Thar She Blos...Again!

Another Alberta pipeline springs a leak:


The clean-up is underway south of Edmonton after a pipeline leak on Tuesday afternoon. It happened  about 10 kilometres east of Red Deer on a line owned by Penn West Exploration.

The company says there was a drop in pressure in a produced water injection line. Employees found the spill in a canola field.  

The Penn West rep makes "produced water" sound like no big deal.  Wikipedia begs to differ.  Definitely not something you want on your Canola.

Blame Ontario

for Tar Sands in the tank:

...buried deep in Shell analysts presentation is the fact that Shell’s new jewel in the crown – its carbon intensive tar sands operations – made a loss in the first quarter of 2009, compared to a profit of $249 million in the same quarter last year.

[...]

On a wider note the figures show that Shell is failing to cover its capital spending programme, which is the biggest amongst its peers. In a huge business gamble, Shell is betting on capital-intensive and climate intensive projects such as a gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar and the oil sands in Canada to boost production from 2010.

If however, the oil price stays low, Shell may not have the revenue to develop them quickly enough. Moreover, if the carbon intensity of these projects are deemed to be too high, Shell’s whole business strategy could be in trouble.

Just this week, Shell was facing calls to disclose future carbon liabilities from its tar sands operations. The UK Co-operative Financial Services and environmental charity WWF-UK are launching a campaign for a legal requirement for companies including Shell and BP to include this information in financial reporting.

I predict that talk of building firewalls will slowly go out of fashion, to be replaced by talk of making a nice stew out of dog-food.

Economic Collapse Frees The East

Environmental activists are relieved by the indefinite shelving of an oil pipeline proposal that they say would make Ontario too dependent on "dirty oil" from Alberta and bring it to Quebec for the first time.

However, activists with Environmental Defence and ForestEthics are concerned the project put on hold by Calgary-based Enbridge could be resurrected in the future.

So they will go ahead Monday with the release of a joint report asserting the project would soon make Ontario totally dependent on Alberta's tarsands for energy security and would undermine the Ontario government's commitments to reduce carbon pollution.

The "Trailbreaker" project would have enslaved Ontario's energy future to Alberta:

Trailbreaker would reverse the flow of a pipeline that now carries crude oil imports from Montreal to refineries in Sarnia, Ont. Instead, Alberta tarsands oil would flow via Sarnia to Montreal and by pipeline to Portland, Maine, where it would be shipped to U.S. refiners by tankers.

"The impact on Ontario would be to force its refineries to rely exclusively on oil from Alberta, since other sources now imported from Montreal would be cut off," the report said. "Given that Alberta is running out of conventional oil, the proposal would mean that Ontario would receive its oil from the tarsands, which produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions as regular oil."

The project's collapse has been put down to current economic conditions. Note that the Gateway Pipeline, which would run West to Kitimat, has also run into trouble, and has been stuck in the "proposal" stage for awhile now. Some in the oilpatch have been hoping that this pipeline would allow the sale of oil to the Chinese, and therefore help Alberta avoid "greening" the tar-sands in response to any environmental initiatives from the Obama administration. With Trailbreaker also in hiatus, it looks like Alberta oil has no way to reach less finicky non-American buyers. Big Oil may have been trapped into acting in a environmentally responsible manner.

Illegal In Canada? Be Legal In Alberta

Not quite sure what this sign means, but the implications seem a bit ominous. Google the phone number and you find Excel Employment Tempro, which is an Etobicoke, Ontario based employment.

Doubt these guys are doing much for the health of the Canadian nation, although I have no doubt they're good at feeding bodies to the Oil Patch out there in the Wild West.