Stephen Lynch, for being in the pocket of “big oil.” Mr. Steyer also accused him – in the form of a cheeky banner, pulled by a plane through Boston’s skies – of a loyalty akin to treason: being a Montreal Canadiens fan.

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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.

At 83, Clement Bowman hasn’t lost any of his vision. We’re not talking about his eyesight, but rather his dogged determination to see potential where others only see pitfalls. It’s not hard to see why Peter Lougheed tapped Mr. Bowman as the first head of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority in 1975.

The late Alberta premier, who also came by the vision thing naturally, had founded AOSTRA a year earlier with what seemed like an impossible mission. All but a small proportion of oil sands bitumen was buried too deep to extract using existing strip-mining techniques. The big oil companies, clueless about how to get at the resource, were turning their backs on their leases.

True visionaries such as Mr. Bowman never let the negative groupthink get them down. With an initial $100-million from the Alberta Heritage Fund, AOSTRA took the lead in developing the now-universal steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) technology that unlocked the oil sands’ potential and brought Big Oil rushing back. Mr. Bowman got the Order of Canada, Alberta got filthy rich and the world took notice.

Fast-forward to the present and the two biggest challenges threatening the resource. Unless Canada can dramatically reduce carbon emissions from the oil sands and squeeze more value from raw bitumen, we risk environmental blacklisting and technological underdevelopment.

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

It’s been a year since the CEOs of 12 major oil sands companies pledged in Calgary to set aside historic rivalries and collaborate to accelerate the pace of environmental improvement through a new organization, Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA).

Over that period, the backlash against development of the Alberta-based resource has intensified, feeding off regulatory processes for new export pipelines like Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, and incidents seen as contradicting the oil sands sector’s promise of responsible development like last week’s pipeline spill in Arkansas.

But Dan Wicklum, COSIA’s chief executive officer, said the environmental wins are beginning and the structure is in place for major breakthroughs.

“I have a trite saying: as scientists and engineers, we have a difficult time scheduling our breakthroughs,” Mr. Wicklum said in an interview. “But the ambition is high. When you look at the projects that we have in the pipeline, the potential is very real.”

The question is whether they are happening fast enough, are significant enough, the improvements are quantifiable, and will be well enough communicated to satisfy oil sands critics and policy makers on the cusp of major decisions in Canada, the United States and Europe this year that could either frustrate or allow further development.

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

VANCOUVER – Japan is prepared to invest billions directly in natural gas infrastructure in Western Canada as part of a plan to secure massive supplies of liquefied natural gas to replace nuclear power, a top government advisor said Thursday.

The plan, a new model for Japan, could intensify the race by Asian countries to lock down Western Canada’s energy resources and infrastructure, which so far has been led by China.

Tokyo-based Tadashi Maeda, managing executive officer of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, said Japan is ready to start discussions with private and government entities in Canada to support construction of pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals to serve the Japanese market exclusively.

“The Japanese government is [prepared to make] a strategic investment for the purpose of developing a commodity market for natural gas, a more transparent and flexible market,” Mr. Maeda said on the sidelines of the Pacific Energy Summit, the platform picked by Japan to announce the plan. “So we are going to make some strategic investments to fill the gap of the infrastructure needs.

“The pipelines and export terminals are imperative. Therefore if it is needed, we are going to bring some capital to cover the cost of the infrastructure.”

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

CBC provides ­platform for anti-oil sands guru

I really need a second bite at the watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s claims — published in The New York Times — that Alberta’s oil sands are perverting Canada’s economy and democracy.

The lefty lecturer’s accusation that the Canadian “conversation” is being suppressed by a “coercive climate” was rendered even more ludicrous this week by the fact that he was instantly invited onto two major CBC programs: As it Happens, and Q. Can an invitation from Michael Enright be far behind?

And, come to think about it, when did any part of Mother Corp. last express skepticism about “official” climate science, or fail to report the latest oil sands scare or pipeline spill non-horror? Two dead in Arkansas. Ducks, that is.

Towards the end of his interview with CBC Radio’s Q host Jian Ghomeshi, Mr. Homer-Dixon was kind enough to mention my own spirited response to his Times piece. I am apparently the sort of shill that lonely voices of sanity such as himself have to face in this nascent Northern “petro-state.” He didn’t have time actually to refute anything I wrote.

