Alex Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines at the Calgary-based pipeline and utility company, said the long delays getting Keystone approved in the US has been an education.

“When you’re involved in one of these cross-border projects you require a presidential permit. At any time in the process, especially one that goes four or five years, you get caught up in the election cycle,” Pourbaix said. “I think it’s not a surprise to anybody that this project, to some degree, has been caught up in election politics and it’s added to the time. We just have to be careful in thinking about that as we go forward with these kind of projects.”

The future of Keystone is still fuelling battles in Washington, DC.

The $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline would bring 700,000 barrels of oilsands crude a day from Alberta through six states and to Gulf Coast refineries.

Republicans in the House of Representatives made yet another attempt this week to take the decision out of US President Barack Obama’s hands.

Legislators voted 241-175 in favour of the Northern Route Approval Act, which would give Congress the power to green-light the pipeline and nix the need for a presidential permit. The bill, however, faces a far less certain future in the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate.

The White House has threatened to veto the bill, saying it “seeks to circumvent long-standing and proven processes for determining whether cross-border pipelines are in the national interest.”

Pourbaix, who speaking to business leaders about getting Alberta’s oil and natural gas to market, said he expected Keystone to be a challenge, but not to this degree.

“When we went into Keystone XL I think it would be fair to say we knew we were going to have challenges but I don’t think anybody could have foreseen the kind of opposition,” he said. “In the first two phases of Keystone, we received our presidential permit in 21 months. We are now well into our fifth year of permitting Keystone.”

Pourbaix said TransCanada will work harder in the future to ensure that people and governments along routes are onside before moving forward. He said the opposition to pipelines such as Keystone XL isn’t about safety.

“This is about a fight over trying to stop the development of the oilsands by choking off the pipeline projects and I think we all have to remember that,” he said. “As we go forward on new projects we’re obviously going to take that into account.”

©The Canadian Press

He says he always opposed the Mississauga project, which was located near his riding, and cancelled in the dying days of the 2011 election.

Sousa told a legislative committee that he recused himself from any high-level discussions about the plant while serving as minister of citizenship and immigration.

He says he first learned it would be cancelled when two of former premier Dalton McGuinty’s top advisers told him during the election campaign.

Sousa made the announcement at the end of September 2011, just a few days before voters went to the polls.

The Opposition Conservatives say the government was privately planning for up to $900 million to cancel the two plants.

Sousa says the government was taking precautions, that the cancellations were still under negotiation and that the final costs would depend on the negotiations.

Premier Kathleen Wynne apologized last week for the $585 million spent to cancel the two gas plants, after repeatedly rebuffing opposition calls to say she was sorry.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant that melted down in March 2011 after being hit by a tsunami, is finding that it can barely meet the headcount of workers required to keep the three broken reactors cool while fighting power outages and leaks of tons of radiated water, said current and former nuclear plant workers and others familiar with the situation at Fukushima.

Construction jobs are already plentiful in the area due to rebuilding of tsunami ravaged towns and cities. Other public works spending planned by the government, under the “Abenomics” stimulus programs of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is likely to make well-paying construction jobs more abundant. And less risky, better paid decontamination projects in the region irradiated by the Fukushima meltdown are another draw.

Some Fukushima veterans are quitting as their cumulative radiation exposure approaches levels risky to health, said two long-time Fukushima nuclear workers who spoke to The Associated Press. They requested anonymity because their speaking to the media is a breach of their employers’ policy and they say being publicly identified will get them fired.

Tepco spokesman Ryo Shimizu denied any shortage of workers, and said the decommissioning is progressing fine.

“We have been able to acquire workers, and there is no shortage. We plan to add workers as needed,” he said.

The discrepancy may stem from the system of contracting prevalent in Japan’s nuclear industry. Plant operators farm out the running of their facilities to contractors, who in turn find the workers, and also rely on lower-level contractors to do some of their work, resulting in as many as five layers of contractors. Utilities such as Tepco know the final headcount—3,000 people now at Fukushima Dai-ichi—but not the difficulties in meeting it.

Tepco does not release a pay scale at Fukushima Dai-ichi or give numbers of workers forced to leave because of radiation exposure. It does not keep close tabs on contracting arrangements for its workers. A December 2012 survey of workers that the company released found 48 per cent were from companies not signed as contractors with the utility and the workers were falsely registered under companies that weren’t employing them. It is not clear if any laws were broken, but the government and TEPCO issued warnings to contractors to correct the situation.

Hiroyuki Watanabe, a city assemblyman for Iwaki in Fukushima, who talks often to Fukushima Dai-ichi workers, believes the labour shortage is only likely to worsen.

