We spent many hours pouring over old records, press releases and news articles to generate this complete time line of all things Trans Mountain. Many of the entries are linked to specific websites as references. Entries without link were mostly taken from THIS file sourced from the now defunct BCWaters.org site. We also have picture gallery of both old and new Trans Mountain images HERE. 1947 Feb Oil discovered near Leduc (near Edmonton) Alberta 1951 Mar Trans Mountain Pipeline Company Company…
As you have no doubt heard, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has forced oil production cuts starting at 350,000 barrels per day in January 2019 and hopes to reduce those cuts to 95,000 barrels per day by the end of 2019. We wanted to know how much oil is that so we worked did the calculations. If a country produced as much as Alberta is cutting they would be in the top 40 oil producing nations. We estimate that Alberta will…
Most pundits say that by the end of 2019 the market would clear itself but the Alberta Government wants to clear the over supply and reduce the current massive oil inventories from about 35M barrels to somewhere near it norm of 20M barrels. So in an ideal world, both the 190,000 barrels per day that is being added to current inventory AND 15M extra barrels of oil in storage would all be gone by December 2019. If we drop 1.25M…
There is a fair amount of misinformation floating around the oil sector about the oil production cuts that Premier Rachel Notley announced on Dec 2nd 2018. Here are the facts in a simple FAQ format: 1 – Where did the number 325,000 barrels per day come from? Alberta estimates that there is about 35 million barrels in storage in December 2018 and that we are adding 190,000 barrels to that every day so they calculated that cutting 325,000 barrels per…
How many times can politician cry wolf before the electorate stand up and say, that is not “our way”: Conservatives believe in small government and limited regulation Liberals believe in larger government and substantial regulation or at least they used to: Alberta: United Conservative Party (UCP) Leader Jason Kenny is calling for the Provincial Government to actually step into the private sector and demand oil production cuts. The “right” would say the solution is to increase the royalty rates temporarily…
Below is a list of the of the six cars GM is dropping from production in 2019. All of these products make up just 8% of General Motors’ US sales and if you exclude the Cruze, that number falls to just 3.5%. If you exclude the Cruze and the Impala, the remaining 4 cancelled cars only provide GM with 1.7% of sales. There is a reason the stock market bounced GM up on this news. Do the math, GM is…
UPDATED: Jan 20 2019 – At first emotional pass it appears that there is little to be done about GM’s announcement they are closing the Oshawa Ontario factory, but there are options and there is work to yet to be done. Here is the list of thing that should be considered and quickly: 1 – Hope a Different Company Buys the GM Factory To Make Cars on Contract… Maybe Even GM’s In mid-January 2019 it became apparent that there are…
This short video shows that the price of oil you see on TV is far from what Canadian Oil Producers receive. As a basis for comparison we used Western Canadian Select (aka W.C.S.) which is a blend of several oils that is about 20% lower quality than the North American Standard oil West Texas Intermediate (aka. W.T.I.). If you want more information on what the different types of oil are and what they are worth, see our article: Oil isn’t Oil:…
In recent years the Olympics has had more and more citizens reject the hosting of the event in their city. When Calgary declined this week, it marked the first time in history that a former host city had citizens vote down a new bid. These are troubling times for the Olympic ‘Movement’: bid rigging scandals You really need to skim through THIS giant list of Olympic scandals to feel the baked in scale of Olympic corruption cost overruns on a…
When we watch the TV or read the newspaper we often see something like “OIL IS UP TODAY” but we really don’t know what that means because there are so many different types of crude oil, each with its own price. Below we briefly explore the 6 oil products that are common to Canadians and Americans and at the bottom of this article we show 60 crude oil types and their prices from around the globe. You can see that…
On Wednesday October 31st, The City of Calgary shaved less than 4% off the proposed Calgary 2026 Olympic Winter Games bid math by claiming saving in security and venue changes. While this is an improvement, the numbers just don’t add up because: Many of the numbers presented are in 2026 dollars but there is an ugly force called inflation that changes the values. Put simply 2026 dollars are worth much less than 2018 dollars, so you need more of them.…
This short clip from the author of “Prius or Pickup?” Jonathan Weiler, explains that political parties on the left and the right have stopped defining themselves by the size of government and instead focused in emotional responses to identity politics. The discussion uses the US system of Democrat vs Republican but it applies to nearly all parties globally. Political parties now energize there voters by vilifying the other side based on their identity: immigrant vs multi-generation citizen rural vs urban…
Today the former leader of the Alberta Wild Rose party Brian Jean published an op-ed in the Edmonton Journal explaining his view that Canadian courts have now seized too much power: Something is fundamentally wrong. Our courts, motivated by virtue-signalling and triggered by legal actions funded by foreign interests, routinely override the explicit wishes of our legislatures and have now claimed the powers to overrule the executive decision-making powers of cabinet. Mr. Jean does not point out that the courts are one…
UPDATE Nov 4 2018 – See our take on the new “lower” cost 2026 Calgary Olympics: Revised Calgary 2026 Olympic Bid Math is Fiction We answer the question of who pays the bill for the Calgary 2026 Winter Olympic Games by using two sets of official numbers and one set of very logical estimates. It is important to note that because there are so many unknowns including hundreds of millions of dollars in so called “soft-costs” (off-ramps, pre-bid expenses, unaccounted security,…
As you can see below oil sands cover an extremely large part of Alberta and that resource is going to be extracted. The question is how? The two most common ways of separate the oil from the sand in the Alberta Oil / Tar Sands is to boil it or put it under pressure while still in the ground. Oil that is on or near the surface is scrapped up by massive loaders and transported to ‘upgrader’ facilities that separate…
Take a look at the Canadian oil production forecasts below notice that the predictions from 2010 have been UNDER-estimated. As you can see even with the 2014 oil price collapse oil sands production just kept chugging along. Some have speculated that the tar/oil sands are like any other extractive industry and they will naturally produce less over time because the ‘easy’ oil is taken up first, leaving the more difficult and expensive oil to later years. Oil Sands production has…