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

Lefty academic Thomas Homer-Dixon spreads more hooey against the oil sands

An announcement this week on joint federal/provincial monitoring of the oil sands was delayed because of the death of Ralph Klein. The notion that there could ever be a program that satisfied critics would be naive even if joint monitoring weren’t beset by political infighting, and the industry’s most unhinged critics didn’t include some of Canada’s most prominent environmental scientists.

Further evidence that foes — including leading media organs — are not interested in objectivity came in an article in Monday’s New York Times by lefty academic worrywart Thomas Homer-Dixon. In fact, Mr. Homer-Dixon doesn’t do much more than follow the Times’ own severely biased editorial slant.

In his day job, Mr. Homer-Dixon peddles “global governance” at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. That’s the theory that socialism — which has always and everywhere failed at the national level — needs to be taken global to fulfill its potential. Given that catastrophic man-made climate change is perhaps the chief justification for this attempted planetary power grab, one can hardly expect objectivity from Mr. Homer-Dixon, who embraces a range of related lousy ideas, from zero-growth societies (in which innovation would presumably be outlawed) to a desperate last-ditch defence of peak oil theory.

You will also remember the name Balsillie. He’s the guy who co-ran, then co-screwed up, RIM (now BlackBerry). Perhaps if he’d spent less time supporting ever-fashionable anti-capitalism, BlackBerry would today be in better shape.

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 http://www.nytimes.com/

Thomas Homer-Dixon, who teaches global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

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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 — TransCanada Corp. has moved a major step forward on its plan to ship Western Canadian crude to the country’s eastern refineries and export facilities, so far facing few of the political hurdles that have dogged other pipeline projects aimed at moving crude out of Alberta.

The Calgary-based pipeline giant said Tuesday that it has launched a formal process to acquire shipping commitments from energy companies for the Energy East Pipeline, which could reach New Brunswick’s Irving Oil Ltd. refinery and port of Saint John.

TransCanada said it is confident in gaining such support, and will then file for regulatory review with the goal to begin shipments by late 2017.

“We’re committed,” said Jeff Matthews, Irving Oil’s director of business development. The proposed pipeline “increases our ability to compete in a tough industry by allowing our refinery access to a crude supply region in Western Canada that has not been accessible in the past,” he said.

The west-to-east project – unveiled just a year ago – is gaining considerable momentum at a time when other pipeline projects such as TransCanada’s Keystone XL and Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway face uncertainty amid political friction and environmental concerns.

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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.

Chris Genovali is executive director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation. Misty MacDuffee is Raincoast’s wild salmon program director.

The federal government’s recently stated intention to establish a “world-class oil spill response and prevention” plan is clearly designed to assuage public fears in British Columbia over the dramatic increase in oil tanker traffic that would accompany the Enbridge Northern Gateway project and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion.

Energy Minister Joe Oliver’s announcement, however, does little to diminish the risk or change the nature of shipping oil on the B.C. coast. The reality is that human nature and physical nature are the forces that produce tragedies at sea. Unforeseen events that inevitably occur in narrow channels, high-traffic corridors and bad weather increase the risk of oil tanker accidents on B.C.’s coast.

Major oil spills show that despite assurances of low risk and advanced technology, poor decisions still lead to major incidents. Groundings, collisions, equipment failures and explosions are all cited as causes for accidents, but these are consequences, not causes. Root causes of incidents are more insidious, with human error, cost-cutting and miscommunication foremost among them.

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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.

The Harper government pushes hard for a west-east pipeline proposal as the people of Mayflower, Ark., lament lost homes.

OTTAWA—Joe Oliver strode to the microphone in the House of Commons foyer Tuesday, brimming with good news. It was all about averting our potentially “lost legacy,’’ jobs, national energy security and social programs.

We were embarking, it seemed, on the 21st century journey to the Last Spike. About 30 minutes earlier, Joe Bradley from the heretofore unheard of community of Mayflower, Ark., told the CBC radio program, The Current, of encountering about half a metre of Canadian oil sands crude running down the street in front of his house in his well-manicured community.