“They are scrounging around, barely able to clear the numbers,” he said.”Why would anyone want to work at a nuclear plant, of all places, when other work is available?”

According to Watanabe, a nuclear worker generally earns about 10,000 yen ($100) a day. In contrast, decontamination work outside the plant, generally involving less exposure to radiation, is paid for by the environment ministry, and with bonuses for working a job officially categorized as dangerous, totals about 16,000 yen ($160) a day, he said.

Experts, including even the most optimistic government officials, say decommissioning Fukushima Dai-ichi will take nearly a half-century. Tepco acknowledges that the exact path to decommissioning remains unclear because an assessment of the state of the melted reactor cores has not yet been carried out.

Since being brought under control following the disaster, the plant has suffered one setback after another. A dead rat caused a power blackout, including temporarily shutting down reactor-cooling systems, and leaks required tons of water to be piped into hundreds of tanks and underground storage areas. The process of permanently shutting down the plant hasn’t gotten started yet and the work up to now has been one makeshift measure after another to keep the reactors from deteriorating.

Thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods that are outside the reactors also have to be removed and safely stored. Taking them out is complex because the explosions at the plant have destroyed parts of the structure used to move the rods under normal conditions. The process of taking out the rods, one by one, hasn’t even begun yet. The spent rods have been used as fuel for the reactors but remain highly radioactive.

One Fukushima Dai-ichi worker, who has gained a big following on Twitter because of his updates about the state of the plant since the meltdowns, said veteran workers are quitting or forced to cut back on working in highly radiated areas of the plant as their cumulative exposure rises.

“I feel a sense of responsibility to stick with this job,” he told AP. “But so many people have quit. Their families wanted them to quit. Or they were worried about their children. Or their parents told him to go find another job.”

Known as “Happy-san” to his 71,500 Twitter followers, he has worked in the nuclear industry for 20 years, about half of that at Fukushima. He has worked at bigger contractors before, but is now at a mid-level contractor with about 20 employees, and has an executive level position.

“If things continue the way they are going, I fear decommissioning in 40 years is impossible. If nuclear plants are built abroad, then Japanese engineers and workers will go abroad. If plants in Japan are restarted, engineers and workers will go to those plants,” he said in a tweet. Most of Japan’s nuclear plants were shut for inspections after the Fukushima disaster.

His cumulative radiation exposure is at more than 300 millisieverts. Medical experts say a rise in cancer and other illnesses is statistically detected at exposure of more than 100 millisieverts, but health damage varies by individuals. He was exposed to 60 millisieverts of radiation the first year after the disaster and gets a health checkup every six months.

Nuclear workers generally are limited to 100 millisieverts exposure over five years, and 50 millisieverts a year, except for the first year after the disaster when the threshold was raised to an emergency 100 millisieverts.

The workers handle the day-to-day work of lugging around hoses, checking valves and temperatures, fixing leaks, moving away debris and working on the construction for the equipment to remove the spent fuel rods.

Other jobs are already so plentiful that securing enough workers for even the more lucrative work decontaminating the towns around the plant is impossible, according to Fukushima Labor Bureau data.

During the first quarter of this year, only 321 jobs got filled from 2,124 openings in decontamination, which involves scraping soil, gathering foliage and scrubbing walls to bring down radiation levels.

“There are lots of jobs because of the reconstruction here,” said bureau official Kosei Kanno.

A former Fukushima Dai-ichi worker, who switched to a decontamination job in December, said he became fed up with the pay, treatment and radiation risks at the plant. He has 10 years of experience as a nuclear worker, and grew up in Fukushima.

He warned it would be harder to find experienced people like him, raising the risk of accidents caused by human error.

He accused TEPCO of being more preoccupied with cost cuts than with worker safety or fair treatment. The utility went bankrupt after the disaster and was nationalized by a government bailout. Even if TEPCO somehow obtains workers in quantity in coming months, their quality would deteriorate, he said.

“We’re headed toward a real crisis,” said Ryuichi Kino, a free-lance writer and photographer who has authored books about the nuclear disaster and has reported on TEPCO intensively since March 2011.

Under the worst scenario, experienced workers capable of supervising the work will be gone as they reach their radiation-exposure limits, said Kino.

He believes an independent company separate from TEPCO needs to be set up to deal with the decommissioning, to make sure safety is not being compromised and taxpayer money is spent wisely.

Watanabe, the assemblyman, said the bigger nuclear contractors may go out of business because they are being under-bid by lower-tier companies with less experienced, cheaper workers. That is likely to worsen the worker shortages at the skilled level, he said.

