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Energy

Nova Scotia and Feds kill offshore gas for good

Published

5 months ago

7 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Zinchuk

Nova Scotia and the feds kill an offshore gas project, while their bills are paid by Alberta and Saskatchewan oil and gas

Well, isn’t that just peachy? Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative government teamed up with the federal Liberal government to put a bullet in the head of the province’s natural gas industry, whose body was apparently still twitching, despite having been thought dead since 2018.

On December 4, Tory Rushton, Nova Scotia Minister of Natural Resources and Renewables, and Jonathan Wilkinson, federal Minister of Energy and Natural Resources issued a joint statement overruling approval of the offshore regulator, Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board.

The dollar figure, so far, wasn’t much, just $1.5 million work expenditure bid for the now dead exploration license. But if successful, the company in question, Inceptio Limited, could have maybe, just maybe, revived the offshore gas industry in Nova Scotia.

According to the regulator, there were two bids for eight parcels in the Sable Island area, only one of which was satisfactory. To be clear – the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board was apparently seeking bids for development. As in, they actually wanted companies to come and develop these natural gas resources.

But I’ll bet my reporter’s fedora someone realized it didn’t look good for Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault speaking at COP28 in Dubai about how Canada would be eliminating venting and flaring, while his partner in crime Wilkinson had it in his power to kill off a new methane (natural gas) project in an area that had been purged of the demon gas industry.

No sir. That could not stand. Thus, the announcement killing the Nova Scotia exploration project on the same day as the announcement of the venting and flaring ban. (Saskatchewan calls that a “production cap by default”)

The message is clear to industry – no more new projects if the feds can stop them.

It was very clear in the joint ministerial statement that no more gas projects will be approved, so stop trying.

The ministers overrode the board, saying, “We recognize the expertise of the board and want to reiterate our confidence in the regulatory process that it undertook. However, we both agree that this decision must also account for broader policy considerations, including our shared commitments to advance clean energy and pursue economic opportunities in the clean energy sector, which are beyond the scope of the board’s regulatory purview. This decision will enable us to research and understand the interactions between the two industries as we transition to our clean energy future.

“Leveraging the experience of the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board as a world class regulator, Canada and Nova Scotia are actively pursuing the establishment of a joint regulatory regime for offshore renewable energy by amending the Atlantic Accord Acts to expand the board’s mandate so that it can regulate and enable the development of an offshore wind sector in Nova Scotia.

“This will ensure that Nova Scotians can seize the economic benefits associated with the energy transition, including the projected $1-trillion global market opportunity for offshore wind.”

In other words, there’s no future in oil or gas for you, so now you’re going to regulate offshore wind.

Never mind that just a little further down the coast, offshore wind projects are dying off. Never mind that offshore developers are in dire fiscal straits, with billions in losses. Expect the “Offshore Petroleum Board” to get a new name in the coming days.

And shame on the Conservative government of Nova Scotia for going along with this. While the governments of Saskatchewan and Alberta are standing their ground, reasserting control over natural resources, the Nova Scotia Conservatives went along with this travesty.

It’s pretty easy to do, if you don’t have to pay your own bills with your own resources. After all, Nova Scotia gets a huge chunk of its budget from the federal equalization program.

Here’s what Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland wrote to Saskatchewan Deputy Premier and Finance Minister Donna Harpauer in the most recent round of equalization payments:

“In accordance with the legislated formula under the Act and its regulations, your province does not qualify for an Equalization payment for 2023-24.”

Alberta, which has a massive oil and natural gas industry, was similarly stiffed.

And here’s what Freeland wrote to Nova Scotia Minister of Finance Allan MacMaster:

“In accordance with the legislated formula under the Act and its regulations, your province’s Equalization payment for 2023-24 will be $2,802.8 million.”

Alberta and Saskatchewan pay into equalization, largely with money from oil and gas, but Nova Scotia will continue to draw $2.8 billion from it, bit not develop their own natural gas resources.

Nova Scotia’s hospitals are still being paid for by natural gas, except that it’s Alberta and Saskatchewan’s gas, not their own.

Pretty peachy, indeed.

Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Tech giants’ self-made AI energy crisis

Published on May 18, 2024

By

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity. Now the grid they’ve helped gut cannot possibly supply their growing AI needs.

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind.

Now the grid they’ve helped gut can’t supply their growing AI needs.¹

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  • For the last decade, tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have, through dedicated anti-fossil-fuel propaganda and political efforts, promoted the shutdown of reliable fossil fuel power plants in favor of unreliable solar and wind.
    Image
  • Tech giants have propagandized against reliable fossil fuel power plants by falsely claiming to be “100% renewable” and implying everyone could do it. In fact, they have just paid utilities to credit them for others’ solar and wind use and blame others for their coal and gas use.²
  • In addition to their “100% renewable” propaganda, tech giants directly endorsed people and policies who shut down reliable fossil fuel power plants.E.g., The RE100 coalition, including Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, advocates for policies to “accelerate change towards zero carbon grids at scale by 2040.”³
  • Companies’ propaganda that solar/wind could rapidly replace fossil fuels has proven false. 

