Alberta’s rolling blackouts show we’re the frog being boiled.
Also:
Saskatchewan’s Top 10 oil producers in 2023.
A second LNG facility at Kitimat, Cedar LNG, is getting seriously closer to going ahead.
Indeed, companies like Baker Hughes are already crowing about getting contracts.
The member of parliament who on Feb. 5 introduced one of the most draconian laws against free speech (and that’s saying something in recent years) has decided not to run again in the next election. NDP MP Charlie Angus is calling it quits at the end of this term, after 20 years.
He’s the guy who wanted to ban promotion of fossil fuels, having introduced a private members bill which would have meant every ad on Pipeline Online, for instance, could incur up to a half million dollar fine.
Working through the periodic table:
Lithium in SK, Part 27: Lithium Bank sells Estevan area land to unnamed buyer
Those Lloydminster folks aren’t too happy about the carbon tax.
Nor are a bunch of other people happy about the carbon tax.
And regarding hydrogen and carbon in the form of methane and other natural gas liquids,
Pembina closes Alliance Pipeline deal with Enbridge
As a note, The Alliance Pipeline runs right through Saskatchewan. I started work on it three weeks after my May, 1999 wedding. I was the only guy on my road bore crew of 12 married once! Most were on their second marriage, a few on their third, one I think on his fourth. At that point you walk into a bar, find a woman you don’t like, and give her your house.
In six weeks, it’ll be 25 years for us. So that pipeline project has some meaning for me.
Can’t imagine why oil shippers demand explanation from Trans Mountain for pipeline cost overruns, can you?
B.C. First Nation and Western LNG partner to purchase natural gas pipeline project. Can they succeed in bringing a major pipeline in on time and on budget, or will they face the same perils as Trans Mountain (above) and Coastal GasLink? Will other First Nations do all they can to halt it, like GasLink? Will they destroy equipment and raid camps?
US Bureau of Land Management accepts bids for the sale of Federal Helium System. FYI the US Govt getting out of #helium is what’s driving Saskatchewan’s burgeoning industry
Saturn Oil & Gas has joined the multi-lateral bandwagon, having drilled two open hole multi-lateral wells that the Government of Saskatchewan announced an incentive for yesterday (shared yesterday)
I’ve been saying for over a year the Government of Saskatchewan needs to do something to increase drilling numbers. I’m wondering if this is it?
Also: Alberta’s shaking up its electrical grid by 2027. And in a related story, new rules for power generators in Alberta
Justin Trudeau may not have taken a “walk in the snow,” like his father did 40 years ago on this day, but Dustin Duncan took a walk in rain in front of Parliament, and decides we’re not remitting carbon tax to the feds.
This is the guy who, by a recently passed law, gets to be sacrificed on the cross for our carbon tax sins.
(The decision was clearly made before, but it makes good political theatre.)
No forecast for snow in Ottawa today, unfortunately. Maybe the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change changed the climate?
While voicing its opposition to federal oil and gas emissions caps, Saskatchewan goes to Houston to seek investment
Saskatchewan’s letter to Guilbeault opposing oil and gas emissions cap.
Saskatchewan’s letter to Guilbeault opposing Methane 75 emissions.
Danielle Smith goes all-in on revitalized sovereign wealth fund for Alberta. Saskatchewan had one, once, but that was 32 years ago. Details in story.
Quick Dick McDick: Climate Cult Megaspecial You gotta be $#!++!\ me
He even references “climate cult,” my favourite SDA category!
CJME/CKOM radio host Evan Bray visits the Estevan coal mine, and much learning ensues
The Friday before a long weekend, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault released his updates to the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations. This is the full update, verbatim.
In Pipeline Online’s continuing mission to ensure Canadians know exactly what Guilbeault is telling them, here’s his verbatim release on the Clean Electricity Regulations.
Remember what I said the previous week about taking out the trash day? Guilbeault did exactly that. Interesting, that.
