Seems everyone else but

Seems everyone else but Canadians benefit from our natural resources but sadly not enough Canadians care.

It is really sad too how Alberta basically gives the oil away and I guess to they will lower the price.

Canadians should all be living like Kings with all our resources but only the rich (most from outside Canada) are the ones reaping the Money...

Nothing will change until Canadians take to the streets and stop acting like ignorant sheep.

To bad Canada was not a normal country and these turds would be tossed by any means necessary.

If Canadians were to ever protest they would only do it for an hour or two and not 'stay the night' (might miss the hockey game horrors of horrors) or for the long haul (as they may miss the royals on tv) until the politicians were gone.

I do not think Canadians even have the balls to remove a government by force ie revolution etc As long as the sheep have their 50" tv, a million cable channels and KFC they are happy..It in al seriousness is pathetic how 'nonchalant' Canadians really are, we bend over and take it up the you know what without any lube...gawd..

But the positive news is during the US and French Revolutions only 3% participated and the rest went baa...

What will it take for Canadians to wake up, stop baaaaing like obedient sheep and leave the field and do something meaningful for a change?

Che Guevara could not save Canadians from themselves..Are Canadians so ignorant on purpose? or is their a reason?

read

Andrew Nikiforuk's book on the tar sands and kiss goodbye to a good nights' sleep. We've been taken to the cleaners time after time after time and Ed's right, we don't learn, and it appears we don't want to learn. The destruction already done by the tar sands madness will take a thousand years to neutralize, then we can start remediation attempts. Except, it won't be us, will it, the burden will fall on our future generations.

Someone recently held forth on the "dumbing down" of the current crop of school kids, and the main point of the rant was that kids no longer have to sit hour after boring hour learning cursive handwriting...there's no need for a policy of dumbing down, we're about as dumb as people can be and still find their mouths to feed themselves.

Thank you, Ed Deak, it's always a pleasure to read what you write..not always comfortable, seldom cheerful, but still, a pleasure.

And that's all it may be.....

a story. The whole conversation sounds rather contrived, to me.

It's happened before

...why should this be any different?

The Japanese were able to manipulate the development of the Quintette & Bullmoose coal mines to their advantage in the 80s.

Why are we surprised that foreign interests want to bend the potential stream of profit in their direction? What's crazy is that Canadian governments are naive enough to let this kind of thing happen again.

Maybe we ARE rubes and deserve to be taken advantage of?

Byers piece

I find the logic of the consultant Mr. Byers spoke with faulty at best.

Enbridge and TransCanada are separate and distinct companies, reporting to separate and distinct shareholders. To state that Northern Gateway (an Enbridge project) is simply leverage for the approval of Keystone XL (a TransCanada project) is very poor analysis.

As Canada increases its oil sands production, seeking new markets is a sensible strategy, in particular given the financial and economic struggles of the United States.

I do agree we should be looking at ways to increase value-added production right here in Canada.

In any event, this article makes some outlandish assumptions, not really based on fact.

Bizarre!

Surely we have just about the dumbest, most short sighted ruling class and set of sycophant politicians in the entire world. They have been bootlicks to foreign Empire's for so long, they simply do not know how to actually think in the national development interest.

I mean, I know all this, and this story still disgusted me even more. Shit!

I echo Fait. Canadians have simply got to wake up. This approaches the bizarre.

An interesting video on the

An interesting video on the end of the presently ongoing fraudulent claims of "recovery" and "growth"

Well, at least some of us have the satisfaction of being able to say that we've been warning about this fraud for many years.

Ed Deak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQqDS9wGsxQ

Upgraders and refineries

The article states that the bitumen should be upgraded at site and shipped as a refined product. I fully agree but with our environmental regulations we all know it is basically illegal to build a refinery in Canada which is really sad as we ship the oil to the gulf and they ship the gas back. Upgrade and refine it here. We don't like to ship raw logs. Why ship raw oil.

Economists

Like Ed Deak (Fiat Lux), I too have spent many years studying economics & economists. I came to the same conclusion: economics is a pseudo-science. The world is vastly too complex & non-linear to be understood by the simplistic mathematics used by these wannabe physicists. In consequence, economists are no more than shills for the status quo, in other words, to provide a smokescreen for the rich & powerful to continue to rip off the rest of the public.

I Dunno

Kinder Morgan's Transmountain pipeline to the west coast is oversubscribed for August, 2011 and will only be able to handle 70% of nominated volumes.

Looks like they are going move forward and to loop that pipeline and increase daily throughput from 300,000 barrels/day to 700,000 barrels/day of mostly heavy oil/bitumen.

