Canada BS Thread

What? That doesn't even make sense.

The current oil prices were created by some short term thinking by OPEC. Basically, in order to extend the length of their payout and maximize the price per liter, OPEC started shorting the market a decade ago to drive up the price. It wasn't a massive short, OPEC made sure there was still enough gas at the pumps, but there wasn't enough to keep all the reserves full and that drove up speculation of a shortage which drove up price. All appeared well.

However, when you make something like oil worth over $100 a barrel technology races to catch up. There is simply so much money on the line at that point that any and all alternative technologies and sources begin receiving funding for development to increase supply. Deep water drilling, fracking, oil shale, and oil sands development technology literally jumped farther in 5 years than they did in the last 20 years before. My wifes uncle is a VP for Husky, a MINOR oil sands player. Want to know their Oil Sands R&D budget in 2012? It was close to 5 BILLION dollars. That's how much money was being pumped into finding ways to get oil out of the ground that couldn't be even 2 or 3 years ago. At $100 a barrel, almost any technology seemed feasible and once those technologies caught on they began to develop and produce oil at a pace out of North America not seen since the early 70's.

Suddenly OPEC was threatened because the west could supply it's own oil. Uh oh. That's not good. Want to know what they decided. It was time for a price war. It made sense. If their $100 oil plan had created the supply that was drowning out theirs then maybe glutting the market with oil would shut it off. What you are seeing now is the effects of that plan. It's working. Oil sands and deep sea wells aren't profitable at this level. The problem is though that fracking, and other technologies that were developed because of $100 oil, now exist that didn't before that make PLENTY of US oil available that wasn't before. That's why the USA is pumping oil like no tomorrow. They can because their cost is around $21/barrel. With shipping. That's sustainable against OPEC. Most of our oil costs far more than $30/barrel to produce. That's not competitive. That's the problem right now.

Obama, and climate change, had nothing to do with what happened. It was simple economics and some botched OPEC oligopoly price planning.

 

Canadians: when you buy a new Tacoma, what ID or documentation is necessary to drive your car off the lot? I'm an American who wants to buy a manual Off-Road and drive it back to the USA.

 

Start here:

http://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car

Then worry about what ID you have to bring. Honestly, as long as you have an drivers license, insurance, the money, and a license plate there is nothing stopping you from driving off the lot except MAYBE Toyota. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a moratorium on selling to US drivers license holders in Canada right now.

 

An International Comparison of Leading Oil and Gas Producing Regions - Environmental Regulation

That comparison is as of Dec 2013. NEB policy has been revised a few times since then though.

 

A quick skim of that pamphlet does not seem to suggest that regulation is choking the oil industry at all. Nor does it suggest that our regulations at that time were a reflection of USA attitudes towards our oil.

Also, bar charts really oversimplify things. Especially for an "opinion survey".

Just some quick observations of course.

 

Absolutely correct.

However the general theme of the article is Canada's unwillingness to allow Alberta to gain meaningful access to foreign and eastern domestic markets.

 

My explanation was directed towards this comment:

 

As for market access I am for that. As I've explained it baffles me why we can't figure out a process to get these pipelines done. I don't think it has anything to do with environmental responsibility. Quite honestly the technology is there, even for transporting bitumen, to reduce spill risks to near zero. At the port a combination of 3rd party oversight, harsh fines, habour pilots, and mandatory escort tugs could bring the risk of an incident to ridiculously low levels.

It all leaves me with the feeling that these protests from certain groups, not all, is again about one thing. Money. The first nations want more. BC wants more. The mayors of Quebec want more. Everyone wants maximum compensation for their "risk" in letting money, I mean oil, come into their neck of the woods. It's no different really than any other extortion racket. Exploit a weakness in the system and profit from it.

Again, just because that's true though, doesn't mean that there isn't fundamental flaws in the environmental review system. It simply means that there is more to the limited market access and pipeline problems than simple environmental concerns, over regulation, or extortion. I think it's a bit of all of that but blaming any one single thing is silly over simplification.

 

Coming up with a way to clean up bitumen in water would be a good start towards a tidewater solution

 

Alberta never got even 1/2 the Brent price due to quality of product but more so due to cost of transportation and lack of any customers other than US Gulf refineries. (who actually prefer our bitumen)
The main issue for me is the Obama focus on killing keystone in his war on carbon, while opening new off shore drilling areas off both east and west coasts as well as new off shore areas in Arctic Alaska. Canada was an easy target. Guess being allies, best friends and having a free trade deal meant nothing to him.
Trans Canada will sue successfully because they were denied free access to US customers. This was a clause the US insisted on putting in the free trade agreement so they had equal/unlimited access to our oil. They were not denied a permit for the 1 meter of pipe needed to cross the border due to anything but politics. Why did Obabma let them spend Billions on permits he had zero intention of approving? That just sucks.
The judges will agree.

 

Actually it would make zero difference to the anti everything crowd I know. And really do you think we know how to clean up regular crude? Valdez says not.

 

As a card carrying member of the left wing intelligentsia, I oppose this project for no particular reason.

 

When can we start

 

Can NAFTA or the TPP supercede a sovereign country's own approval process for cross border projects ? I hope not .

 

Likely yes. It's the same way you could, in theory, sign a land use deal for all right of ways on your land and then, when you try and protest the new battery going up next to your house, you find yourself in the wrong. Signing all encompassing agreements is sketchy, even for countries.

 

Actually, the refineries want both our crude and the new oil from US fracking. The US oil crude supply right now is unusually light which makes it difficult to run fractionating columns at anywhere near normal efficiency. By combining Canadian heavy weight crude and US light weight crude, well, you basically make a product that is extremely efficient to fraction out traditionally. That's also why you find trains carrying US light weight into Canada. Our refineries want the same, mixed, product.

@OZ-T what would be perfect is if we could combine our bitumen with US light crude (whatever it's technically called, my friends were trying to explain it and I forget the name) at Vancouver and ship that. It would be basically Sweet Crude. Not nearly as hard to handle as bitumen. However, that would require training up or piping in huge amounts of Oil from the USA... which would have it's own set of issues.

Obama did what was politically necessary. Plus it's not just him, it's his Republican congress, and to be honest he never had much say in law making when it came to further Gulf Oil development. Any executive decisions he would of made to block it would of been political suicide. Same with Keystone. He had to stand up somewhere where it wouldn't hurt normal Americans and Keystone was where he choose. By the time the courts even hear the case he'll be in retirement somewhere.

We are still allies. Canada trades more with the US than anywhere else. They are the only reason we have any manufacturing sector. In this case though we are getting screwed on oil. It's political. It sucks. It is the way the world works though. You have to do what's best for your party and not always what's best for the people who have no vote.

 

I'm pretty sure there was a similar lawsuit filed by an American gas company/oil producer for the sale of MMT fuels in Canada. MMT is a chemical used to boost octane rating. It is bad for the environment and hard on vehicle components like spark plugs and cat converters. The use of MMT was banned the States and Canada quickly followed suit by banning the importation of MMT. The company sued the Canadian government because the ban violated the company's access to Canadian customers.
So we have (maybe had? I don't know if it has changed) MMT fuels and the company got a large settlement from the Canadian government.

 

Interesting

http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/6471460

http://elizabethmaymp.ca/investor-state-treaties/what-happened-under-chapter-11-nafta

 

Thats correct, and we were fined heavily for not allowing access. Oz T should not have forgotten the lumber deal already.