Happy-san has the same fear. Some of the recent workers, rounded up by the lesser contractors, appear uneducated and can’t read well, he said.

Although life at the plant has calmed compared to right after the disaster, Happy-san still remembers the huge blast that went off when one of the reactors exploded, and rubble was showering from the sky for what felt like an eternity.

“We had opened the Pandora’s box. After all the evil comes out, then hope might be sitting there, at the bottom of the box, and someday we can be happy, even though that may not come during my lifetime,” he said.

Legislators voted 241-175 in favour of the Northern Route Approval Act, which would give Congress the power to greenlight the pipeline and nix the need for a presidential permit. The bill, however, faces a far less certain future in the Democrat-controlled US Senate.

As legislators debated the bill, their arguments fell along largely partisan lines – Republicans touted the jobs and energy independence that Keystone XL would purportedly create, while Democrats warned the proposal poses grave risks to the environment.

One pro-pipeline Democrat – Nick Rahall of West Virginia – said that while he supports Keystone XL, he cannot back a bill that attempts to do away with the permit process.

“Waiving permits for a foreign company? We don’t even do that for domestic companies,” he said on the House floor. “This bill’s a mockery.”

The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, saying it “seeks to circumvent long-standing and proven processes for determining whether cross-border pipelines are in the national interest.”

Democrats in the House are attempting to trip up the bill by way of a handful of amendments, including one that would require any oil and refined product that is transported via Keystone XL to stay in the US.

Democrats have argued for years that rather than make the US less dependent on oil from hostile OPEC regimes, Keystone XL will allow Alberta oilsands bitumen to be exported abroad from the Gulf Coast.

Another Democratic amendment would require Calgary-based TransCanada to disclose its campaign contributions for the past five years before construction of Keystone XL proceeds.

Republicans, meantime, have long insisted that Congress has the authority under the US Constitution to regulate international commerce – and that includes the pipeline, they say, since it aims to carry oilsands bitumen from Canada into the US.

Environmentalists were universal in heaping scorn on the latest Republican attempt to force approval of the pipeline.

“This bill is nothing more than an effort to run roughshod over protections for landowners, wildlife and drinking water supplies so that TransCanada can get oil to Gulf coast refineries for export to China and other countries,” said Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.

North of the border, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has nearly doubled its spending on the promotion of Keystone XL, from $16.5 million from $9 million a year ago.

Its beefed-up efforts included Harper’s visit to New York last week to pitch the pipeline to the Council on Foreign Relations and in roundtables with U.S. business leaders.

©The Canadian Press

Two Nuclear Regulatory Commission specialist inspectors will join the on-site NRC inspectors “to assess the circumstances surrounding the discovery,” the agency said in a news release.

Plant operator Duke Energy said last week it found a quarter-inch mark of corrosion and cracking in the covering of the reactor vessel, which contains heat produced by the nuclear core’s energy. The crack did not penetrate the vessel head and there was no evidence of radiation leakage, the NRC and Duke Energy said.

“There was no immediate threat to the public or plant workers, but because the discovery is on the vessel head and was not seen in the original review, we are sending specialists from our Atlanta office to further evaluate the issue,” said Victor McCree, the NRC’s Southeast regional manager. “The special inspection team will work to analyze and understand all the details.”

Duke Energy has started the repair process, the agency said. The company expects to have the reactor back in production within weeks, Duke Energy said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week.

Charlotte-based Duke Energy took over the Harris plant after it acquired Raleigh-based Progress Energy last year, which made it the country’s largest electric company. The utility is co-operating with the NRC inspection, Duke Energy spokeswoman Rita Sipe said in an email.

“We have a team that is also performing our own evaluation to determine why this was not identified in previous reviews,” Sipe said.

The shutdown came as plant operators prepared for an upcoming refuelling outage by reviewing results from ultrasonic testing gathered during a refuelling outage last spring.

The on-site portion of the inspection at the southern Wake County nuclear plant is expected to take about a week and a half, with a report to be issued within 45 days after the inspection is completed, the NRC said.

The inspection team will review Duke Energy’s actions leading up to the discovery of the problem, examine the previous ultrasonic testing records, evaluate the company’s repair plans, and decide whether the discovery highlights any broader issues that other nuclear plant operators should be aware of, the regulatory agency said.

Progress Energy was cited last year for two safety violations at the Harris plant considered to be of low to moderate significance, which an NRC spokesman said last week has since been corrected. Regulators found problems with ventilation systems that would be needed if there were a nuclear emergency.

In Windvision 2025: A Strategy for Alberta, Canwea suggests setting a ‘Clean Energy Standard’ that puts a cap on the allowable amount of emissions from the province’s energy producers are. It also recommends increasing the $15-per-tonne carbon tax imposed on heavy emitters.