And for something a little different, yesterday was Family Day. Not everyone gets to go sledding. While I took these photos three weeks ago, they’re pretty representative of what Family Day is to a lot of people in the oil sector – just another day.
Guilbeault’s proposed Clean Electricity Regulations have been slightly modified. This is the Canadian Press story. I’ll be working on this to have a lot more in depth next week.
In my editors note, I point out: Pipeline Online will have extensive coverage on this early next week, including reaction from the Saskatchewan government. The “Clean Electricity Regulations”, if implemented, will be one of the largest and furthest reaching policies in recent Canadian history, impacting almost every aspect of our society and economy.
I should point out the most important lesson I ever learned about government communications came from a first season episode of The West Wing, called Take out the Trash Day.
This announcement from Guilbeault came out early Friday afternoon. Imagine that.
https://twitter.com/s_guilbeault/status/1758547663958483250?s=20
Also:
Peter Zeihan makes some sense, kinda sorta, out of Biden’s LNG export approval pause.
And who needs small modular reactors when we can apparently just jump to fusion? Hasn’t fusion power been just 30 years away for something like 60 years?
This video series is a spectacular take on many of the energy issues of the day. It starts with the February, 2021, Texas blackouts, and goes on to tackle renewable power in the form of wind and solar. It doesn’t speak too fondly of coal, but goes broadly into the adoption of nuclear power. Canada and its experience with nuclear figures heavily into this series, including the influence of Dr. Chris Keefer, a Toronto ER physician who had lead the crusade to bring nuclear power back to the fore. And the series gets into why nuclear all of a sudden is in a renaissance after decades of being in the dumps.
This applies directly to Saskatchewan, where just last week, SaskPower inked a deal with GE Hitachi Canada to continue the development path of small modular reactors. And in that press conference, SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya, when asked by Pipeline Online how many reactors we’re going to build, said Saskatchewan’s grid is expected to grow from 5,400 megawatts currently to 13,000 to 15,000 megawatts by 2050. That’s about 2.5x what it is now. And nuclear appears like it’s going to play a huge part in that. So the issues presented in this series are very topical for this province.
Juice really highlights a lot of the issues Pipeline Online has been focusing on for the last two years. In particular, reliability trumps all, and wind and solar can only be relied upon to be utterly unreliable.
I strongly suggest anyone in the decision chain of Saskatchewan going nuclear – all MLAs, including cabinet and opposition, all executives, board and management of SaskPower, and union leadership and membership, take the time to watch this at some point in the near future. This is the reality Saskatchewan is rapidly heading towards.
This series was put together by Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver. Bryce one of the most astute energy analysts out there. You can follow his Substack at https://robertbryce.substack.com/
This was originally a feature, but broken up into manageable chunks and posted for free on YouTube. Each episode is around 22 minutes long. It’s definitely worth watching all five. All five videos are in the story link above.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! The meteor is on its way, and CBC just posted a critical story on electric vehicles. Pipeline Online had to share this one. And yes, I borrowed from Ghostbusters there.
In the meanwhile, charging those cars with solar power in Alberta would have been tough on Sunday at noon.
On the topic of cars, a Edmonton-area heavy equipment rental shop took the second largest Caterpillar dozer made and crushed a car with it, just because.
On Friday, the Biden Administration took a shotgun and fired a barrel into each foot of one of the biggest success stories in the American energy industry, one which kept Europe from going dark when the Ukraine war started. And here’s the Whitehouse’s backgrounder on it, verbatim, which reads like a description of how the Biden-Harris administration has applied a knee to the neck of the American energy industry.
(I’m not sure when they started doing this, but the Whitehouse press office continually refers to the Biden-Harris administration. Are they expecting someone to perhaps fall off the ticket between now and November? Like maybe Biden’s health won’t hold out and it’ll be a Harris presidential candidacy?)
Alberta’s electrical grid stood at the brink of blackouts Jan. 13, before pulling back in the nick of time.
It was the second evening in a row Alberta saw “grid alert” issued, but this time, it was a much closer-run thing.
