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Canadian oil extraction is ‘extraordinarily dirty’ process, Obama says
Keystone XL pipeline vetoed by president in February
U.S. President Barack Obama has some less-than-laudatory words for Canada’s oil industry in a new example of his increasingly critical take on the oilsands.
He was asked about the Keystone XL pipeline during a town-hall session Friday — and he launched into an explanation of why so many environmentalists oppose it.
“The way that you get oil out in Canada is an extraordinarily dirty way of extracting oil,” Obama said during the event at a South Carolina college.
“Obviously,” he added, “there are always risks in piping a lot of oil through Nebraska farmland and other parts of the country.”
Obama has recently taken to dismissing the Keystone XL pipeline, playing down its benefit for the American economy. But his remarks Friday at Benedict College were notable in that they were aimed at the industry itself.
Keystone veto
It came during a question-and-answer session where a student saluted him for vetoing a bill to build the pipeline: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” said the questioner. “You are what we hoped for.”
Obama replied that his decision to veto the bill wasn’t the last word on the matter. He said he hasn’t made a final decision. But then he proceeded to launch into a statement on climate change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
2015: The Year We Turn Away from Tar Sands
2015: The Year We Turn Away from Tar Sands
In 2014 Naomi Klein popularized the term “blockadia” in her book This Changes Everythingusing the term as a sort of catch-all to describe the grassroots insurgency emerging across the globe in the face of extreme energy development. This past year also saw the continued desperate push by tar sands peddlers to build more pipelines, new mines and rush to dig up every last drop of tar sands crude. Thankfully, community opposition from the source to every coast (and even across the Atlantic in Europe, where protests met the arrival of the first shipment of tar sands to Europe) has risen up. As we leave 2014 and look forwards to 2015, here is a snapshot of the global movement to stop the tar sands.
The Source
Just a few short years ago the Northern Alberta tar sands were a little known unconventional oil reserve. Not anymore, thanks to the tireless efforts of activists & community leaders from Indigenous communities downstream of the tar sands. Projects like the Healing Walk, the final walk that happened this past June, have brought global awareness to one of the world’s largest and most dangerous pools of carbon.
This year saw three major tar sands projects shelved. Shell, Total and Stat-Oil all suspended projects that previously had been seen as “done deals” because of a lack of market access, financial uncertainty and rising opposition. With the falling price of oil, and the world waking up to the reality of the carbon bubble, this could be just the beginning for financial trouble in the tar sands. In 2015, new projects like Teck’s Frontier Mine – the largest open pit tar sands mine ever proposed – could become a litmus test for the future of new tar sands developments, and a turning point to stopping tar sands at the source.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canada: A Microcosm Of The Ultimate Effect Of Low Oil Prices?
Canada: A Microcosm Of The Ultimate Effect Of Low Oil Prices?
Canada’s economy, lately driven in large part by oil, is a classic example of the old see-saw axiom: Downward pressure in one place creates upward pressure in another.
In this case, the bad news of low oil prices for the provinces of Alberta, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan, which until recently were enjoying an oil boom, becomes good news for Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
Alberta is a good model for what’s begun to go wrong in Canada. Already, three huge oil companies have canceled oil sands projects there: Shell of Britain at Pierre River, Statoil of Norway at the Corner oil field and France’s Total at the Joslyn mine. And more cancellations are expected as what feels like a non-stop drop in oil prices drives even more energy companies to postpone or even cancel projects.
Related: How Broken Are The Energy Markets?
The reason is that Alberta, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan have been experiencing a boom not in oil, but in oil sands, sandstone impregnated with crude oil. While shale oil is expensive to extract, oil sands are expensive to clean. And at the current average price of crude, which is now just above $50 per barrel, both forms of oil are becoming less and less profitable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Flashpoint Issue 2015: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Environment News Service
Flashpoint Issue 2015: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Environment News Service.
WASHINGTON, DC, December 29, 2014 (ENS) – A renewed battle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is shaping up for the new year in North America.
The Republicans, who favor the Alberta-Gulf Coast pipeline because of the jobs and energy security they say it will create, will have a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since TransCanada Corp. filed an application for the pipeline six years ago.