    Statewide blackouts in California (2020) and Texas (2021) were caused by the failure of solar/wind—which can go near zero at any time—to make up for lack of reliable fossil fuel capacity.

  • Thanks in significant part to tech giants’ advocacy, we have now shut down enough reliable power plants to be in a nationwide electricity crisis. 

    For example, most of North America is at elevated/high risk of electricity shortfalls between 2024-2028.⁴
  • The anti-fossil-fuel, pro-unreliable solar and wind political climate that tech giants have fostered is getting much worse, as the Administration has pledged to further reduce reliable electricity supply via power plant shutdowns and add artificial demand through EV mandates.

    Biden’s EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid
    ·
    APR 22
    Biden's EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid
     

    Biden’s de facto mandate of over 50% EVs by 2032 is a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid that will 1. Force Americans to drive inferior cars. 2. Place massive new demand for reliable electricity on a grid that is declining in reliable electricity supply.

     
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  • While for years tech giants didn’t seem to have any concern about the electricity supply disaster their propaganda and policies were bringing about, they are now very interested because of the accelerating power requirements of computing, above all the hyper-competitive AI space.
  • To function at its potential, AI requires massive amounts of power. E.g., state-of-the-art data centers can require as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor.⁵
  • Electricity demand from US data centers already doubled between 2014 and 2023. Now with the fast growth of energy-hungry AI, demand from data centers could triple from 2.5% to 7.5% of our electricity use by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group.⁶
  • In large part due to AI, nationwide electricity demand is projected to skyrocket. Official 10-year projections for the US have summer and winter peak demand rising by over 79 gigawatt and over 90 gigawatt. 90 gigawatt is equivalent to adding the entire power generating capacity of California (!)⁷
  • Given the woeful underpowered grid that AI giants have helped bring about, dramatically rising demand from AI will not only contribute to massive electricity shortages, but it will also destroy a lot of potential for AI to occur in the United States.
  • Limited and expensive electricity will force data centers to operate with higher cost or lower capacity within the US—or take a performance hit in the form of increased latency (which can drastically reduce the value of the product) by moving offshore.
  • Not only is offshoring data centers destructive from an economic standpoint, it also poses a substantial security risk. E.g., Building a data center in China—which we already depend on dangerously for critical minerals—gives the CCP physical power over more parts of our economy.
  • Economically, data centers are a gold mine of opportunities.Globally, data centers employed 2M people full-time in 2019, many in high-skill/high-pay jobs—and this number is forecast to increase nearly 300K by 2025.

    Our gutted grid will cost many Americans these opportunities.⁸
  • In the face of woefully inadequate electricity supply for their AI goals, tech giant CEOs are finally speaking up about the lack of power. 

    E.g., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that energy will be the #1 bottleneck to AI progress.

  • It is not enough for tech giants to warn us about the lack of reliable power. They need to take responsibility for their anti-fossil-fuel advocacy that helped caused it. And they need to support energy freedom policies that allow all fuels to compete to provide reliable power. 

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    Today’s grids are being ruined by systemic preferences for unreliable electricity: 1) no price penalty for being unreliable 2) huge subsidies for unreliables 3) mandates for unreliables Congress should end these now. The Opportunity America, given its combination of abundant domestic energy resources, technological ingenuity, and free-market competition, has …

     
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  • An example of a tech giant influencer not taking any responsibility for causing the electricity crisis is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who pushed companies and governments to adopt “net-zero” policies using mostly solar/wind, but now admits they can’t power AI data centers!
  • A better attitude toward electricity was expressed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “There will always be people who wait and sit around and say ‘we shouldn’t do AI because we may burn a little more carbon’… the anti-progress streak” and this “is something that we can all fight against.”⁹
  • America faces a choice. We can either continue our current trajectory, descend into a Third World grid, and become totally inhospitable for AI, or we can adopt energy freedom policies and become a world leader in both AI and electricity.
  • Share this article with tech giant CEOs and tell them to publicly apologize for damaging our grid and to commit to energy freedom policies.Google: @sundarpichai ([email protected])
    Apple: @tim_cook ([email protected])
    Meta: @finkd ([email protected])
    Microsoft: @satyanadella ([email protected])

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Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

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Energy

New Report Reveals Just How Energy Rich America Really Is

Published on May 17, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

 

A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.

The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.

Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.

The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.

“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”

It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.

The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.

In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.

Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.

No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”

With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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