Wednesday-Night

See also Wednesday-Night.com Alberta and Oil Notes

3 May
Oil sands giant says ’sorry’ for dead ducks
EDMONTON — The company behind a giant oil sands plant in northern Alberta has taken out full-page ads in several Canadian newspapers to apologize for the deaths of an estimated 500 ducks that landed on a toxic wastewater pond near Fort McMurray, Alta., earlier this week. [Not really good enough; we hope they don’t think that’s where their responsibility ends]
1 May 2008
Hundreds of ducks dead after landing in pond owned by Canadian oil sands company
(IHT/AP) FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta: Alberta’s environment minister said the provincial government’s efforts to allay environmental concerns about its booming oil sands industry will be hurt by the deaths of hundreds of ducks that landed on a pond filled with toxic waste.
Environment Minister Rob Renner concedes the deaths have put a dent in Alberta’s efforts to counter the message being spread by environmental groups that Canada’s oil sands projects are taking a toll on the environment [and] Alberta’s oil sands industry is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Syncrude faces scrutiny after ducks land on toxic pond
The ducks’ demise is a public-relations nightmare for the Alberta government, which has been trying to convince domestic and international critics that production in the province’s oilsands is environmentally friendly.
The province may charge Syncrude with not immediately reporting the incident. That’s in addition to charges the company could face for failing to keep the migratory birds off the ponds in the first place, which alone carries a potential $1-million maximum fine.
Birds’ deaths draw global spotlight
(Calgary Herald) Alberta’s oilsands opponents have a new emblem — hundreds of ducks coated and killed in oily toxic sludge.
News of the dying ducks wasn’t disclosed until Alberta deputy premier Ron Stevens completed meetings with government and business officials in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. His five-day trip is part a new $25-million marketing campaign to counter negative perceptions of the oilsands and sell the province as a source of secure and environmentally sustainable energy.
March 1
Canadian ambassador Wilson lobbies U.S. to go easy on oilsands restrictions
MIKE DE SOUZA, Canwest News Service
The Energy Independence and Security Act 2007, adopted by Congress and approved by the Bush administration in December, prevents U.S. government departments and agencies from buying alternative fuels, which generate more pollution than conventional fuel from customary petroleum sources. But this could drastically affect the practices of the U.S. military and postal service, among the biggest customers of the energy-intensive oil from Alberta. Full story
February 22, 2008
Alberta’s Oilsands Ambivalence
Colby Cosh, National Post
I was amused to discover in Tuesday’s Financial Post that Canadian petroleum producers are awakening to the fact that the oilsands extraction operations of northern Alberta have something of an image problem. The main reason I was amused is that if you’ve lived in Alberta, you know that the oilsands actually have about eight or nine different image problems. The environmental one is just the one that gets talked about the most — particularly now, as prize-mongering journalists reinvent themselves as experts on the energy business and flock to Fort McMurray to bring back word of the supposed slow-motion tragedy in progress there.
The oilsands, thanks to the surreal prices that petroleum fetches at the moment, are an incredible bonanza of wealth that is propelling Alberta, from north to south, toward unfamiliar heights of economic growth and development. And yet, funny thing — you won’t by any means find it easy to track down anyone who’s visibly happy about it.
February 4, 2008
Shifting Sands Q&A
For eight days from late January through early February, The Globe and Mail [Link to Globe & Mail series, videos and more] took an extensive look at the Alberta oil sands, the $90-billion mega-project that has changed Canada forever — both internally and in our relations with other countries.
Virtually every major oil company in the Western world has picked up a piece of the action to create what promises to be the biggest industrial project on Earth.
Development of the oil sands has brought incredible riches to the oil companies, the provincial government and many Alberta businesses.
But it has also created environmental problems, sparked debate about growing divisions between the rich and poor in Alberta, and exacerbated long-term trends of inter-provincial migration away from job-challenged regions of Atlantic Canada.
How did the quest to retrieve the treasure hidden beneath huge swaths of northern Alberta go from fool’s errand to monumentous payoff?
The oil sands are seen as a crucial source in a world of increasingly tight supply, where many reserves are in politically volatile regions controlled by undemocratic states. Put another way: Should they disappear tomorrow, one industry expert estimates, the price of oil could jump a third to $130 a barrel.