“Neither of these policy measures alone will totally address the challenges facing wind energy in the province, but they are very complementary,” said Robert Hornung, president of Canwea.

“A Clean Electricity Standard will incent long-term contracts for electricity and help provide the long-term revenue certainly needed to finance new projects. An uplift in the carbon price will increase the value of greenhouse gas offsets produced by wind energy projects, providing an additional revenue stream that will improve project economics.”

Canwea estimates the province has about 5,000 megawatts (MW) of easily accessible wind resources. In 2012, wind energy accounted for 3.4 per cent of the province’s energy supply. According to the report, every 150-MW wind farm would:

- reduce Alberta’s GHG emissions by 300,000 tonnes a year;
- represent $316 million in investment
- create 140 full-time equivalent construction jobs and 10 permanent jobs in operations and management
- provide $17 million in lease payments to landowners over 20 years
- generate $31 million of property tax revenue for municipalities

The province’s oil and gas industry could stand to benefit from wind energy as well by using wind as a clean source of power for their operations—something that may help improve the industry’s global reputation, the report adds.

Under the amended and restated JDA, CO₂ Solutions’ proprietary enzymatic method to capture of carbon dioxide from power plants, oil production operations and other large sources of emissions will continue to use Codexis’ directed enzyme evolution technology and enzyme production capabilities.

CO₂ Solutions’ technology uses the natural enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, to enhance the efficiency of CO₂ capture from industrial emission sources, at lower cost than conventional carbon capture technology. Codexis’ technology has dramatically improved this enzyme’s ability to function in harsh industrial conditions. Codexis’ carbonic anhydrase is now suitable for pilot and demonstration testing in CO₂ Solutions’ carbon capture projects.  Carbonic anhydrase is found in humans and other living organisms and is critical in the efficient management of CO₂ during respiration.

Codexis, Inc, based in Redwood City, CA, engineers enzymes for pharmaceutical, biofuel and chemical production.

CO₂Solutions Inc. was founded in 1997 in Quebec City. The develops technology to reduce carbondioxide (CO₂) using the enzyme carbonic anhydrase.

Nearly 700 residents from Hippo district in Miyagi prefecture, just northeast of Fukushima, filed a claim Tuesday with a government arbitration office demanding that they be given the same compensation as residents of Fukushima.

The government’s basic compensation scheme only covers Fukushima residents, which critics say is an attempt to minimize costs.

The Hippo residents said some radiation levels in their area exceeded those in Fukushima towns. Hippo district is about 50 kilometres northwest of the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.

They demanded that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), pay them an additional 70 million yen ($690,000) in damages.

Due to the huge costs of compensation and clean-up of the plant, Tepco has declared bankruptcy and is under state control. The compensation money paid by Tepco actually comes from the government.

Radiation levels in Hippo district are comparable to areas in Fukushima subject to voluntary evacuation, where residents are entitled to receive up to 720,000 yen ($7,000) for every child and pregnant woman, and up to 120,000 yen ($1,180) per adult. After months of negotiations, Tepco has agreed to pay Hippo residents about half the Fukushima amount.

Residents of areas just outside of Fukushima say they also face discrimination in legal protection. They say health checks, radiation monitoring and clean-up projects in most cases do not go beyond the prefectural border.

“Damages from the nuclear accident do not stop at the border. We hope that the compensation program is carried out in a way that reflects the reality of people’s lives,” said Koji Otani, a lawyer representing the residents.

Although the amount sought by each resident is small, the group hopes to be able to set a precedent, he said.

A massive earthquake and tsunami hit the Fukushima plant, knocking out its cooling systems and causing the cores of three reactors to melt and release radioactivity into the air and water. The radiation level in Hippo exceeded the annual limit for nuclear workers.

So far, Tepco has paid 2.3 trillion yen ($22.5 billion), about half of it to companies and business owners. That amount includes 1.6 million individual claims, mostly from voluntary evacuees. Because the amount of claims is expected to exceed the initial estimate of 3 trillion yen ($29 billion), the government has injected an additional 154 billion yen ($1.5 billion) into the compensation fund.

About 150,000 Fukushima residents are still displaced. Hundreds have filed claims seeking greater compensation.

Copyright © The Associated Press.

Wholesale natural gas prices have been climbing substantially from their record lows. Oil prices have only recently cooled slightly after reaching nearly $100 a barrel (WTI) earlier this year. That makes it that much more important to minimize costs to retail buyers, wherever possible.