Alberta’s electrical grid was in such peril of falling into rotating blackouts on Saturday night, the provincial government urged people to even turn off their bathroom fans, among other things.
Also, from Western Standard:
STIRLING: When magical thinking meets a polar vortex cold, hard reality follows
Shell is betting heavily on Canadian LNG. Not only is it the lead partner in LNG Canada, it just agreed to buy 1/6 of the offtake from its competitor up the coast.
Shell signs offtake agreement to buy LNG from second BC project
And for a REAL deep dive into carbon tax analysis, a Prince Albert, SK, based economist allowed Pipeline Online to reprint this in-depth report on how the carbon tax affects his SaskPower and SaskEnergy power and natural gas bills. It was originally posted on LinkedIn.
Energy, and the “energy transition” being forced upon Canadians by the federal government, is becoming the dominant story, affecting all our lives and everything we do. In his year-end interview with Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, Pipeline Online dives deep into the biggest energy issues of the past year.
This is Part 1: Fighting the Feds.
Part 2 will focus on addressing low oil drilling activity, despite decent oil prices.
Part 3 discusses the Clean Electricity Regulations and their impact, and widespread adoption of nuclear power.
Part 4 talks about lithium and helium development, and ends with Christmas greetings.
Enbridge sells Alliance Pipeline, Aux Sable to Pembina Pipeline
This is part of a continuing trend of Enbridge selling assets to enhance its American expansion.
I worked on almost every dirt-moving crew on the construction of the Alliance Pipeline, from 35 C below to 30 C above. I started on road bores, special projects, ditch, tie-ins, did a bit of backfill and eventually final cleanup. I started work three weeks after my wedding, and out of the 12 guys on my road bore crew bus, I was the only one married once.
Like or hate it, believe it’s a passing fad or the wave of the future. #ESG came out of nowhere about four years ago and now is at the forefront of concern for almost every larger business in the energy sector, and beyond. This Op-Ed by Deidra Garyk studies the Impact of ESG on the Energy Sector, Part 1. Watch for Part 2 tomorrow.
And along those lines, the Coastal GasLink project was an ESG nightmare, with protests across the country. This Canadian Press story says Police violated protesters’ rights in Wet’suwet’en pipeline blockades, Amnesty says
Also, oil prices are plummeting. This is not good, here, there or, apparently, in New Mexico
No. 2 oil-producing US state braces for possible end to income bonanza in New Mexico
Federal and Nova Scotia governments kill offshore petroleum project in name of “clean energy”. No more gas development. Don’t even try. But wind? You betcha.
And here’s an analysis of why. It has a lot to do with the fact Nova Scotia can still pay for its hospitals with natural gas money, just natural gas produced in Alberta and Saskatchewan. And it has more to do with Guilbeault announcing a defacto production cap by banning venting and flaring.
And along the topic of the undead, the federal regulator still isn’t done with stretching out the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline. What’s another $200 million per month delay?
As a side note, two years ago I ran into the consultant whose job it was to shut down, abandon and clean up this project. He was the company man looking after the drilling of the first lithium well in Canada, near Torquay, Saskatchewan. I never got around to writing a story about it, dammit. Not enough hours in the day.
And if anyone feels like asking CJME/CKOM why Zinchuk isn’t scheduled to do his regular energy spot the first Wednesday of the month, as he did with Gormley:
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Here are the second reading speeches on the Saskatchewan bill which basically tells the federal government to F off on the carbon tax for home heating, for natural gas via SaskEnergy. There’s a speech from the government, and NDP opposition.
In August, Steven Guilbeault released the draft Clean Electricity Regulations which mean to remake our entire country in just 11 years.
On Nov. 2, Saskatchewan told them where to go. Today, they said publicly how to get there.
Three stories:
‘It just isn’t possible’ – SaskPower Minister in-depth response to Clean Electricity Regulations.
SaskPower response to the Clean Electricity Regulations: ‘Not possible from technological, financial and logistical perspectives‘
Saskatchewan response to the Clean Electricity Regulations: Unaffordable, unconstitutional and unobtainable.