Category: Energy policy
Energy policy
“Edmonton – Where’s the Boom?”
By Graham Hicks
January 17, 2023
We live in strange times here in Edmonton.
Every other time we went through high energy price cycles – when oil was running between $100 Cdn to $130 Cdn - Edmonton boomed.
Restaurants and clubs were opening every week, packed from the moment they opened their doors. The fun zones of the city – Old Strathcona, the west end of downtown – pulsed with energy. Money gushed through town. If you wanted a job, you got a job. Well-paying too.
At times Edmonton and Calgary led the country in rising real estate prices, low vacancy rates and expensive rents.
It’s been a year now – since the start of 2022 - that oil and gas prices had the big rebound.
But the city still seems to be in a post-pandemic lethargy. Pedestrians in the party zones are few and far between. A depressing number of quality restaurants have gone out of business. The “for lease” ...
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Downtown Edmonton is seen from Ada Boulevard near Rundle Park in Edmonton on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.Ian Kucerak / Postmedia, file
The glass is half-full, not half-empty.
Never waste a good crisis.
From the ashes, the phoenix is reborn.
Positives can arise from this unprecedented economic emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, impossibly low oil prices and forever-delayed resource development.
The biggest positive? A shattering of conventionality.
For decades, Alberta made half-hearted efforts to innovate and diversify beyond oil and gas. It never really happened. It was too easy to make a ton of money from oil and gas.
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Today, these last few weeks, it has hit home. Either we drastically change, or we die.
Every other jurisdiction in Canada, and around the world, faces a similar challenge. If we are all rebuilding from ground zero, Alberta looks really good.
Our population is young, strong and talented, supported by excellent educatio ...
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The Aspen Oil Sands Project, Imperial Oil’s $2.6 billion, new in-situ oilsands project will eventually produce 150,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd). It is under construction.
Foster Creek Oil Sands Expansion Project — Cenovus — $2 billion, adding 40,000 bpd — under construction.
Lewis/Meadow Creek East/Meadow Creek West SAGD Oil Sands Projects — Suncor — $2 billion, around 200,000 bpd from different projects — proposed.
Narrows Lake In Situ Oil Sands Project — Cenovus — $1.6 billion — 130,000 bpd — proposed, currently deferred.
What is our problem here?
Why the tears and teeth-gnashing over the indefinite postponement of the TECK Frontier open-pit bitumen mining proposal in the oilsands, when environmentally acceptable in-situ oilsands projects are lined up around the block?
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A quick oilsands refresher: There are two ways of extracting heavy oil (bitumen) from the oilsands, open-pit mining a ...
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Robyn Luff, MLA for Calgary-East poses for a photo in her Calgary office on Aug. 20, 2018.Al Charest/Postmedia
DOES ANYBODY KNOW THESE PEOPLE?
When the Alberta NDP government was elected in May of 2015, the same question reverberated through business circles. “Does anybody KNOW any of these people?”
Outside of their own constituencies, you still hardly see or hear from those NDP MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly) who are not cabinet ministers.
Representing Metropolitan Edmonton constituencies for the NDP are Erin Babcock, Jon Carson, Estefania Cortes-Vargas, Lorne Dach, Nicole Goehring, Trevor Horne, Jessica Littlewood, Rod Loyola, Annie McKitrick, Chris Nielsen, Marie Renaud, Heather Sweet, Bob Turner and Denise Woollard.
Does anybody even recognize their names? The only non-ministerial Edmonton NDP MLA with any kind of public profile is Edmonton Centre’s David Shepherd!
Now we know why. Calgary MLA Robyn Luff, kicked out of the NDP caucus for spilling confidenti ...
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By GRAHAM HICKS
I have been to a wind farm, watched the blades on 80-metre-tall wind turbines turn lazily in the late-February sun.
In a very gentle 5.4 km/h wind, 16 megawatts (MW) of electricity were being generated — wind converted to electricity at each tower, fed through underground cables to a substation, then fed into the provincial power grid.