But in a regulated system, profits for utilities must remain healthy too if we expect them to stay active in the market, according to a report by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

“Regulators would be wise to put significant effort into scrutinizing all new investment made by the firms they regulate,” writes author Kent Fellows, Phd candidate in the university’s economics faculty, who adds that there is little room in the energy network for unnecessary costs.

The way that government agencies regulate pipelines in Canada appears to be increasing costs beyond where they need to be in order to fairly serve both utilities and customers. By relying on traditional rate-of-return regulation models, which calculate price-rates based on the regulated firm’s cost of capital (that is, how much it costs the company to finance its operations), regulators, including the National Energy Board and the Alberta Utilities Commission, reward firms for over-investing in their operations instead of reducing costs.

Utilities are motivated to prolong the period in which they can earn a return on their capital, since it is one of the few opportunities they have to increase profits under the widely used rate-of-return regulatory model. That results in utilities keeping assets on the books — and paying for them — longer than they might otherwise need to. The end result is a distortion of the decisions made by regulated firms and, ultimately, higher prices for consumers.

Regulators that take a passive role in setting the rate of return for their industries, ironically, are likely to see their idleness pay off. Firms with a freer hand will seek to accelerate the depreciation of capital assets, reducing costs more quickly. The result is that consumers pay more in the short term, but substantially less over the long term.

Click here to read: Not so fast: How slower utilities regulation can reduce prices and increase profits.

Created in association with SME’s Tooling U, Knowledge Edge features 16,000 technical papers, more than 1,200 e-books and 700 videos in a web-based encyclopedia that makes access to peer-reviewed manufacturing know-how a click away.

“While (online) searches yield a wealth of information, there is little standard as to what’s posted and what can be trusted,” SME director of professional development Jeannine Kunz said in a statement.

“Knowledge Edge relies on SME members, longstanding industry professionals and SME’s trusted manufacturer customer base to provide a reliable source of manufacturing information online.”

To learn more about Knowledge Edge, log on to the Tooling U website and request a demo of the subscription-based service.

Released by industry association Sous-Traitance Industrielle Québec (STIQ), the Baromètre industriel québécois study found 56 per cent of small- and medium-sized manufacturers in the province experienced revenue growth of at least five per cent last year.

Those numbers matched the study’s 2011 results, according to STIQ.

The study found 36 per cent of SMEs increased their respective number of employees by five per cent in 2012.

2012 was a very active year for many Québec-based prime contractors, especially in industries with highly-structured supply chains, such as aeronautics, transportation, mining and electrical energy.

The study shows manufacturers were able to capitalize on this dynamism and increase their sales volumes with prime contractors.

In 2012, 44 per cent of SMEs attributed more than 25 per cent of their sales to prime contractors, compared with 36 per cent in 2011.

Meanwhile, 49 per cent of respondents saw at least a five per cent rise in sales attributable to prime contractors, against 44 per cent in 2011.

Despite the solid numbers, SMEs in Québec could have sustained even higher growth in 2012 by investing more in research and development and acquiring advanced equipment, according to STIQ.

Only 55 per cent of firms invested more than two per cent of their revenues in R&D, while 68 per cent spent more than two per cent on equipment purchases.

In its export forecast for the province, Export Development Canada (EDC) said huge increases in B.C.’s global exports in 2013 and 2014 will push it to the top of the pile.

Delivering the forecast in back-to-back speeches in Victoria, B.C., and Vancouver, EDC chief economist Peter Hall predicted the province’s exports will grow by 11 per cent this year, followed by another 12 per cent in 2014.

“British Columbia’s exports are on track for a vibrant expansion, sharing top spot among the provinces with Nova Scotia,” Hall said. “B.C. is enjoying an exceptional recovery in forestry and very strong gains in ores and metals. Following recent ups-and-downs, B.C. is in an international sales sweet spot this year and next.”

The forestry sector accounts for approximately 32 per cent of the province’s international sales, the largest share of B.C.s total.

Hall predicted that provincial exports of forestry products will grow by 25 per cent in 2013 and another 17 per cent in 2014, this after only two per cent growth in 2012.

“Forestry exports are set to experience impressive growth, with demand and prices for lumber driven upwards by rising U.S. housing starts that are expected to expand by 34 per cent in 2013 and 24 per cent in 2014. Those are big numbers,” Hall said.

“The recovery of China’s construction sector will also add momentum. Looking forward, though, supply constraints will start to emerge after 2014, suggesting potential for significant investment in lumber capacity.”

The energy sector is also an important contributor to the province’s export picture, accounting for 27 per cent of total international sales.

EDC’s forecast predicts a four per cent decline this year, ahead of 10 per cent growth in 2014.

