Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Energy East map. Note “Cacouna” on the St. Lawrence. It was originally supposed to be a secondary export terminal. The Moosomin terminal would have allowed the option of southeast Saskatchewan and southwest Manitoba oil to flow on that pipeline. The Hardisty kickoff would have allowed oil from northwest Saskatchewan, too. National Energy Board/Canada Energy Regulator
I had the opportunity to make a speech in Calgary last week, talking about how Saskatchewan could find its way to producing a million barrels of oil per day. It’s an optimistic goal Premier Scott Moe suggested during the Saskatchewan provincial election, a drum I will beat from a long time to come.
One of the questions from the floor was regarding takeaway capacity, should Saskatchewan see any success in seeking to increase its oil production from around 450,000 barrels per day today.
Clearly, Enbridge is part of the answer. But their mainline would still lock Saskatchewan production into the US market. So what else can we do?
I said, “The reality is, is that if we want to ship anywhere other than the US, we need Energy East.”
Asked who we would sell it to, I responded, “That’s Energy East. Sell it to the east. Saskatchewan oil is never going to go west. We need to go east, or we need to go south. And some people are talking Churchill. I’m questionable about that. My stepdad worked as a tugboat hand in Churchill in the ’70s. I ‘ve got varying opinions about how practical Churchill is. But we need to go east. We need to build Energy East. We need to do it yesterday. It was supposed to be in service December of 2018. Imagine where we’d be if we had built that damn thing by then.”
Imagine, indeed.
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The election that is being held today saw a lot of talk about pipelines and energy corridors. But will any of it really happen?
I’ve spent the last 17 years writing about energy, and I’ll likely develop carpal tunnel syndrome writing about how the last 10 years have been devasting to the industry.
Ten years under the Liberals.
Remember how one of the first things Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did was kill the Northern Gateway Pipeline? “The Great Bear rainforest is no place for a pipeline, for a crude pipeline.”
That was the oil pipeline to Kitimat. Funny, the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which thankfully was built, ran through that very same rainforest. How did it get there?
Heading the other direction, TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline would have taken not only Alberta oil, but Saskatchewan and Manitoba oil, too, to the East Coast. A good chunk of its 1.1 million barrels per day of capacity was supposed to go to the Irving Refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, with the rest being exported from that port. The original idea also included an export terminal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, but that was deleted as there were concern about whales. (Not much concern was raised about tankers bringing oil into Montreal from foreign lands, however.)
All this talk about energy corridors and what not really centres around one thing – making Energy East happen, and in a larger scope. There’s a significant threat posed by President Donald Trump, his trade war and often repeated inclination to annex Canada. There’s a non-zero possibility he could shut off Enbridge’s pipelines running via Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan to southern Ontario. If he did, we could actually “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” as the saying goes.
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The largest threat to our energy security in this country is not China, or Russia. It’s our southern neighbours.
And to anyone who says Trump will be gone in three years and 265 days, who is to say that JD Vance won’t be president for the following eight years? Any assumptions of returning to normalcy could prove fanciful at best.
We need that pipeline built. We need it built now. And we need to go beyond its original plans.
We need to be able to supply not only New Brunswick, but Ontario and, yes, even Quebec refineries with Western Canadian oil. We need the ability to export to European allies who would much rather buy from us than from Russia.
We need to move fast, and get it done within four years.
So can we trust the party that killed Energy East in the first place to now, finally make it happen?
We all know the answer to that.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca.
Watch for the Pipeline Online Podcast today, Monday, April 28, at 1:30 p.m. with guest Mark Scholz, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Energy Contractors. We will certainly be talking about the election. You can see it below:
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You can also listen and follow on Apple Podcasts.
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- 0086 Sask Gov Oil and Gas Incentive Programs0086 Sask Gov Oil and Gas Incentive Programs
- 0085 Turnbull snow removal call office0085 Turnbull snow removal call office
- 0084 EMP Metals Pipeline Online0084 EMP Metals Pipeline Online
- 0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech
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- 0041 DEEP Since 2018 now we are going to build0041 DEEP Since 2018 now we are going to build
- 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
- 0022 Grimes winter hiring
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- 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
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