Alot of that heavy oil currently gets shipped from the Transmountain terminal in Burnaby to Asia. Furthermore, China opened up its first heavy oil upgrader in 2010. The Chinese can easily expand heavy oil refining capacity both dramatically and quickly should the need arise - ie. greater imports of Albertan bitumen.

China’s state-owned oil company, Sinopec, has invested over $100 million in moving the northern Enbridge pipeline through the planning/permitting process. I doubt that their intention is a ploy to throw that money away as a ruse for putting pressure on the U.S. State Dept.

And let's look at the expense of shipping this bitumen through the Gulf of Mexico:

1. A new Keystone pipeline will charge oil shippers a premium due to its upfront high costs;

2. A Keystone pipeline will also require more expensive transitting costs due to its longer lenght;

3. Gulf oil refineries will also charge a premium for refining the heavy oil into sweet, light crude;

4. Shipping times are ~ 4- 6 days longer from the Gulf of Mexico to China than from the west coast;

5. The expensive upgrading of the Panama Canal will also see a steep increase in tolls for shippers;

So from a financial, transportation and logistics viewpoint, shipping bitumen from the west coast is much more cost effective and timely than from the Gulf of Mexico, esp. if Chinese refineries intend to substantially increase heavy oil refining capacity.

Economists

While I find it tempting to agree with Fiat Lux et Vox.Pop and take a shot at all economists, there are a few that I am attracted to—not that I agree with everything they say, of course: Karl Marx gave an excellent synopsis of the industrial capitalism of his time; Adam Smith’s insight into the role of self-interest in wealth creation is informative as long as you also read his Theory of Moral Sentiments and realize that the ‘invisible hand’ is as likely to be picking your pocket as helping anyone. Malthus had it half right; Keynes made much sense—too bad his theories have never been tested. J K Galbraith’s insight in how technocrats have taken over from capitalists (entrepreneurs) as the driving force of the economy, now taken over by financiers. Kenneth Boulding, E F Schumacher, Herman Daly, Paul Hawken and Joe Stiglitz to name a few worth paying attention to.

Hey, how about we shut down

Hey, how about we shut down the tar sands and gateway and invest in clean energy and local economies? I know it's a radical idea but it is the future.

There are always exceptions

There are always exceptions to any and every rule and, obviously, there have been economists with great brains and intelligence.

At the same time even the stupidest and biggest criminals in history have done some good we can learn from. I've never seen an economy turned around and benefiting more than the first 6 years under Hitler, making Germany the envy of Europe.

I hate anything connected with Marx, as I have seen the destruction caused under the licence of his name.

Adam Smith and his contemporaries haven't known a lot of things we know now as physical laws.

In any case, he was a professor of moral values and if he'd known the crimes modern economists are advising under his "invisible hand" theory, where he only meant that people who invest in "domestick" economies, will get unexpected benefits, he'd never written the words.

There was also Veblen who warned against the coming madness some 90 years, ago, also Odlum et al.

Galbraith wrote "The purpose of competition is to eliminate competition" and no truer words have ever been written.

Herman Daly discovered over 30 years ago, when he was in Brazil, that we must have a Steady State, Zero Growth economy to survive.

No wonder neither of them ever received the Bank of Sweden Prizes, falsely called Nobel Prize for Economics, established to give respectability to the presently ruling neoclassical market economic crime wave, attempting to overrule physical realities, with the inevitable disastrous results.

The only benefit I can see in the present madness is that humanity may wake up one day and the Age of Enlightenment may begin.

Being a perennial optimist, who has witnessed many turnarounds and miracles, I certainly hope so,

Ed Deak.

Canadian Pipe Dream

I loved this article by Byers.

Life as we know it on planet Earth.

It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to make money....

For the insider club.

It reminds me of the the smoke and mirrors of a stock market leveraged at 30 or 40 times, and the imaginary house market.

Is anything real anymore?

Stupid To The Last Drop

Alberta being stupid to the last drop is not news - a whole book was written on the subject.

Pipeline bait-and-switch

An article by Mike De Souza last May supports what Michael Byers heard:

"A multi-billion-dollar pipeline project that would link the oilsands region to the coast of British Columbia offers new export capacity that the Canadian industry does not really need, senior bureaucrats have told the federal government..."

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/real+need+pipeline+between+oilsands+west+coast+senior+bureaucrats/4848002/story.html

Sure would be nice if the ignorant Harper government would listen to the knowledgeable bureaucrats.