The forecast also noted that the recovery in the United States will mean solid growth for the province’s machinery and equipment producers and agri-food sales through 2014.

Nationally, Canadian merchandise exports are forecast to rise nine per cent in 2013 and five per cent in 2014, while economic growth (GDP) is expected to rise 2.2 per cent this year and 1.9 next year.

EDC is forecasting global growth of 3.5 per cent in 2013 and 4.2 per cent in 2014.

According to ATCO Structures and Logistics, a subsidiary of Alberta-based energy and utilities giant ATCO, it has been awarded a sub-contract from engineering and project management firm Bechtel to supply the buildings for the Chevron-operated Wheatstone LNG project in western Australia.

The contract kicked off last month.

The company expects to create 137 new jobs, including 42 manufacturing jobs in Perth and Brisbane, Australia, and 95 jobs based on-site at Ashburton North, 12 kilometres west of Onslow in western Australia.

The new roles created on site include engineering, plumbing, carpentry, electrical trades, general labouring and administrative positions.

According to ATCO, the agreement also supports 70 existing manufacturing, in-house subcontractor and support staff positions.

The units will be built at ATCO’s manufacturing facilities in Brisbane and Perth.

The 150,000 sq. ft. facility in Perth is the newest addition to ATCO’s construction operations in Australia.

The plant is expected to be fully operational in September 2013 and will supply approximately 60 per cent of the required units for the Wheatstone Project.

ATCO’s portion of the manufacturing work is expected to begin in July 2013 and completion is scheduled for the end of the second quarter of 2014.

This is ATCO’s fourth major contract win supporting LNG projects in Australia.

In 2011 and 2012, ATCO delivered three large workforce housing projects for LNG facilities on Curtis Island, providing more than 6,000 beds for workers constructing LNG terminals.

As part of the 15th annual Gas Tax Honesty Day, the federation encourages citizens to lobby against charging tax-on-tax for gasoline and diesel.

Alberta director Derek Fildebrandt says even without a provincial sales tax, residents of the province pay roughly $80 million a year or $15 per fill-up.

Fildebrandt says citizens must also keep things from getting worse by keeping provinces and municipalities from continually looking to new or higher gas taxes as a quick fix for pet projects.

Check out the report here.

©The Canadian Press

Simply imposing emissions targets or trying to cap economic growth to reduce emissions isn’t going to work, Harper said during a question-and-answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“I am convinced that, over time, we are not going to effectively tackle emissions unless we develop the lower-emissions technology in energy and other sectors,” he said.

“That is the thing that will allow us to square economic growth with emissions reduction and environmental protection. I’m convinced if we cannot square those, we are not going to make progress globally.”

Any realistic international agreement to limit emissions has to cover everyone, not just the developed world, he added.

“We need a mandatory, international protocol that includes all significant emitters and if we do not get that we will not be able to control global emissions.”

Over the course of the hour-long session, a relaxed-looking Harper discussed climate change, the Keystone XL pipeline and Alberta’s oilsands, as well as medicare, border issues, the Middle East and the perils that bedevil the global economy.

He waved off the concerns of environmental critics as he pitched the TransCanada pipeline project as a good thing for the United States that would, if approved, create thousands of jobs and reduce American reliance on offshore oil.

“One needs to put this is a global perspective,” Harper said. “Less than one tenth of one per cent of global emissions are in the oilsands. it’s almost nothing globally.”

It will, however, play a major role in Canada’s own emissions-reduction targets, he conceded.

Harper’s pitch for Keystone XL, which would carry bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast, included a warning.

“The only real, immediate environmental issue here is, do we want to increase the flow of oil from Canada via pipeline or via rail? If you don’t do the pipeline, more and more is going to be coming in via rail, which is far more environmentally challenging.”

The Obama administration is mulling over whether to approve the project; Harper refused to speculate on which way the White House might lean.

He did, however, put in a plug: “I think all the facts are overwhelmingly on the side of approval of this.”

Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, Harper is expected to stress that Canada is halfway towards meeting its greenhouse gas emissions target. Many people in both countries, however, are wondering about the other half.

As the Obama administration ponders the TransCanada Corp. proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline to link the oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, Harper’s government is trumpeting the steps it has taken to ensure pipeline safety, cut emissions and monitor oil sands pollution.

In advance of the prime minister’s Q-and-A with the council, the federal government took out ads in major US publications and fired up a new website to promote its sector-by-sector regulatory approach to reducing emissions.

“With these and other means, Canada is honouring its United Nations commitment under the Copenhagen Accord to a 17% reduction in emissions from 2005 levels by 2020,” the website says.

