Tag: tar sands

Canada firms may miss Chinese market   Enbridge VP warns energy sector must act: Calgary Herald

Calgary Herald


Canada firms may miss Chinese market  Enbridge VP warns energy sector must act

If Canada’s energy firms don’t start exporting to China now, others might beat them to it, according to an Enbridge Inc. vice-president. 

 The warning by Byron Neiles, who heads up major projects for the Calgary-based company, was one of several made by industry voices to delegates at a national forum in Calgary on doing business with Hong Kong, hosted by the Hong Kong Canada Business Association. 

They argued the window of opportunity to sell to China won’t always be open largely due to competition and the chance the world’s second largest economy may cease growing at its current staggering pace – reducing the money its investors can spend.

Tar Sands Express – Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline or the Railway? Watershed Sentinel

Watershed Sentinel

As billionaires invest in the railways and oil tanker traffic skyrockets along the BC coast, it looks as though the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline may have been a ruse all along  – a classic “bait and switch” – with a number of PR payoff ….

 By autumn 2008, CN Rail approached the Alberta government with its plan to move tar sands oil.  Alberta’s Energy Minister at the time, Mel Knight, told Dow Jones Newswire that CN and his government have had “very good meetings,” with CN believing that it could eventually transport 400,000 barrels per day from eastern Alberta to the West Coast of Canada. 

Just six months later, CN was estimating that it could transport 2.6 million barrels per day to the West Coast if 20,000 railcars were added to its fleet.
On April 15, 2009, the Financial Post’s Diane Francis reported that CN “will deliver the oil sands production through the use of insulated and heatable railcars or by reducing its viscosity by mixing it with condensates or diluents. The ‘scalability’ of the concept – up to millions of barrels per day – means that the railway can ramp up production cheaply and quickly to provide immediate cash flow to producers which otherwise will have to wait years for completion of upgraders and/or pipelines.

National Post editorial board: Ottawa isn’t the oil sands’ enemy, Edmonton is

National Post

Editorial

National Post editorial board: Ottawa isn’t the oil sands’ enemy, Edmonton is

There’s an old adage in Alberta politics that when all else fails, bash Ottawa. Well, Alberta’s Tory government must feel itself at risk of failure, because it has begun making far-fetched claims about how its federal cousins ­­– Stephen Harper’s new Tory majority — have suddenly turned into anti-oil sands hypocrites bent on hobbling the project’s development with new environmental regulations just to win favour with central Canadian voters.