The value and importance of the oil sands will make that much harder the choices that Albertans and all Canadians suddenly face. Canada has now become a major-league merchant of one of the most desirable – and dirtiest – sources of energy. The money is flowing in, and the profits are rolling out – good news for stockholders, the Canadian dollar and government coffers.
But there are environmental and social costs to stuffing our pockets while the oil speeds south. And Canadians will have to answer a question already being asked by many Albertans: When does a boom become a burden?
In addition, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is fond of saying that Canada is becoming an “energy superpower.”But other countries don’t always see us that way.
Shaking the foundations
IMPACT ON CANADA’S DOLLAR AND OVERALL ECONOMY
The nation’s manufacturing sector has been hit by a double whammy: Oil wealth has ignited the loonie, hurting exports, and the higher energy prices are squeezing profits. Now the factory-dependent provinces are looking greedily at Alberta.
Canada is an energy superpower unlike any other.
Eight countries own 78 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves: Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Russia. Only one member of that club can claim to be a stable, developed democracy.
But another thing separates Canada from most of the world’s largest energy producers, even the democratic ones: Our oil-driven economic clout is so new that we’re still arguing over how to handle it.
Norwegians don’t fuss much over oil money. With a $370-billion oil fund, they have plenty to go around among 4.7 million people (and no provinces to grab a share). In Mexico, there is no room for debate: The Constitution grants the central government an iron grip on energy development, which is exercised through state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), and oil profits represent about one-third of government revenues.
… A couple of factors might explain the loonie’s new link to oil. In the late 1970s, oil got expensive because of geopolitical strife - the revolution in Iran, among other events - which caused a rush of capital into the safety of the U.S. dollar, driving our currency down. This time, oil is expensive because supplies are tight, and the U.S., with its banking woes and its large fiscal deficit, is no currency safe haven.
Also, output from oil sands is rising faster than our own consumption, leaving more oil available to sell to other countries. Crude exports equalled more than $30-billion in 2005, up from $8.3-billion a decade earlier. Export Development Canada figures that every $10 (U.S.) increase in the cost of a barrel of oil now drives the Canadian dollar up by 3 cents, all else being equal.
The dollar-oil relationship will only get stronger if Canada’s oil exports triple again, because of high prices and new projects in Athabasca. But does an end to cheap oil mean an end to a cheap currency, too? In other words, is a high dollar permanent? “You can get ’stickiness’ in the exchange rate,” says EDC chief economist Stephen Poloz.
February 2
Looking for solutions to the carbon conundrum
A $100-billion bet has been made on Alberta’s oil sands, but there is a growing worry climate concerns will trump economic ones. Capturing carbon and sequestering it could be a win-win situation — but it won’t come cheap.
Carbon capture and storage technology is critical to Canada’s ability to meet two seemingly contradictory goals on energy and the environment. Indeed, it may be the silver bullet that allows the world to arrest climate change even as the globe consumes growing of amounts of fossil fuels to energize emerging economies like China and India.
And Canada is uniquely positioned to take a leadership role in the technology, if it can summon the political will to do so.
Much of the debate over the economy-versus-environment conundrum here focuses on the oil sands boom and how governments should manage it. Oil companies are planning to quadruple the output from the oil sands over the next 15 years, which would propel the country into the elite ranks of the world’s top petroleum producers and produce jobs and wealth for all Canadians. But at the same time, the federal government has set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020. The oil sands are expected to be the single largest source of growth in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.
[It is suggested that]Canada is losing a technological race against the Americans, the Europeans and the Australians to develop and deploy the CCS technology, which could be exported to emerging markets. Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich member of the Persian Gulf state United Arab Emirates, has entered the field with plans to capture up to 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and inject it into aging oil fields to enhance recovery.
February 1
The climatic costs of rapid growth
… what angers environmentalists and an increasingly vocal segment of Albertans: The oil sands projects have grown in number and size so suddenly that there hasn’t been time to consider the long-term environmental costs. Groups like the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, have proposed a moratorium on new projects until technology can catch up. Greenpeace, which opened an Edmonton office last summer, is campaigning for a complete halt to all development.
Oil produced from the bitumen lying in the sand under Alberta’s boreal forest is one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Under current conditions, extracting one barrel of synthetic crude from a mine requires roughly two to four barrels of fresh water from the nearby Athabasca River (an amount top water scientists say the river cannot sustain), along with 750 cubic feet of non-renewable natural gas and about four tonnes of tarry sand and “overburden” – the industry term for soil.