They plan to bring up legislation early in January to force President Barack Obama to sign the required Presidential Permit for the pipeline that declares it to be in the national interest. The Permit is needed because Keystone XL would cross an international border.
The proposed 1,179-mile (1,897 km), 36-inch-diameter pipeline would carry diluted bitumen from Hardisty, Alberta, and extend south to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would join existing pipelines to carry the dilbit to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. The refined product is planned largely for export.
Obama says he is waiting for a lawsuit over the pipeline route in Nebraska to be settled, but has signaled that he views Keystone XL as a threat to international efforts to limit climate change.
We Forget All Too Fast Just How Quickly It Can Hit The Fan | Zero Hedge
We Forget All Too Fast Just How Quickly It Can Hit The Fan | Zero Hedge.
Currently there is probably no other great divide in opinions than the current state of oil and all it entails. (well maybe gold but that’s for another column)
I believe there’s not only two sides to this story but there is also a very legitimate concern for the two-sided sword that can be wielded – by both sides. And again, in my opinion, both have very valid reasons for optimism as well as concern. I don’t believe they are mutually exclusive.
Today we have what many would call an oil boon in not only the U.S. but Canada as well. Together the current debate falls along two fronts.
First: Is there really as much there as they believe there is?
And second: If so can it be extracted at a price bearable to both producers as well as consumers?
There seems a real split right down the middle and both sides make very good arguments. Who’s right and who’s wrong is yet to be seen. However, what does not need to be borne out any longer is the fact that the OPEC cartel believes there’s a real cause for concern. And that is a very positive byproduct to come forth from this whole debate.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Kinder Morgan leaves Burnaby Mountain in win for pipeline protesters – Waging Nonviolence
Kinder Morgan leaves Burnaby Mountain in win for pipeline protesters – Waging Nonviolence.
On the morning of November 28, after weeks of sustained protest, energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan packed up the equipment it had planned to use in the construction of a new pipeline on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, and left without finishing the job.
Weeks earlier, the company had legally declared a “no protest zone” — valid through December 1 — to keep protesters away from the mountainside construction sites on the grounds that their presence would present a safety hazard and undue expenses. When that wasn’t enough, they filed an application with the British Columbia Supreme Court to extend the injunction for another two weeks. But the court rejectedtheir application, when it was revealed that Kinder Morgan had provided the wrong GPS coordinates for the injunction zone. As a result, charges were also lifted from the over 100 people arrested for civil contempt due to a lack of clarity around where they could and could not be on the mountain.
Most importantly, the ruling means that Kinder Morgan can no longer continue construction on the site, as it has no legal grounds to do so. According to Reuters, the project would have more than tripled the volume of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, which transports an estimated 300,000 barrels of tar sands oil daily through Alberta and British Columbia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy
Letter from a petro-state | openDemocracy.
Over a year ago, a colleague at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Homer-Dixon, penned a compelling opinion piece for the New York Times in which he addressed, from a Canadian perspective, the debate surrounding the future of the planned Keystone XL Pipeline. If built, this pipeline would transport unprocessed, environmentally toxic Alberta tar sands bitumen to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, Illinois and Oklahoma. Given the fact that Keystone has recently just failed, again, to pass the House, it is worth returning to the question raised by Homer-Dixon: is Canada becoming a ‘petro-state’? For Homer-Dixon, a state could be defined as a petro-state if virtually all of its main features could be ever more narrowly geared to the development of this single sector: non-renewal energy. This narrowing has deleterious implications for innovation, economy and democracy. Let us address each of these in turn.
If we understand basic research in science to be directly related to innovation insofar as many forms of technology and their application stem not from research in applied science per se but from basic research, then in Canada we have seen specifically a drastic diminution in a substantive commitment to technical innovation. Two years ago, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government announced that it would only fund science with determinant applicability, which is to say, those forms of sciences that could be directly marketable. Moreover, it has actively muzzled government scientists and librarians, severely limiting what they can and cannot say in public. For Karl Popper, the “open society” was a society in which there existed a robust culture of “conjecture and refutation” which constituted the very condition for the possibility of scientific innovation. That is, scientific truth-claims are those claims that can stand the open test of evidence-based falsifiability by other scientists and the public at large.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
