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)

Trudeau likes the idea of Canada. It’s just aboriginal Canadians that he largely hates:

A federal decision to stop issuing offshore oil and gas licences in the Arctic was made without consultation with the people whose economy stands to pay the price, Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod said Wednesday.
The leader of the territory south of the oil-rich Beaufort Sea said he heard about the new policy just two hours before it was made public Tuesday in a joint statement by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama.
McLeod said he is disappointed by Ottawa’s “unilateral” move, which he said has set back recent initiatives by Ottawa to give Canada’s territories more autonomy.
“We need to have northerners making decisions about the North that affect them,” McLeod said in an interview.

Microwave technology;

Developed by Qmast LLC, microwave technology is used for the extraction of oil shale, which is different from shale oil. Oil shale is found in rock formations that contain kerogen. One of the current extraction methods of kerogen has been strip mining because these are shallow formations. The extracted rock is then crushed and heated to high temperatures to liquefy the oil.
Qmast’s method concentrates a microwave beam equivalent to about 500 household microwaves to heat up an area that reaches approximately 80 feet from the wellbore. The crude oil then flows freely to the wellbore.

h/t Gagnon