“I grabbed my daughter and got in the car and ran as fast as we could,’’ Bradley said. His house value is gone, he has concerns about the health of his eight-year-old daughter and he isn’t going back.

There could scarcely be a more graphic illustration in one morning of the economy versus the environment in this country’s ongoing pipeline debate.

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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.

Ugly video of an Arkansas oil spill has Americans up in arms.

WASHINGTON—Pictures don’t lie. And as much as some would like to write off the oil-drenched images flying across Facebook and Twitter Monday as an April Fool’s joke gone rogue, they are real.

That actually is a river of Alberta crude gushing through an Arkansas suburb. And gushing onward to YouTube, virally, throughout Easter weekend. Like Jed Clampett’s worst nightmare, Canada’s diluted oilsands bitumen has never looked so ugly, coursing for the first time across the driveways of everyday Americans.

The black ooze comes as yet another black eye to Canada, just as the Obama White House readies to make a final call on Keystone XL. America’s already tortured pipeline politics just got stickier.

But looks can be deceiving. And thus far, all indications suggest this latest rupture in Mayflower, Ark., though classified as “major” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, may wreak about a third or less of the damage of the damage done during the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill, which saw more than a million gallons of Alberta crude pour into a Michigan waterway.

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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 should link additional petroleum flows going south on Keystone to a hard cap on future extraction rates.

The expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline has become a lightning rod for the battle between long-term climate concerns and shorter-term economic benefit. Opponents say Canada’s tarsands are one of the world’s most carbon-intensive and environmentally destructive sources of oil.

Proponents argue they’re a politically stable source of oil in a world fraught with risk. Both are correct. A compromise on Keystone is essential if Canada is to become a responsible energy superpower in the complex 21st century world of carbon constraints.

I suggest the Canadian government take the lead by linking additional flows going south on Keystone to a hard cap on future extraction rates and priority access in all Canadian pipelines based on the carbon content of the oil. This compromise reflects facts on the ground and aspirations for change. Like all good compromises, everyone loses and everyone wins.

Climate hawks like me recoil in horror at yet another long-term high-carbon infrastructure project, built in the very teeth of an increasingly angry climate.

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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.

EDMONTON — One of the most prominent opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline will soon get a chance to plead his case to the man who controls the project’s fate – by personally hosting a fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama.

Billionaire Tom Steyer and his wife are scheduled to host Mr. Obama at their home in San Francisco on Wednesday for a $5,000-per-person cocktail fundraiser, one stop of a brief trip in which anti-Keystone protesters, placards in hand, will also greet the President. It comes as cleanup continues at the site of an oil spill in Arkansas, where a pipeline carrying Canadian crude ruptured and forced the evacuation of about two dozen homes.

That spill has spurred on environmentalists and Keystone XL opponents, many of whom see Mr. Steyer as a close ally. The hedge-fund founder last month waded into the Massachusetts Senate race by buying ads against a fellow Democrat who supports the Keystone XL project. Mr. Steyer has regularly spoken out against Keystone. His cocktail fundraiser will offer another platform.

“As it relates to the President, Tom is honored to be hosting such an event,” Christopher Lehane, the American billionaire’s spokesman, said in an e-mail.

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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 and TORONTO and OTTAWA — Price discounts on western Canada’s heavy oil have narrowed dramatically, as producers move record amounts of crude by rail in order to sidestep pipeline bottlenecks and reach thirsty U.S. refineries.

The price spread between Western Canadian Select and the North American benchmark is at its narrowest in more than a year, after shrinking rapidly in the last month. WCS sold for about $78 (U.S.) a barrel late last week, about $15 a barrel less than West Texas intermediate oil. That differential had reached nearly $35 in January.

The shrinking spread gives a reprieve to energy companies producing heavy oil in western Canada.

Those companies, which include global giants and small producers, have been hammered by the steep discount, leaving some to trim their budgets and pull back on expansion plans. The reduced differential is also welcome news for the government of Alberta, which is facing its sixth deficit in a row due in part to the price gap weighing on royalty revenue.

In the first 12 weeks of 2013, the number of carloads of petroleum products shipped by U.S. and Canadian railways was up 47 per cent from its year-ago level, according to National Bank Financial’s chief economist and strategist Stéfane Marion.

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