Tag Archives: oil and gas

Jan 27 2016
1 Comment
Business, Democracy, Energy, Oil and Gas, Politics

Running on empty in New Brunswick

DSC_0027

We become what we think we are.

If we believe that we are weak, uneducated and profligate, the chances that we will lie down, refuse to crack a book, and spend whatever money the state sends us to load up on Kraft Dinner and past Christmases’ chocolate treats rise precipitously.

If, on the other hand, we are convinced that we are strong, innovative and prudent, the odds of our crafting a real future for our neighbours and ourselves – one we build with reason, critical thinking, social deliberation, and daily service – improve significantly.

New Brunswick sits uncomfortably somewhere between those two poles of conscience.

On the one hand, in this province we are gorgeously engaged, generous and rational. On the other, we are thicker than a sack of hammers at the bottom of the Petitcodiac River.

We, for example, continue to muck and moil over the possibilities of a shale gas industry in this province even though we know that market forces, combined with our own government’s foot-dragging, have effectively shut the door on that avenue of commercial enterprise.

With the price of Texas crude spluttering just below $32 a barrel, the entire oil and gas industry in Canada is in suspended animation (if not actual free-fall). Now, there is almost no point in imagining a future in which we control the uses to which we put our indigenous fossil fuels (if we ever have).

Still, as Adam Huras of the Saint John Telegraph-Journal reported earlier this month, New Brunswick Energy Minister Donald Arseneault thinks “the 12-year lows facing natural gas prices could buy the province more time to get the industry right – that’s of course if the province decides to go in that direction.”

Says Mr. Arseneault: “In terms of lifting – or not – the moratorium (on shale gas development), even if there is down time, it gives people more time to get better educated with the issues. . .and it will give government more time to review the report submitted to us by no later than March 31.”

He refers, specifically, to the research his department has commissioned from a three-person panel on the environmental, social and economic efficacy of hydraulic fracturing in the province. The question now becomes: Is he kidding?

He’s right in one sense. What, exactly, is the rush? Given the industry’s pricing structures these days, we have all the time in the world to, effectively, decide not to decide, which is, after all, what this provincial government has desperately desired for this fractious issue since the beginning of its mandate.

Again, we become what we think we are. If we believe that we are, by nature, cautious and conservative, then we will rejoice in every opportunity that removes risk from the process of democratic decision-making.

Sure, let’s take this whole shale-gas thing and give it a good look-see. It’s not as if the issue matters much these days. The market has bottomed out; exploration companies are no longer testing, drilling or producing; and as for public debate, well, all is quiet on the eastern front of environmental protest.

Still, what if we applied that standard to every other challenge the province faces?

Should “wait-and-see” become the new motto we teach our children as we ask them to find their personal and professional bliss elsewhere in Canada or the world?

Should we “be” in this place or merely sleep in it?

Are we timorous or bold and forthcoming?

It’s a decision we choose for ourselves, and it always has been.

In the end, we become what we think we are.

Tagged , , ,
Sep 22 2013
Leave a comment
Economy, Energy, Environment, Oil and Gas

Our increasingly dull song of praise for oil

You can just smell the methane

You can just smell the methane

One public page of the member-driven website, Geo-Help Inc., which bills itself as “The Virtual Geology Department providing Geological Expertise and Services to the Oil and Gas Industry in Canada,” offers a collection of quotes that reaffirms man’s (though, interestingly, not even one woman’s) abiding love affair with liquid, black gold down through the decades.

Odes have been written to exalt the substance, including this one, sponsored by Seneca Oil and published in 1850:

“The healthful balm, from Nature’s secret spring/ The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring/ As from her depths the magic liquid flows/ To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.”

Others, like Kansas geologist Wallace Pratt (1885-1981), also recognized the allure when he said, “Where oil is first found is in the minds of men.” Men, presumably, like American industrialist J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) who once declared that his formula for success was to “rise early, work hard, strike oil.”

The quotes are not uniformly laudatory. One describes oil as “the excrement of the devil.” Another complains, “You can’t get the grease without a lease.”

And some are way off the mark, as is one attributed to the Director of Anglo Persian Oil Company who, in 1926, observed, “Saudi Arabia appears devoid of all prospects for oil.”

Historically, though, our preoccupation with the stuff has been, until quite recently, laced with positive connotations. And this strikes me as somewhat paradoxical, because unless you happen to be an industry executive or petroleum geologist, the chances are very good that you, like me, find oil to be. . .well, pedestrian.

Or, if you will pardon the pun, boring.

Whenever a fixation becomes mundane, it has a tendency to subdue the other faculties of mind – imagination, ingenuity, creativity – that can, quite often, improve social, political and economic conditions.

