The numbers of oil tanker rail cars being shipped in 2019 and projected for 2020 and beyond are truly staggering. That got us to thinking about how long a train would they make and the results were quite interesting. If all the rail cars carrying crude oil just in 2019, largely from Western Canada, were connected in a single train they would be over 1400 kilometers. That is 50% longer than the distance from Calgary to Vancouver: a crude oil…
With all the hype surrounding Telsa, Cadillac and Uber‘s autonomous driving technology you can be forgiven for thinking that the auto industry is developing dozens of unconnected standards. In fact most of the major players are not only sharing patents, they are actively partnering with each other. The cost to develop self driving technologies would make in-house development consume a prohibitively long time in the globally competitive world of transportation. Below is a list and description of some of the…
It will come as no surprise to anyone in the oil sector, or involved in the stock market that Canada exports nearly all of its oil to the United States. What may be surprising is some of the secondary markets. For instance, you can see in the graphic below that The Netherlands and France are Canada’s second and third largest export markets for refined oil (i.e. gasoline, diesel…) Click to expand graphic 2017 Exports From Canada Click to expand…
The City of Toronto has the largest transit system in Canada that includes 2200 buses and they are now testing 10 fully electric units from each of New Flyer (Canada), BYD (China), and Proterra (US) Here are the numbers: 25% more reliable 30% few parts less items to inventory and manage saves money 25% lower maintenance costs 60% quieter which is a big deal for drivers and communities 75% reduction in energy costs $32,000 /bus /year energy savings $70 million…
It is oft said by those who disapprove of carbon taxes that: Carbon taxes are ineffective Carbon taxes target the wrong people The Canadian Federal Government does not have right to impose a carbon tax All three of these statements are demonstrably incorrect. University of Ottawa Professor of Law and Economics, Stewart Elgie, explains that the dissenting judges in the Saskatchewan and Ontario carbon tax cases are not disagreeing with the principle that the Federal Government has the right to…
Every year since 2000, notable pundits and real companies have claimed that next year is the Hydrogen’s year. It certainly looks good on television. Real car companies like Honda, Toyota and GM produce a few thousand hydrogen test vehicles (so called FCV’s or Fuel Cell Vehicles) and make slick commercials with pure water dripping out of tail pipes in front of endless green fields: The promise of hydrogen is indeed intoxicating. It is very easy to overlook its massive problems…
UPDATED: July 21 2019 Since the start of the 2019, there have been many important events in the Trans Mountain Pipeline saga and it is easy to get lost. To clarify the issues we have appended the following entries to our master list “Complete Trans Mountain Pipeline and Expansion Timeline from 1947 to 2022” 2019 Jan 15 100 First Nations groups meet in Calgary to discuss purchase of Trans Mountain 2019 Jan 21 Trans Mountain submits report to NEB proposing…
If you live in Alberta, BC, Ontario… ok… Canada, or the US or UK or Australia… ok… if you live on planet earth, you have heard about Carbon Taxes. Those that are for them claim they will cure all environmental ills and those against claim they are just another government tax grab. We dug into the facts and came up with 5 Myths about Carbon Taxes we thought you would find interesting: MYTH 1 – Carbon Taxes Don’t Change Behaviour…
In this short video we took a 10 minute discussion about the Canadian economy an focused on the discussion about how Quebec’s SNC Lavalin is treated so differently from Western Canada’s Oil and Gas industry. If you have the time, the full discussion is quite interesting and you can watch it here on the BNN Bloomberg site: PART 1 and PART 2
The “Oil Curse” or “Curse of Oil” or “Resource Curse” is the net negative outcome that is seen with any single industry that takes over a geographic area. The central idea is that when oil is discovered in an undeveloped land, like rural Africa, the initial promise of great wealth results in rapid development and that leads to what economists call ‘externalities’. Externalities are charges that should be calculated as part of the cost of development but instead are pushed…
There is a lot of conversation around various sources of pollution but many of them have no context so you really can’t get a mental grip on how serious the problem really is. Below is a chart we built with data collected by the University of Calgary. We hope it will help you put things in perspective. This data is specific to Canada in 2015 and while the numbers are shown in the outermost ring and in the table below,…
Three days ago Linda Mcquaig wrote an article in the Toronto Star saying: Trudeau should consider buying GM and making electric cars …Yet, oddly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed no such careful consideration when he promptly jumped in with 4.5 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the leaky, 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline last spring, declaring it “in the national interest” to ensure the pipeline’s expansion after the corporate owner threatened to back out of the project. And taxpayers could be on…
Most casual observers hear sound bites and web clips talking about coal jobs coming back to the United States and think that it must be happening, but it just isn’t. The Trump EPA and other regulatory bodies have notably deregulated the coal business, but you can’t sell what people don’t want. In this case ‘people’ are the companies that produce electricity, and they don’t want coal. Power companies have turned toward a much more stable form of energy input that…
Below are the biggest conventional oil discoveries of 2018 grouped by the country they were found in. As you can see, these top 10 countries alone found more than 6 Billion of Barrels of Oil Equivalent. Those that want to “keep it in the ground” are just not realizing that oil is a global commodity. As large as Canada and the US are at producing it, if we don’t others will. That means blocking pipeline like the Northern Gateway, Energy…
This gallery of images has been collected from old reports, news items and published content from various governments covering the history of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Expansion from 1950 to 2019. You may also be interested in our Complete Trans Mountain Pipeline and Expansion Timeline from 1947 to 2021. Mouse over any graphic for a description or click any image to enlarge it
UPDATED: JULY 19, 2019 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…