“We estimate that as a result of our collective actions taken to date, Canada is already halfway toward closing the gap between what our emissions had originally been projected to be in 2020, and where we need to be to meet our Copenhagen target.”

But critics, including Environmental Defence Canada, Equiterre, Forest Ethics Advocacy, Greenpeace Canada and the US Natural Resources Defence Council, have set up their own internet soapbox.

They say TarSandsRealityCheck.com “presents peer-reviewed, easy to understand facts about the devastating impacts of the tar sands on climate, economy, human rights, land and species, air and water.”

The trouble with Harper’s “halfway” claim is that it lumps together all the measures both provincial and federal governments have taken and the cumulative effect they will have on emissions by 2020.

Numerous analyses suggest that closing the rest of the gap will take a near miracle, or some kind of national carbon pricing program.

The federal Conservatives reject carbon pricing, although many provinces have already headed in that direction, either on their own or to comply with federal regulations.
Something will have to give.

Oil and gas are the largest source of emissions growth. Federal, provincial and industry officials have been negotiating for months to produce a plan that would curb emissions at a cost that does not disadvantage the industry.

But none of the scenarios will take Canada anywhere near meeting its 2020 target, analysts say.

Environment Minister Peter Kent, meanwhile, is looking at the handful of sectors not yet regulated. Commercial and residential buildings are key, he said in a recent interview, adding that he’s also hoping for international action in the aviation sector.

Canada, he also noted, is now getting credit for reforestation efforts. But none of those this will give Canada more than a few megatonnes of carbon reductions each by 2020, well short of the needed 100 megatonnes.

Canada could buy emissions credits from cash-short developing countries, but the government isn’t keen on that option.

The Conservatives have also rejected suggestions that they limit emissions by freezing oil sands development and pipeline construction.

The International Energy Association said it expects oil sands production to increase by 1.3 million barrels a day by 2018, to a total of about 5 million a day.

© 2013 The Canadian Press

In Edmonton to deliver a provincial export forecast, Export Development Canada (EDC) chief economist Peter Hall predicted Alberta’s exports will surge by nine per cent in 2013 and another six per cent in 2014.

“Alberta’s export story over the next two years will be determined by both the capacity to ship crude oil and pricing of natural gas. Conditions will be helped by a dollar that’s eased back from parity,” Hall said in his forecast to Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters (CME) members.

The energy sector dominates Alberta’s exports, accounting for approximately 73 per cent of the province’s total international sales

Hall predicted that provincial exports of energy products alone will grow by nine per cent this year, followed by another seven per cent in 2014.

Those numbers will come, he said, after the energy sector experienced growth of only two per cent in 2012.

“While global crude prices have stabilized, Alberta’s crude has been sharply discounted because of tight transportation capacity constraints,” Hall said.

According to Hall, the price gap between West Texas Intermediate and Western Canadian Select crude earlier in 2013 averaged around $20 per barrel, which adds up to about $16-billion in annual losses.

While a combination of increased rail capacity and Canadian pipeline repurposing has boosted shipments and arrowed the price gap, Hall said capacity constraint still pose a threat to the sector.

In other areas, the continued economic recovery in the United States is expected to help the machinery/equipment and forestry sectors, with industrial activity in the U.S. spurring equipment sales and a resurgent U.S. housing market boosting lumber exports.

EDC’s forecast noted that other export categories will perform well this year, but 2014 will be more of a mixed outcome.

Fertilizer prices are predicted to slip a notch, even though Alberta is expected ship more this year.

Metals and minerals will be up considerably in 2013, but chemicals will grow at a slower rate.

Nationally, Canadian merchandise exports are forecast to rise nine per cent in 2013 and five per cent in 2014, while economic growth (GDP) is expected to rise 2.2 per cent this year and 1.9 next year.

EDC is forecasting global growth of 3.5 per cent in 2013 and 4.2 per cent in 2014.

The deal with TC Pipelines LP, one-third owned by TransCanada, involves the Bison and GTN pipelines.

The sale is expected to close in July.

The Bison pipeline connects gas from the US Rocky Mountain region to TransCanada’s Northern Border system in North Dakota.

GTN moves Western Canadian and Rocky Mountain gas to the Western US.

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling says the proceeds from the sale will help fund TransCanada’s capital program, which includes $26 billion in commercially secured projects.

“The transaction demonstrates one of the many funding options available to TransCanada to finance our current capital commitments,” he said.

©The Canadian Press

It’s a blessing that we have a former vice-president of the United States visiting Canada to set us all straight on the development of oil sands resources, which he condemned for the “reckless spewing of pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere as if it’s an open sewer” during an interview with the Globe and Mail.