Oil & Gas industry are in uncharted waters

A few months ago I finally found some clear evidence, in an article, of what I suspected. That oil prices by the barrel were going down and at the same time, at the pump, going up. The article blamed our Tar Sands for bringing down the price of WestTexasIntermediate (WTI). As was mentioned in the article above, we mix tar with condensate so that it will flow thru the pipelines to the US refineries and our little old Tar Sands oil has so diluted the WTI density or API, that it has now reduced the value of all other WTI oil in the US.

Historically, WTI prices were typically 20% higher than Brent Sea (North Sea crude). Since 2008, that price differential has traded places and now Brent Sea is 20% higher than WTI.

In July of 2008, when barrel prices peaked at $147/for WTI. Gasoline in Canada was $1.47/litre, which simply demonstrates the relation between the two. Today WTI was $87 & Brent Sea was $109 and pump prices in Vancouver were $1.30/litre. The reason for the change in these relationships is due to the cost of refining heavy oil or tar.

Quote:
"The Gulf of Mexico coast is the only place in the world with any significant capacity for handling bitumen. That's because it has refineries equipped to handle heavy oil from Venezuela. If the Asians buy any bitumen from Canada, they'll insist on a very steep discount, because they'll have to ship it to the Gulf of Mexico, too."

The main question that has yet to be answered is, are the Tar Sands economically viable, based on the old standard of degrading the environment. Jeffery Rubin, in this video, does not get into the above scenario directly, but indirectly he more than touches on it. He is very knowledgeable on the subject of oil and related costs.

When the Tar Sands loses it's lustre, the Cdn. economy will take a very serious beating.

The Cdn. economy has taken a

The Cdn. economy has taken a serious beating with the FTA and WTO frauds, and now the country has sell itself and call it an "economy".

Selling the land from under our feet is not an economy but stupidity.

Ed Deak.

Small Canadian windfalls

Nice article. However, as tshipton indicates, there are a couple of questions, one of which (for me) is why the upgraders are not profitable here. OPTI has gone broke and been sold to the Chinese who may well be willing to take a longer-term view of the energy market than most of our greedy executives and equity market profiteers.

My question would be whether the shipment of condensate-greased tar to Asia would be so that cheaper labour and lower economic standards would allow China to process its fuel source in other areas where it could pollute to its heart's content? Would that Byers had asked that question of the loose-lipped mollusc that was his companion....

The other side

"There was also Veblen who warned against the coming madness some 90 years, ago, also Odlum et al.

Galbraith wrote "The purpose of competition is to eliminate competition" and no truer words have ever been written.

Herman Daly discovered over 30 years ago, when he was in Brazil, that we must have a Steady State, Zero Growth economy to survive.

No wonder neither of them ever received the Bank of Sweden Prizes...

Nice writing, Ed - your best. Like daveoferg, I disagree, but your points here are irrefutable.

Condensate one way, crud the other way

It has long puzzled me why thick, raw, corrosive bitumen would be shipped so far for refining. Value added makes sense for changing this toxic treacle into a slightly less toxic and more valuable liquid for export.

Cost of refinery infrastructure is high, but given the plans to spend nearly a trillion dollars on tar sands expansion, building on site refineries can't be so far out of line.

Woodworker, you're probably correct about environmental regulation preventing the building of such refineries, but that seems absolutely ludicrous, given the huge environmental devastation that this industry has already caused in that boreal region.

I look for other influences in the shadows on this one. Cheaper labour costs combined with slacker environmental regulation, a standard for so many corporate operations oversees, may fill the economic bill, but for the short term only.

terminalcitygirl, I've long agreed with you on this one, but as you may have noticed, the big gas guzzler ads are back on TV and the high octane supercars still go rapidly and senselessly around in circles, ovals or more complex loops while spectators watch for crashes and drive home afterward.

Electricity naturally comes out of a wall socket and fuel out of a nozzle, just as chicken breasts are grown at the back of the supermarket.

To these folks there are no fuel or environmental problems, just who will be the next race hero.

I've said it before, it's

I've said it before, it's all about the water and I do believe that. They'll build west to tank stuff to china, and south to take the water to the states. Water is the next oil.
http://www.canadians.org/media/water/2011/16-Aug-11.html

Today Govenor Carney endorsed pipelines

Today Govenor Carney endorsed pipelines. On Wednesday, Premier Christy Clark said she is going to Asia on a trade mission. Is she going to tell them they need to build a refinery that can process heavy oil (tar)? One of her main backers and advisors is Gwyn Morgan of Encana fame.

One has to wonder if the whole pipeline to the coast issue is just a bluff to get the Americans to hurray up and approve the pipelines that would bring more oil & gas to the US from Canada & even Alaska?

Either way, its a big shell game and it may be years before we know and even they know, what was really at stake for the various players.