Alberta Tarsands: This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
JWN Energy claims green hydrogen is set to be competitive with fossil fuels by 2040. Green hydrogen is made from renewable energy such as solar or wind. Blue hydrogen is made using natural gas. It’s more environmentally friendly than traditional fuel sources, but not as friendly as green hydrogen
Last month I published an article saying, Alberta eyes a cleaner future as a hydrogen superpower. It includes a quote by Simon Dyer, deputy executive director of the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank. “Alberta has a lot of the building blocks in place to be able to compete in this space and develop a thriving hydrogen economy.” He said, “Hydrogen could represent a lifeline to Alberta’s oil and gas industry,”
Naturally, I envisioned Alberta becoming a world leader in producing and distributing hydrogen. It would give us the edge. When the world wanted Alberta’s bitumen, there wasn’t any mention of reaching tidewaters to get it to the market. They came and got it. Now that it’s the dirtiest and least valued oil in the world, no-one wants it. The government, whose budget relies on oil revenue to meet it’s budget, is completely delusional to think we can turn back time, to when it was in high demand.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney feels if markets were more accessible, Alberta could move more oil. He bemoans the province’s lack of pipelines to get the precious cargo to the coast. He’s sure if he had a way to load it onto tankers, that international markets would quickly snap it up. He needs to produce more oil, in fact, as we patiently wait for this opportunity that will never come. Unfortunately, the province has limits.
There is a 100 megatonne annual limit on provincial carbon emissions. In the oil industry, emissions are produced mainly from extraction, transportation and production. Rather than turning Alberta into a world leader in the production and distribution of hydrogen, Alberta will use hydrogen to reduce emissions and increase oil production.
According to a news article, “Alberta will announce, no later than October, a strategy to develop “blue hydrogen” as a cleaner alternative to using natural gas to extract crude at steam-driven oil sands sites, Associate Minister of Natural Gas Dale Nally told Reuters in an interview.
Robert Tremblay of the Alberta Party wrote in the Lethbridge Herald that Alberta is in desperate need of economically viable energy construction projects. This hydrogen project isn’t one of them. We are also in desperate need of politicians who have the vision to lead us into the 21st century, rather than mire the economy in the mistakes of yesterday.
Mr Tremblay says, “Even better, the domestic and global movement for climate action shows us that these projects are not risky and will not face the severe legal and social headwinds that other energy projects have faced over the past two decades.”
WClarke’s photo of the Exxon Mobil Refinery in Baton Rouge
The oil lobby’s political friends are melting away faster than an Alberta glacier. Every crack in that coalition is a foothold for a green and just recovery from the pandemic.
The latest sign was ExxonMobil being dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the same day that Storebrand, a major European investor, announced it was blacklisting the company over its anti-climate lobbying.
The Dow Jones Average is an index that tracks 30 large, publicly traded “blue chip” (read: financially sound) companies. Exxon and its predecessor companies had been part of the Dow Jones index since 1928, so that snub had to sting.
But Storebrand’s new climate policy is even more important.
Storebrand also blacklisted companies that get more than five per cent of their revenues from coal or oilsands. Major investors like Blackrock, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and the Norwegian Oil Fund have announced similar exclusions as they, too, reduce their exposure to fossil fuels.
In “Who Benefits? An Investigation of Foreign Ownership in the Oil Sands”, Environmental Defence, Équiterre, and Stand.earth maintain that 70 percent of oilsands production is owned by foreign companies and shareholders.
Berman emphasized the big five oilsands producers—Suncor, CNRL, Cenovus, Imperial Oil, and Husky Energy—are all majority foreign-owned, controlling 60 percent of bitumen production.
“Premier Kenney has used his bully pulpit to attack Canadians that are concerned about the climate and the toxic mess being left behind by the oil and gas industry of somehow being unpatriotic,” she said. “This research shows clearly that the majority of the revenues from the oilsands are going to foreign investors while Canadians are left paying for the cleanup.
Who Benefits? An Investigation of Foreign Ownership in the Oil Sands
Reclamation of the oil sands, conventional oil and gas wells, and pipelines in Alberta will cost an estimated $260 billion and take as many as 3000 years to complete.
“The government of Alberta should stop wasting time and money on war rooms and propping up oil companies like Suncor and CNRL who claim to be Canadian but are sucking this country dry.”
Any event — such as a COVID-19 outbreak in any of these oil-supplying countries — that disrupts the flow of crude oil to the refinery threatens the energy security of most people in Atlantic Canada.
