It Was The Yes Men

A hoax news release that claimed Calgary-based pipeline company Enbridge Inc. would use human hair to soak up future B.C. oil spills left the company fuming Tuesday.

Got an email from The Yes Lab a few minutes ago. Here's just the first bit:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2011

ENBRIDGE HAIR HOAX EXPOSED
Group responsible offers free haircuts at Enbridge HQ at noon

Earlier today, the world learned of oil transport giant Enbridge’s strategy for handling inevitable oil spills along its proposed pipeline through pristine British Columbian wilderness: mop it up with human hair.

And contact info:

CONTACTS:
Shannon McPhail (Smithers, BC), Canadian PERM spokesperson, 250-842-2494, shannon@kispioxriver.com
Rick Smith (Michigan), US PERM spokesperson: 269-425-1822, permkzoo@gmail.com
Sean Devlin (Vancouver) , The Yes Lab: 778.321.7306, sean@yeslab.org

Go get 'em, fellas.

Iggy On Oil

His promise to uphold and formalize a B.C. oil-tanker-traffic moratorium, a stance endorsed by environmentalists and about 80% of the B.C. populace, is damn smart politics, esp. if you see it as a natural counter-balance to his support for continued oil sands development.

That is: some in Alberta, like Ezra Levant, see the Northern Gateway Project as a means of getting tar-sands oil to other markets should the Obama administration impose clean-up measures, like a carbon tax, upon it. Make us live up, and we will send our oil overland to Kitimat and sell it to the Chinese Communists, is the message.

Except that Iggy's move would effectively kill the Gateway Project; so in effect the LPoC position is that the oil-sands must be developed but must not be allowed to escape (literally) their environmental responsibilities.

And while the measure may not play that well in Alberta, its B.C land through which the pipe-line must run, and B.C. waters that a spill would pollute. So it isn't really up to them, is it?

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.

Chinese Out, Gateway Pipeline (Hopefully) Dead

From Interfax China:

Shanghai. July 16. INTERFAX-CHINA - The China National Petroleum Corp. will bail out of a landmark oil pipeline project in Canada as well as reduce investment in other oil sand projects in the country due to insufficient support from the conservative Canadian government, a senior company official said during an industry conference held in Canada's resource-rich city of Calgary late last week.

This is actually good news, because all good Canadians should want the Gateway Pipeline project dead as a doornail. Forget about the environmental problems that arise when you run an oil pipeline through a bunch of mountains, and think of the larger issues around the "greening" of the tar sands. Right now the best hope for that lies not in Ottawa, but South of the border.
California, for example, has passed a clean gas law that requires cuts in carbon emissions through the entire life cycle of the product, from extraction to transportation to final combustion. In May, Ontario and B.C. got on board with this concept, signing agreements with Governor Schwarzenegger to only consider oil purchases from low emitting sources. Furthermore, national (U.S.) legislation with a similar intent may be as little as two years down the road.

Since so much energy goes into producing gas from the tar sands, this kind of legislation will pressure the players in the Alberta Oil Industry to get their act together. If they don't clean up their processes, they won't be able to sell their product.

Unless of course they have a pipeline to the Pacific that lets them sell dirty oil to the less finicky Chinese. No pipeline, no escape hatch. See?