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…
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 It is much more accurate to say Nuclear Reactors HAD their problems in the past those serious issues are: Outdated.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…
The old DOT-111 rail cars carry about 700 barrels of oil but because of safety concerns they are being phased out for newer, safer DOT-117 oil rail cars which can carry about 675 barrels of oil. We will use 700 barrels as a round number to form a basis of comparison: 1 rail car tanker = 3.25 truck tankers = 700 barrels = 111,000 liters = 29,500 US gallons = 117,500 US quarts As you can see below there are…
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…
We have two versions (full and highlights) of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s speech to the Alberta Teachers Association conference in Edmonton in which she explains that the Trans Mountain Pipeline will not cause increased carbon emissions because: The demand for oil will increase through 2045 and that demand will be met by the environmentally disastrous Russia’s, Nigerian’s or Venezuelan’s if Canada does not produce it Unlike nearly every other oil producing jurisdiction on the globe, Alberta has set carbon emissions limits…
Pictures say a thousand words and that has never been more true than with the images used to explain the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX) project. News sources typically use massive stacks of pipe or gigantic multi-tier above ground pipelines as their backdrop for reporting on TMX. Humans ingest and trust what they see much more than what they hear. The reality is that the Trans Mountain Pipeline EXPANSION is just 61cm (24″ inches) in diameter that is buried underground…
The recent Federal Court decision holding up the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project makes for great political debate and emotional exaggeration but is not nearly as onerous as many people are make out. Put simply the decision said just two things: Consultation that has already been COMPLETED needs to respond to concerns, not just acknowledge them There needs to be a short study of the impacts of Tanker traffic in the Vancouver area Neither of these are hugely difficult or…
What Happens To Transformational Technologies Like Fusion When Even Governments Say It Will Take Too Long To Develop? The short video below explains how technology that can fundamentally change the world through things like limitless energy is something that few investors or even governments want to fund. In this world of short-termism in which elected officials can only see to the next election and CEO’s are only concerned about the next three quarters, there are some who are willing to…