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
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…
If you are worried about the environment you may be surprised to learn that virtually all rational energy environmentalists are pro-nuclear. This is a quite a surprise to many. The reasons are that while Nuclear Reactors have their problems… well, lets stop there. It is much more accurate to say Nuclear Reactors HAD their problems in the past those serious issues are: Outdated. Nearly all of the nuclear reactors in operation today were constructed between 1970 and 1985 and 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:…
As a resident of Alberta Canada, home of the third largest oil reserves on the planet, I know quite a few truck owners that tell me they will never want an EV Truck. Alberta has a tiny population with a massive land mass. We have just 4 million people spread over 640,000 kilometers and alot of that is mountain. This is truck country and I know from first had experience that truck owners equate electric vehicles with weakness. So why…
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…
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…
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…