It’s as though they want us to leave: The federal government is not subjecting foreign oil imported into Canada to the same environmental standards is has imposed on Western Canadian oil.
And I’d be good with that.

BC exports $600 million worth of aluminum to the United States each year. The proposed trade tariffs by the US would put thousands of BC jobs at risk, creating uncertainty for people and their communities. #bcpoli #cdnpoli

— John Horgan (@jjhorgan) March 6, 2018

Documents link Kinder Morgan Strategy Group to militant environmental activists

As the impoverished masses of oil-rich Venezuela know all too well, you also have to have a stable, predictable, competitive tax and regulatory regime. And right now, Alberta and Canada do not. “When an international investor sees that in Canada a single level of government aided by activist groups can stop a project that has been officially approved after years of regulatory process, they’re going to conclude that Canada is not a stable and reliable place to invest, that its risks are effectively on the same level as those of a Third World country,” says Questfire’s Dahl. “We’re starting to operate like a banana republic, but one that doesn’t even want to sell its bananas.”
[…]
“The provincial government claims their policies are not driving capital away,” says one Calgary entrepreneur. “But it’s a lie.” He notes that in the pre-Internet era, when documents moved by fax or courier, a provincial licence to drill a new oil or gas well was typically issued within seven to 14 days. Today, despite all parties wielding modern information technology, one month is typical and government regulators can take six months to issue certain well licences. In Texas, the same type of permit can be obtained within 24 hours of application.
Another example of regulatory sclerosis: for years Alberta has been tightening its restrictions on “flaring” or burning off unneeded natural gas that often comes up as an uneconomic by-product in an oil well. Flaring remains a common practice elsewhere, but even the world’s tightest flaring rules weren’t enough for Alberta’s NDP government, which now demands that literally any volume of gas be “tied-in”, or brought on production. Because the cost of doing so is prohibitive, the new policy has resulted in uncounted numbers of wells being shut-in and not producing oil (or generating government royalties). Next up are new federal rules requiring the capture of even minute leakages of methane, which will further raise costs at virtually any existing well, pipeline site or processing facility. Originally planned jointly with the U.S. when President Barack Obama was in power, the Trump Administration has dumped the rules, leaving Canada with yet another competitive disadvantage.

Read it all. But first, pour yourself a stiff drink.

Via Oilprice;

The bankruptcy of a small Canadian oil and gas company in 2015 and the following creditor claims have created a legal dispute over who should pay for abandoned wells and whether creditors should have priority over environmental cleanup in case of energy bankruptcies. The oil and gas industry is closely watching the lawsuit–which ended up at Canada’s Supreme Court last month–because it could set precedents for orphan wells remediation and who will pick up the tab.
The Supreme Court is likely to hear the case because a small company bankruptcy has become a major issue of federal insolvency laws and provincial energy regulations, according to legal experts.
[…]
If the Supreme Court hears the case, and if it sides with the previous court rulings, the AER may have to increase the orphan levy it charges from well licensees. But if Canada’s top court reverts the decision and potentially saddles lenders with liabilities of bankrupt companies, banks may start to price in that risk and charge more for extending loans to the oil industry.

But you can just call it “NDP”: Pacific Northwest LNG project will not proceed

Looks like we picked a bad time to fall behind the export curve.

Commercial development of the globe’s huge reserves of a frozen fossil fuel known as “combustible ice” has moved closer to reality after Japan and China successfully extracted the material from the seafloor off their coastlines.
[…] Commercial-scale production could be “transformative for northeast Asia, particularly for Japan, which imports nearly all its hydrocarbon needs,” said James Taverner, a senior energy industry researcher at IHS Market, a London-based consulting firm.

h/t Sask Watch

Hawaii’s sewage problem. Via Drudge.
Related:

In a February 2013 study, the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization revealed that the state renewable energy tax credit could cost $1.4 billion in lost revenue based on 1,100 megawatts of installed systems.

The world’s media treats new energy supplies like an infinite number of $100,000 prizes landing in your lap. We will never be short of energy, because there is always a new major discovery – Angola, Kazakhstan, Brazil, shale this and that, etc. – to meet rising demand. And they have been sorely needed, because oil demand has grown by 10 million b/d in the past decade alone.
These big discoveries are getting rarer and smaller, while the world continues to rely more and more on fossil fuels. All the major discoveries listed in the last paragraph combined don’t offset demand growth over the past decade, never mind offsetting natural declines. This fact remains true despite the ungodly furor made over renewable energy and electric vehicles, which are hardly gaining traction despite massive incentives and media hype. This fact also is not lost on hugely populous countries, particularly China and India, which are nervously eyeing the world’s oil supplies and buying up whatever crap comes on the market (apologies, Spyglass).

Which brings us to Canada…
h/t Ken (Kulak)