Crude oil supply
Relying on non-Canadian suppliers has never been an issue for the refinery. Even during the low points of Canadian-Saudi relations in the summer of 2018 and periods of increased tension in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has been one of its principal suppliers. (Part of this may be attributable to the fact that about 60 per cent of the refinery’s output is shipped to New England and U.S.-Saudi relations could be affected if Saudi Arabia’s supplies to the Saint John refinery were disrupted.)
However, COVID-19 is a concern for those running the refinery. In April, Irving Oil applied to the Canadian Transportation Agency to use tankers from unspecified, non-Canadian suppliers for these two shipments, as per the requirements of the Coasting Trade Act. In each application it was made clear that the company’s overriding concern was the impact COVID-19 could have on about 80 per cent of its crude oil supply shipped from non-Canadian sources.
This is a legitimate concern.
Cargo ships navigate through Panama Canal waters in Gamboa, Panama, in June 2020. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)
A COVID-19 outbreak in an oil-producing country or on board a tanker could disrupt the flow of crude oil to the Saint John refinery and, consequentially, disrupt the flow of its refined products to most of Atlantic Canada and New England.
Irving Oil’s decision to find alternate ways to access Western Canadian crude oil from British Columbia via the Panama Canal or the U.S. Gulf Coast will undoubtedly increase the diversity of its supply. However, Irving’s concerns over COVID-19 and its international suppliers and shippers are equally applicable to Western Canada’s oilfields and any ships used to carry the crude oil.
To be fair, Irving has few other choices: crude-by-rail is a possibility, but there is limited capacity in its rail yard; TransCanada killed the Energy East project and even if it could be revived, it would take years to complete.
LaGrange should disclose the epidemiological models used to anticipate consequences of both the current reopening plan and several alternatives, so they can be accurately compared.
The public has the right to hear how Alberta’s plan incorporates up-to-date data, verified by districts, about realities in schools. These include factors like class and room sizes; data on which mitigation measures such as smaller class size, better ventilation or medical-grade PPE for teachers could help stem viral spread and their costs. Where good data about the consequences of reopening don’t yet exist, there should be transparency, too.
We should also know what experts have been consulted, what concerns, ideas and recommendations they generated and how these were addressed and evaluated.
Transparency about data and expert recommendations are vital to an informed public. Transparency allows discussion and critique, and allows concrete conversation about risks the public is being asked to accept.
What is the prospect that children, family members or teachers will be hospitalized or die? What are best- and worst-case scenarios in terms of resultant casualties and community spread? The public should know what risks or potential costs everyone is being asked to bear.
Premier Jason Kenney has released few details about back-to-school plans, while emphasizing parent choice. In this photo, Jillian Reid, 9, works at home in Cremona, Alta., in March 2020, after schools closed. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Transparency also allows parents to make informed choices and to develop a sense of confidence in how decisions are made not only now, but going forward.
Israel, for example, failed to reduce class size and saw an outbreak at a high school when schools reopened that infected hundreds. There were instructions for mask-wearing by students in Grade 4 and older, open windows, frequent hand washing and physically distancing students when possible. But with up to 38 children in classrooms, physical distancing was impossible, and under a heat wave, officials permitted windows closed for air conditioning and allowed a mask-wearing exemption. Are similar outcomes or decisions possible in Alberta?
Transparency also matters as it allows people to evaluate whether plans address and fund ethical requirements pertaining to school staff: adequate provisions so reopenings work logistically, adequate protection that ensures reopenings are maximally safe and adequate compensation for staff who are assuming risks.
Unanswered questions
We need answers to questions such as: How much does teachers’ risk increase in classrooms where social distancing cannot be maintained? Given risks, is hazard pay in order for school staff? If it isn’t — hopefully because projected risks are low — then how about a provincial payout for those who may nonetheless suffer serious illness or death in conjunction with a COVID-19 school outbreak?
That seems only fair and could contribute to confidence in what to expect.
In the end, transparency allows us to hold leadership accountable. Politicians and scientists can be wrong. If the public knows what the province’s projections are and accepts them, then it can be prepared for predicted bumps without losing trust in leadership. If the models turn out to be inaccurate or ethically unacceptable, the public deserves a change in course.
If requests for transparency go unanswered, Albertans must assume either that the scientific expertise behind decisions to open schools is inadequate, or that the education minister is failing to base her decisions on scientific expertise. Neither option is acceptable with so many lives at stake.