This might help explain New Brunswick’s current circumstances. The rut the province is in – fiscally, commercially, even demographically – could well be related to, if not actually derive from, our single-minded focus on the promise of a pipeline from Alberta’s oil patch and the putative promise (and danger) of a fully functioning shale gas industry in the future.

I would never suggest that we should dismiss these projects for the sake of our becoming less tedious people. But it might profit us to pull our heads from the sand and take a look at what other jurisdictions around the world are doing with energy development. (A well-known writer – though, his name escapes me – on the industry from, of all places, Calgary made a similar observation on New Brunswick CBC Radio’s rolling-home show last week).

Science Daily reports, “It’s less costly to get electricity from wind turbines and solar panels than coal-fired power plants when climate change costs and other health impacts are factored in, according to a new study published in Springer’s Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

“In fact – using the official U.S. government estimates of health and environmental costs from burning fossil fuels – the study shows it’s cheaper to replace a typical existing coal-fired power plant with a wind turbine than to keep the old plant running. And new electricity generation from wind could be more economically efficient than natural gas.”

Meanwhile, also according to Science Daily, “High school and college students got a recruiting call. . .to join the Solar Army and help solve one of the 21st century’s greatest scientific challenges: finding the dirt-cheap ingredients that would make sunlight a practical alternative to oil, coal and other traditional sources of energy.

‘Enough sunlight falls on Earth in one hour to provide all of the world’s energy – for 7 billion people – for an entire year,’ said Harry B. Gray, Ph.D., leader of the army. He is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. ‘If we can capture that energy and use it to split water, burning coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels will be history.’

Maybe. Maybe not. But even the thought is inspirational – which is more than I can say about oil.

Tagged , , , , , ,
Sep 13 2013
Leave a comment
Economy, Environment

Such a fine line: economy versus environment

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

This music industry icon, this erstwhile miner for a heart of gold, steps off the bandwagon just long enough to cluck his tongue and sample the air in beautiful, downtown Fort McMurray.

It looks like a nuclear test site and smells like one, too, says Neil Young: “The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuel (is) all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

What’s more, he told an American crowd the other day, “Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. . .a wasteland. . .The oil that we’re using here. . .they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”

Actually, there’s no need for atomic-era hyperbole. Good, old Fort Mac (population: 61,000) looks like Fargo, North Dakota, which is, in and of itself, bad enough. But I take Mr. Young’s point: The tar sands are despicable. Boo.

Among the celebrated elite, it’s a familiar refrain, gaining ever greater traction as U.S. President Barack Obama leisurely considers his next move in the Keystone XL pipeline kerfuffle. Indeed, the list of prominent “deathline” haters grows longer with each day that passes on the protest lines: There’s the Dali Lama and his pal, Al Gore; there’s Bishop Desmond Tutu and Sundance Kid Robert Redford; there’s actors Mark Ruffalo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kyra Sedgwick, and David Strathaim. All are wedded to the simple, if absolute, certainty that Alberta’s oil industry is killing the planet.

They are probably right. Still, no one in a position of authority ever looks at the long game of energy policy – not when the short game is so economically lucrative and politically profitable.

Consider the oft-repeated rejoinder of tar sands apologists to the environmental lobby’s claim that Alberta bitumen is dirtiest source of oil in the world: No, it’s not. Or, as Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver told The New York Times’s Joe Nocera recently, “That statement that the Keystone pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment is absurd.”

Mr. Nocera – a confessed proponent of the project – grabbed the baton from Mr. Oliver and, in his column, sprinted to the finish line:

“Oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim. Extraction technology has improved to the point where there is almost no difference, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, between sands oil and old-fashioned oil drilling. The government has insisted that the companies extracting the oil return the land to its original state when the mining is completed. Indeed, for all the hysteria over the environmental consequences of the oil sands, there is oil in California that is actually dirtier than the oil from the sands.”

All of which misses the bigger point – the one that celebrity eco-warriors, themselves, invariably fail to make: If you’re pointing a shotgun to your head, does it really matter what calibre of shell you’re using?

The world is hooked on oil. It’s going to stay that way until it runs out (not likely) or its economies collapse (increasingly likely). If Keystone fails to win presidential assent this time around – thanks, perhaps, to the pickets of the preeminent – it, or something like it, will roll out the next time around, or the time after that. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Just as there’s no point in pretending that anyone is giving serious consideration to the long-term economic benefits of the Energy East pipeline proposal for New Brunswick – though we might do ourselves a favour by curbing our crowing tongues for a change and spend a few minutes actually examining the post-construction-phase ramifications of, and the durable commercial opportunities generated by, the project.

After all, out here in New Brunswick, where we don’t lace our boots without a government shoestring, we’re not looking for a heart of gold.

Just the gold.

Tagged , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: