Recently in Oil sands Category

Earlier this year, Luc Bouchard, the Roman Catholic bishop of St. Paul in Alberta, Canada, issued a pastoral letter in which he wrote that the environmental threat posed by the proposed future development of oil sands "constitutes a serious moral problem."

A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations doesn't address the morality of oil sands development. It concludes that greenhouse gas emissions related to development will pose no climate threat. (Bishop Bouchard addressed a much wider range of environmental concerns, including climate change). However, neither will expanded development be the energy security godsend that its advocates claim. The report, written by Michael Levi, a senior fellow at the Council, concludes that oil sands are "neither critical to US energy security nor catastrophic for climate change."

The infamous Section 526 of US energy legislation, which prompted concerns last year from Canadian officials that it would bar US government agencies from purchasing fuel refined from oil sands crude, does not appear to be worth talking about, at least for the time being.

"It certainly has not been an issue raised with me over the course of the two days of meetings that I had here," Jim Prentice, Canadian environment minister, told a press conference at the Canadian embassy yesterday.

Presidents and Prime Ministers are normally big picture people, so it's not surprising that when US President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met last week in Ottawa, the Canadian Embassy confirmed that they did not talk about Section 526.

For those who are blissfully unaware of obscure legislative references, Section 526 is a provision in the US Energy Independence Act of 2007. It prohibits Federal agencies from buying an alternative or synthetic transportation fuel produced from non-conventional petroleum sources if the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with that fuel (from production to refining to consumption) are greater than such emissions from fuel produced from conventional petroleum sources.

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation prior to his February 19 with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Obama didn't respond when asked if he considers oil sands "dirty oil." During the presidential campaign Obama pledged to break the US addiction to "dirty, dwindling and expensive oil."

Obama did acknowledge that oil sands "creates a big carbon footprint." The dilemma, he said, is "how do we obtain the energy we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change." Canada and the US "can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they are emitted into the atmosphere," he said.

US President Barack Obama's 6-hour trip to Ottawa on Thursday, while brief and lacking in the pomp and circumstance normally associated with presidential trips abroad, will arguably be one of the most important of the early period of his presidency.

Canada is the largest trading partner of the US, particularly in the energy and transportation industries. So how the two countries work out some particularly difficult issues running the gamut from the so-called "smart grid" technology in the power sector to carbon sequestration and cap-and-trade will have dramatic impacts in both countries for years to come.

Alberta's oil sands industry has taken considerable heat for its environmental sins, and now an ecclesiastical voice is added to the secular critics.

"I am forced to conclude that the integrity of creation in the Athabasca Oil Sands is clearly being sacrificed for economic gain," Luc Bouchard, the Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Paul in Alberta, wrote in a pastoral letter last week. "The proposed future development of oil sands constitutes a serious moral problem."

I went to Fort McMurray last year, though I doubt I was there even 24 hours. But even that short-view leads me to conclude that this brief CNN overview is pretty accurate.

One observation: this video may not be safe for children's viewing, if you've been telling your kids that formal education is the way to the top. Just watch; you'll see why.

There may not be a bigger non-issue in US energy than the much-ballyhooed fact that the US has not opened up a new refinery since 1976. It's made for a great sound bite, and could leave the average person believing the US refines the same amount of crude that it did 30+ years ago.

That's not true, of course. Expansions and so-called capacity creep all have contributed to the fact that in 1982, in the first week with available data from the US Energy Information Administration, US refiners put 11.7 million b/d of inputs into their refineries. Last week, it was 15.4 million b/d, and it's been as high as 16.4 million b/d.

It is all but required that when you visit the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, that you try to get your picture taken next to one of the giant ore haulers. You stand next to the tire, which towers over you, and whoever is viewing the picture gets some sense of how big these machines are. A driver of one is said to have described it in this way: think of going into your house, climbing the stairs, walking to a window and then driving the house.

Safety concerns have taken away all the fun, and unless you’re very important, you can’t get right next to the truck anymore. So on a visit to the oil sands, a delegation of Platts’ sales and editorial staffers got the next best thing: standing next to a tire set up solely for the purpose of shutterbugs. The tire in question here costs $60,000 apiece, and it’s not even the most expensive tire used at the site.

A more detailed account of the trip to the oil sands is described in the August 17 entry.

The Calgary Sun has always been that city's racier newspaper, a tabloid that unfailingly managed to find something fairly seamy about what otherwise looks like a relatively tame town.

Its website has numerous links, including one called jobboom.com; no mistaking that for what it is. It's a listing of the enormous employment opportunities that the explosion in Canadian oil sands production has helped to drive.