However, Al Gore’s remarks were less than helpful as Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver travelled through Europe to tackle the EU’s new Fuel Quality Directive, which labels fuel derived from oil sands crude as dirtier than conventionally refined crude. Oliver argues that is not the case, and he’ll have a challenging time getting the Europeans to change their minds, even without Gore’s provocative remarks.

Alberta’s oil sands have become a chief villain in the global climate change narrative. There is a growing hostile clamour coming from enviro-critics who are unimpressed with the notion that an energy hungry world reliant on non-renewable fossil fuels should make use of a massive resource within a stable jurisdiction. As Gore stated so elegantly to the Globe and Mail, “There’s no such thing as ethical oil. There’s only dirty oil and dirtier oil.”

Yes, we all recognize that extracting and turning the glop that comes from the oil sands into fuel is more carbon intensive than conventional means – something like 12% to 22% more greenhouse gas emissions per barrel (depending on who is measuring). And sure, mining the bitumen isn’t pretty. It makes a mess of the landscape. But reckless spewing?

We could point out that the industry’s R&D and new technology is dropping emissions levels, that energy producers are focusing on mitigating water use and they’re pledging to return the landscape to almost original condition – not that these efforts will resonate with critics, like Gore.

Yet as an environmental prophet, he actually does have relevant things to say about climate change and the need to address this global environmental threat, but like many of the critics of the “tar sands” and the opponents to the Keystone XL pipeline, his efforts would be best applied to the dirty business going on in his own backyard.

Neither the US nor Canada are particularly good examples of emissions stewardship. Both have earned Ds for their efforts in a field of 17 developed economies, according to the Conference Board of Canada’s How Canada Performs report card. But electricity generation is a major source of emissions for both countries, and based on that measure, Canada gets an A on renewable energy, compared to an American C.

Electricity accounts for the biggest portion of US emissions at 33%. Seventy per cent of its electricity generation comes from burning fossil fuels. Of that, burning coal is good for 42%.

Thirteen per cent of Canada’s emissions come from generating electricity, second to transportation at 24%. Low emitting power sources (such as nuclear, wind, solar and hydro) account for 78% of the power. Of that, 64% is from hydro generation.

Both countries lag on emissions reductions. Canada is about halfway to a recalibrated commitment of 17% from 2005 levels, while the US brought its emissions down in 2011 by reducing the intensity of fuels used for electricity, notably coal, and significantly increasing the use of hydro.

Good for the US. But it bears repeating that in the climate change sweepstakes, China is responsible for 23% of emissions, the US 19%, the EU 13% and Canada 2%. Of that 2%, the oil sands accounts for 7% of Canada’s total emissions and about 0.15% of global emissions. If Canada were to shut down the oil sands tomorrow and not extract or upgrade another drop of bitumen, there would be virtually no impact on global emissions. The United States, on the other hand, is still burning plenty of fossil fuels for electricity. Coal, scrubbed or not, is hardly clean. Oliver notes emissions from US coal-fired power plants are 40 times greater than those generated by the oil sands.

So who is treating the atmosphere like an open sewer? Grandma would say that’s the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Gore…

The premier says there was “very keen interest” from companies and other governments in a carbon capture project at the Boundary Dam power station near Estevan. The Saskatchewan government wants to commercialize the technology being tested at the plant.

Wall says the project will be tried out this fall and will “go live” as a generating facility next year.

“But we’re getting close enough now where SaskPower officials are starting to welcome earnest consideration to join this consortium and invest, you know, bring some of those capital dollars to our province,” said Wall.

Carbon capture involves gathering carbon dioxide from power plants and injecting it deep into porous rock formations so it doesn’t add to greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan at Boundary Dam is to capture up to 90% of CO2 emissions. Most of the CO2 will be sold to oil and gas companies that use it to push more oil out of the ground in what’s called enhanced oil recovery.

Saskatchewan has put about $1.1 billion to the carbon capture project and the federal government has ponied up $240 million.

The province, which relies heavily on coal-fire power plants, needs carbon capture to work. Coal currently provides more than 50 per cent of Saskatchewan’s electricity and the province has an estimated 300-year supply, according to SaskPower’s website.

“In the years ahead, when the federal regulations require that certain coal plants simply can’t operate anymore, what are we going to do? Are we going to shut them all down and build all new or is coal still viable?” Wall asked. “There’s two objectives here. One is to generate some commercialization opportunities, some revenue from around the world for this technology, but also to use it for ourselves so that at least coal is an option and we’ll have cleaned it up.”

©The Canadian Press