Oil at the first phase of separation from the sand is seen at the Suncor tar sands processing plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, in this Sept. 17, 2014 file photo.
(Todd Korol/Reuters)
Oil sands producers may have collectively breathed a sigh of relief on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent failure to get the premiers signing on to a national price for carbon emissions. However, domestic measures to reduce carbon emissions are the least of oil sands producers’ concerns when it comes to how actions to mitigate climate change will challenge their industry’s survival.
CALGARY – Imperial Oil Ltd. has revealed plans for a new $2-billion oilsands plant at a time its competitors have cancelled or deferred new projects to survive the oil price collapse.
Imperial, one of the largest oil and gas companies in Canada, announced Friday it had filed an application with the Alberta Energy Regulator to build a 50,000 barrel per day oilsands facility, which would extract oil using a new technique the company says would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent compared with existing projects.
Canada’s oil sands sector represents a crucial global supply to meet future crude demand, but only if producers can simultaneously drive down costs and slash greenhouse-gas emissions, the head of the influential International Energy Agency said Thursday.
Alberta has been capturing carbon for three decades. Yet, ask anyone who spends their days contemplating carbon capture and storage (CCS) about its future in the province and you’re likely to get similar responses from each: a small sigh, followed by descriptors like “disappointing” and “not good.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The sighing is no doubt related to the high ambitions for CCS under the Alberta government’s climate change plan of 2008.
Feb 25, 2016 - AltaGas announced today that the Douglas Channel LNG consortium has decided to halt project development.
AltaGas says the decision is based on "adverse economic conditions and worsening global energy price levels."
The Douglas Channel LNG project site was planned near Kitimat, on the north coast of British Columbia, and had been targeted to commence LNG exports in 2018.
We saw the delegates hugging each other as they walked out of the COP21 climate change talks in Paris back in December — but we had no idea what the agreement they reached meant for Canada.
Now we do. And it turns out Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall was quite right to be anxious about the future of our fossil fuel industry and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley may have been quite wrong in her assertion that Alberta will prosper — if she was talking about the oil and gas industry, at any rate.
Is Alberta dominated by the oil industry the same way Greece is dominated by the Eurozone?
To many of the Alberta governing party's long-time supporters it may seem so tonight.
Syriza, as readers will recall, was the leftist coalition led by Alexis Tsipras, elected to govern Greece in January 2015 by vowing to fight Eurozone austerity. Something changed, and in the end Prime Minister Tsipras and his party embraced the European Union's brutal austerity.
Albertans don’t need to be reminded that an economy built largely on oil extraction isn’t always smooth sailing. Amid 2009’s great recession, Alberta shed over 17,000 jobs, flatlining for most of 2010 before roaring back in 2011 with more than 100,000 new jobs. The job losses of 2015 — 19,600, according to Statistics Canada — are yet another bust in a boom-and-bust cycle that fractures communities.
