Shifting Sands Pts I-VII

http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-01-26-SS1 Shifting Sands, Part II: The Texas Connection The kinder, gentler energy superpower Jan 28, 2008 The Globe and Mail By DAVID EBNER AND BARRIE MCKENNA In Texas City, a small port town south of Houston near the Gulf of Mexico, a hub of refineries rises through the misty January air, billowing steam from scrubber towers. These refineries make up part of a sprawling industrial cluster in the Gulf Coast region that is better equipped than anywhere on earth to handle the gooey crude coming out of Alberta's oil sands. In a twisting turn of geography, geology and history, Texans are hungry for Alberta oil. As the U.S. seeks to decrease its dependence on crude from unstable regions and OPEC countries, and with the oil sands booming, Canada has supplanted Saudi Arabia as the leading supplier of crude to the U.S., claiming the No. 1 spot in 2004. Now, three major pipelines that would move Alberta oil all the way to Texas are under consideration, with a final decision on at least one likely within two months. A fourth pipeline is nearly approved to send almost half a million barrels a day to Illinois, Oklahoma and northern Texas — the first major extension of Canadian oil beyond the Chicago region. The push to develop major oil pipelines over thousands of kilometres from Alberta to Texas represents a major shift in the movement of Canadian oil. Growing shipments of Alberta crude to the U.S. for refining are deepening the two countries' mutual dependence. The U.S. now buys almost 100 per cent of our oil exports, and Canadian exports to the U.S. could increase to 3 million barrels a day by 2015, from roughly 2 million barrels a day currently. For the Americans, it can hardly flow fast enough. "The world's a more dangerous place these days; having our friend to the north getting us some crude is good," said Lane Riggs, a vice-president at Valero Energy Corp., an independent company that refines upwards of 30,000 barrels of Alberta crude a day and is hungry for more. ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-01-28-SS2 Shifting Sands, Part III: Why Cape Breton shakes in the echo of this distant boom Jan 29, 2008 The Globe and Mail By SINCLAIR STEWART NEW WATERFORD, N.S. — When Frankie Morrison wanted to remodel his kitchen, he didn't take out a loan, or dip into his retirement savings. Instead, the 53-year-old father of three followed in the footsteps of his son, his eldest daughter, his brother-in-law and just about every other working-age man in this former coal-mining town: He headed west for a spell, to take part in the Great Economic Miracle known as the oil sands. “I came home with $9,200 in my pocket after six weeks,” he explained, flashing a $200 watch his employer gave him for avoiding accidents on the job. “My buddy just came back and he made $43,000. He bought a four-wheel drive, put new cupboards in his home, a new kitchen and new flooring. As a fella says, you make hay while the sun shines.” The problem is, Mr. Morrison was making hay in Alberta while he was employed as the town councillor for New Waterford, a small community perched on the eastern tip of Cape Breton Island, near the mouth of Sydney Harbour. The local media discovered his side-act and pointed out he was still receiving a weekly travel stipend from the government (he paid the money back, saying it was an oversight). Mr. Morrison was scarred enough by the experience that he doesn't plan to return to Alberta any time soon, but his constituents are showing no such reluctance – in fact, they're heading out in swarms. New Waterford, population 6,500 and falling, embodies one of the less remarked-upon implications of the oil sands bonanza: a profound social and demographic shift in the small communities that furnish so much of the project's labour force during its massive construction phase. So many of New Waterford's men are working out of town that the fire department can't recruit volunteers and the dart leagues are foundering. The local high school is having a difficult time finding coaches. A great number of children are being raised by their mothers. And finding a plumber or electrician is next to impossible. Meanwhile, some of the youth heading west in search of jobs are staying there, exacerbating the town's attrition and raising questions about the future sustainability of basic services. “There's hardly a household you can go by without running into someone working in the oil sands,” Mr. Morrison says. “There's a lot less men around. It's unbelievable. They're either getting ready to go or they just came back. In the 40 to 50 group, they're all out there.” ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-01-29-SS3 Shifting Sands, Part IV: Life on the cold side of the country's hottest economy Jan 30, 2008 The Globe and Mail By GORDON PITTS In the rolling farmland around Derwent, Alta., the fields are littered with what look like oversized pop cans. These stubby storage tanks contain heavy oil that has been pumped from the ground and is waiting to be trucked away – much of it to the big Husky Oil upgrader in Lloydminster. The tanks are not a pretty sight – they lack even the stark imagery of the classic oil well – but they are money in the bank for the farmers who till this undulating Alberta ground. For a farmer, the extra few thousand dollars a year from a single well might buy a piece of equipment, some groceries, or maybe pay off a bit of the debt from a hard life on the land. “It all goes back into the farm,” says Peter Harasiuk, 71, who collects about $20,000 a year from eight small oil leases to backstop a beef operation that has been depressed by years of low prices and the fallout from the BSE scare. ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-01-30-SS4 Shifting sands, Part V: Frugal Norway saves for life after the boom Jan 31, 2008 The Globe and Mail By DOUG SAUNDERS STAVANGER, NORWAY — To stroll along the harbour of this pretty town on Norway's North Sea Coast is to follow the history of an economic explosion. To the south, the old wooden canneries are still processing herring and cod, the commodities that until a few decades ago were the mainstays of Norway's poor, austere economy. Across the harbour, the constant movement of enormous cranes and construction ships is evidence of the great North Sea oil boom that has turned Stavanger into a high-rent boomtown and Norway into one of the world's wealthiest nations. The streets of this fishing town are now lined with luxury-goods shops and packed with highly paid foreign workers. But further from shore, you will find a third economy, a more surprising one that has nothing to do with oil or fish. In one big building just outside of town, a local firm called HighComp is turning out 10-metre-wide housings for huge wind-turbine generators. “We're doing our best business in parts of the economy that have nothing to do with oil or fish being pulled from the sea,” said owner Helge Rasmussen, 34. His plastics firm's wind-power division built $4-million worth of housings last year and has completed deals across Scandinavia and northern Europe. The world's largest natural gas platform, Aasgard-B, was partly assembled near Stavanger at a cost of $1.4 billion, then towed into the North Sea. Closer to the harbour is Laerdal Medical, which makes life-saving devices such as defibrillators and medical simulators for export to 22 countries. Its profits grew by 10 per cent last year, even though Norway's currency has a high exchange rate. “We had our best year ever last year, and it was 97-per-cent exports, including difficult markets like China,” said Tor Morten Osmundsen, the company's chief executive. These companies are no exception. Across Norway, the oil boom is being paralleled by record growth in the non-petroleum, export-driven economy. In November, Norway's non-oil private-sector economy reported quarterly growth of 1.9 per cent, the equivalent of a 7.6-per-cent annual growth – an astonishing economic performance, beating even the growth of oil and gas exports. ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-01-31-SS5 Shifting sands, Part VI: The climatic costs of rapid growth Feb 01, 2008 The Globe and Mail By ERIN ANDERSSEN Two Fridays ago, a bigwig from the Suncor oil company sat at Wayne Groot's kitchen table, where the window looks out over his cherished potato fields. They chatted about their kids, and Mr. Groot, not being the lawyer-fetching type, served tea. But it wasn't long before the conversation turned to the true reason for the visit: Suncor wants to buy the Groot land – in particular, the patch upon which the family bungalow sits – to build an upgrader that will take the bitumen travelling from the oil sands up north and turn it into synthetic crude for the thirsty markets down south. The night before the visit, Mr. Groot, 47, had a restless sleep. But then he's been suffering waking nights for two years now, ever since the land agent first showed up and slipped a big number his way for the acreage he'd always imagined passing on to his kids. He doesn't want to sell; his family has been farming the rich soil northeast of Edmonton for three generations. It pains him to think of smokestacks plopped on some of the finest agricultural fields in the country. Greenpeace activists unveil a huge protest sign in Edmonton to coincide with the opening of a session of the Alberta legislature in November. But he knows that everything is headed in that direction, as relentlessly as the bitumen flowing down the pipes from Fort McMurray, where 42,000 hectares of nearby boreal forest have already been hacked so raw and bare that people say they don't like to fly over it any more. And to think that when he was a boy, on vacation with his parents, he'd once been excited at the sight of Suncor's busy oil sands mine. Back then, Suncor was on its own, pushing out 50,000 barrels on a good day. Now, with daily production at 1.2 million barrels and growing, and 40 companies with a stake in the sands, the problem has drifted into Mr. Groot's backyard: Pending provincial approval, there are plans to build as many as 10 upgraders within a few kilometres of his farm. “We're exploiting this province way too fast,” says Mr. Groot. “In 50 years, we will know a lot more about what this has done. But then there won't be any more land left.” ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-02-01-SS6 Shifting Sands, Part VII: Looking for solutions to the carbon conundrum Feb 02, 2008 The Globe and Mail By SHAWN MCCARTHY At his lab in an industrial park in Edmonton, Bill Gunter is exploring how carbon dioxide reacts with the crude oil molecules that are drawn from the Leduc reef near Redwater, Alta. The Alberta Research Council scientist is a veteran in the arcane science of CO{-2} injection, in which carbon dioxide is shot underground to coax stubborn oil and gas molecules out of geological formations where they have been trapped for hundreds of million of years. He is working with Calgary-based ARC Energy Trust, which is proceeding with a pilot project to boost oil and gas production from its Redwater deposit by flooding it with carbon dioxide. But there is a new urgency to the research. Now, Dr. Gunter is just as keen to ensure the carbon dioxide remains trapped underground as he is to enhance the recovery of ARC's valuable oil and gas deposits. The researcher is also hunting bigger game: He is studying the reef to determine the feasibility of permanently sequestering as much as one billion tonnes of CO{-2} in its structures. ARC's Redwater site is strategically located just a few kilometres from the vast complex of existing and planned refineries, petrochemical plants and oil sands upgraders that will make northeast Edmonton one of the country's CO{-2} hot spots. In essence, the idea is to turn their smokestacks upside down – pumping the carbon dioxide underground rather than into the atmosphere. “We've got the perfect conditions in Western Canada – excellent storage potential, a large source of CO{-2} and a market for it in enhanced oil recovery,” he said in an interview in Edmonton. What's lacking at the moment, he added, is the economic incentive for companies to invest the billions of dollars needed to build an integrated carbon capture and storage network. ... http://dogwoodinitiative.org/newsstories/gm-2008-02-02-SS7

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