In that lazy wind at Capital Power’s Halkirk Wind Farm about 30 kilometres east of Stettler, 83 towers each generated 230 kilowatts (kW) of power ‑ enough to perhaps power my neighbourhood at that very moment.
Halkirk is impressive — the 83 wind turbines scattered across 60 square kilometres of working farmland are so quiet (at least in low winds), so grey, so clean against the blue sky — dotting the landscape around the village of Halkirk like ghostly sentinels.
The technology and know-how are all imported. The global wind-farm company Vestas Wind Systems, headquartered in Denmark, manufactures, assembles, maintains and ...
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One really shouldn’t be so foolish as to predict Edmonton’s economy.
It’s like predicting how the Oilers will do. Who, six months ago, would have predicted our hockey team’s current dire straits?
This column has been all gloom and doom on the future of Edmonton and Alberta’s economy.
I’ve been arguing that the now-three-year crash in oil and gas prices shows no sign of let-up, that construction is slowing, that “carbon restraint” is clamping down on global demand for our oil and gas and at the same time raising Alberta’s electricity costs: That sky-rocketing provincial debt and a perceived anti-business bias from the current provincial government has scared off investment in Alberta.
Not a pretty picture.
But in the past few weeks a flurry of economic forecasts are painting a more optimistic future – at least for 2018 and 2019.
The basic theory seems to be that things have been so bad — a 3% drop in Alberta’s economic output ...
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When my latest Enmax utilities bill arrived, I went on Facebook with my concerns.
The monthly energy costs for my house, for June, were dirt cheap — $20.05 for electricity, $7.19 for natural gas.
But the other costs, exquisitely detailed, seemed outrageous in comparison.
Another $57.48 for other electricity costs, being the administration, distribution, transmission, balancing pool allocation, rate riders and Edmonton local access fees.
An extra $66.57 for other natural gas costs: Administration charge, transaction fee, fixed delivery charge, variable delivery charge, rate riders, municipal franchise fee … and the dreaded carbon levy.
Why, I asked on Facebook, so much billing gobbledygook? Are we being hosed? Is it meant to hopelessly confuse the customer, so we shrug our shoulders and pay?
These complex bills have been around for 10 years. Yet the Facebook reaction was astounding.
Some 60 comments ricocheted back, along with hundreds of likes. “A crock of confusion &he ...
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In the Alberta government’s climate change/carbon tax/phase out coal/renewable energy debate, I have never seen an objective analysis of how Alberta could meet its lower greenhouse gas (GHG) goals as cheaply as possible with the least possible damage to the province economy.
We know the New Democrats’ end goal. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has committed Canada to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by one-third, from 2013’s 726 Mt (million tonnes) to 523 Mt by 2030. So must Premier Rachel Notley do the same, reducing Alberta’s GHG emissions by approximately a third from 2013’s 267 Mt to 193 Mt by 2030.
We know however, that this New Democrat government is in love with renewables, regards coal as the face of evil, dislikes oil, and only grudgingly puts up with natural gas.
But the question to be asked – the logical, rational question – is this: What combination of coal, natural gas, oil, renewables and conservation would reduce provincial GHG ...
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No matter that Canada’s contribution to global warming is negligible.
No matter that China, India and the USA are the culprits, not Canada.
No matter the consequences, the carbon tax is going to happen in Alberta.
On January 1, the carbon tax will bump up the cost of gasoline by 4.5 cents a litre, diesel by 5.4 cents a litre, home heating costs by $1 a gigajoule. In winter, my 2,100 sq. ft. home burns eight to 10 gigajoules of natural gas per month.
The carbon tax will add to most of your purchases. Municipalities will pass on carbon taxes in higher property taxes. Grocery stores will pass on the added cost of transporting food.
Carbon taxes won’t go away. Those two great world saviors Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau will keep raising the carbon tax every year for the next six years. By rough calculation, the carbon tax on gasoline will be around 17 cents a litre by 2022.
This tax grab is the equivalent, respected Calgary economist Jack Mintz says, of a 3% provincial sales tax.
...
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