What’s more, the oil sands are easily cast as a climate-change villain: In 2006, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that the mining and upgrading of oil sands bitumen created five times as many greenhouse-gas emissions as would come from producing oil from a conventional well.
January 31
Frugal Norway saves for life after the boom
Across Norway, the oil boom is being paralleled by record growth in the non-petroleum, export-driven economy. In November, Norway’s non-oil private-sector economy reported quarterly growth of 1.9 per cent, the equivalent of a 7.6-per-cent annual growth – an astonishing economic performance, beating even the growth of oil and gas exports.
While it isn’t hard for nations and provinces to get rich from oil, it is exceptionally hard – almost impossible, by conventional economic reasoning – for them to make money off anything else while the oil boom is taking place.
Everywhere else in the world – including Canada – a boom in oil has led to a decline, if not a complete devastation, of conventional businesses. It’s a phenomenon known to economists as “Dutch disease,” after the tragic experience of the Netherlands, which discovered oil in the 1970s. As oil exports boomed, the flood of money into the domestic economy inflated the currency, provoked price increases and destroyed exports, leading to a decade of joblessness and rising inequality.
January 28
The Texas Connection
Canada is the kind of oil supplier the U.S. can rely on, and no one knows it better than the Texans
As the U.S. seeks to decrease its dependence on crude from unstable regions and OPEC countries, and with the oil sands booming, Canada has supplanted Saudi Arabia as the leading supplier of crude to the U.S., claiming the No. 1 spot in 2004.
Now, three major pipelines that would move Alberta oil all the way to Texas are under consideration, with a final decision on at least one likely within two months. A fourth pipeline is nearly approved to send almost half a million barrels a day to Illinois, Oklahoma and northern Texas — the first major extension of Canadian oil beyond the Chicago region. The push to develop major oil pipelines over thousands of kilometres from Alberta to Texas represents a major shift in the movement of Canadian oil.
Beijing wary of investing in oil sands
Beijing wants a relationship of trust with its oil suppliers – and that means it usually prefers to buy from authoritarian regimes in Africa, Latin America or the former Soviet Union, where there are no complications about democracy or minority rights. … despite China’s insatiable demand for energy to power its booming economy, the Alberta oil sands are largely off the Chinese map. Beijing is obsessed with diversifying its oil sources and avoiding any dependence on a single supplier. It sees Canada as a country in the U.S. sphere of influence, a country where oil could be held hostage to political concerns. And it has little enthusiasm for multibillion-dollar oil deals in a country whose relations with China have been soured by human-rights disputes.
January 26
An empire from a tub of goo
How did the quest to retrieve the treasure hidden beneath huge swaths of northern Alberta go from fool’s errand to monumental payoff?
On the morning of April 9, 2003, Murray Smith, then Alberta’s energy minister, [received] a letter from his federal counterpart south of the border. It was about the oil sands – a resource that had long been underestimated at home and almost ignored internationally. No more, U.S. energy secretary Spencer Abraham wrote. From now on, when the Americans talked oil, they would be counting the reserves sitting beneath the forests of northern Alberta. … The world finally was acknowledging what Albertans had been saying for decades: that their oil sands rival any source of crude on Earth.
17 February 2008
OTTAWA: ENVIRONMENTALISTS DENOUNCE OILSANDS PROJECTS
U.S.-based environmentalists have denounced Alberta’s oilsands projects as the “most destructive project on the planet” and accuse the federal government of being an accomplice of the their developers. Environmental Defense recalled the more than 100 government and independent reports on the toxic waste ponds that cover 50 square kilometres and are big enough to be observed from space. The lobby’s report also notes that oilsands produce three times more greenhouse gases than the extraction of conventional oil and are likely responsible for acid rain in neighbouring Saskatchewan. The document also mentioned health problems at the Fort Chipewyan, an aboriginal community downstream from the oilsands, where various types of cancer and other diseases have become endemic where they had been unheard of. Environmental Defense blames these woes in part on lax enforcement of federal environmental and fisheries laws and the CO2 emissions reduction targets “set deliberately low” by Environment Minister John Baird.
Managing the Tar Sands Boom - It’s Time to Stop and Think!