Energy
Nova Scotia and Feds kill offshore gas for good
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
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].
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned International Energy Agency (IEA) head Fatih Birol in July that he was considering cancelling America’s membership in and funding of its activities due to its increasingly political nature.
Specifically, Wright pointed to the agency’s modeling methods used to compile its various reports and projections, which the Secretary and many others believe have trended more into the realm of advocacy than fact-based analysis in recent years.
That trend has long been clear and is a direct result of an intentional shift in the IEA’s mission that evolved in the months during and following the COVID pandemic. In 2022, the agency’s board of governors reinforced this changed mission away from the analysis of real energy-related data and policies to one of producing reports to support and “guide countries as they build net-zero emission energy systems to comply with internationally agreed climate goals” consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016.
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One step Birol and his team took to incorporate its new role as cheerleader for an energy transition that isn’t actually happening was to eliminate the “current policies” modeling scenario which had long formed the base case for its periodic projections. That sterile analysis of the facts on the ground was replaced it with a more aspirational set of assumptions based on the announced policy intentions of governments around the world. Using this new method based more on hope and dreams than facts on the ground unsurprisingly led the IEA to begin famously predicting a peak in global oil demand by 2029, something no one else sees coming.
Those projections have helped promote the belief among policymakers and investors that a high percentage of current oil company reserves would wind up becoming stranded assets, thus artificially – and many would contend falsely – deflating the value of their company stocks. This unfounded belief has also helped discourage banks from allocating capital to funding exploration for additional oil reserves that the world will almost certainly require in the decades to come.
Secretary Wright, in his role as leading energy policymaker for an administration more focused on dealing with the realities of America’s energy security needs than the fever dreams of the far-left climate alarm lobby, determined that investing millions of taxpayer dollars in IEA’s advocacy efforts each year was a poor use of his department’s budget. So, in an interview with Bloomberg in July, Wright said, “We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates, or we will withdraw,” adding that his “strong preference is to reform it.”
Lo and behold, less than two months later, Javier Blas says in a September 10 Bloomberg op/ed headlined “The Myth of Peak Fossil Fuel Demand is Crumbling,” that the IEA will reincorporate its “current policies” scenario in its upcoming annual report. Blas notes that, “the annual report being prepared by the International Energy Agency… shows the alternative — decades more of robust fossil-fuel use, with oil and gas demand growing over the next 25 years — isn’t just possible but probable.”
On his X account, Blas posted a chart showing that, instead of projecting a “peak” of crude oil demand prior to 2030, IEA’s “current policies” scenario will be more in line with recent projections by both OPEC and ExxonMobil showing crude demand continuing to rise through the year 2050 and beyond.
Whether that is a concession to Secretary Wright’s concerns or to simple reality on the ground is not clear. Regardless, it is without question a clear about-face which hopefully signals a return by the IEA to its original mission to serve as a reliable analyst and producer of fact-based information about the global energy situation.
The global community has no shortage of well-funded advocates for the aspirational goals of the climate alarmist community. If this pending return to reality by the IEA in its upcoming annual report signals an end to its efforts to be included among that crowded field, that will be a win for everyone, regardless of the motivations behind it.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Audrey Streb
The Trump administration is rolling back President Joe Biden’s restrictions on oil and gas, planning 21 lease sales in 2025 — a sharp contrast to Biden’s first year, which saw none.
The Department of the Interior (DOI) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have already held 11 lease sales under Trump generating over $110 million for Americans, and plan to host 10 more in 2025, the agency told the Daily Caller News Foundation. While the Biden administration imposed a sweeping offshore drilling ban and greenlit a record-low offshore oil and gas leasing schedule, the Trump administration is working to reopen development on federal lands and waters.
“President Donald Trump has revived American energy. While the Biden administration left our energy resources to waste at the cost of taxpayers, Americans can feel relief knowing that they now have an administration laser focused on unleashing our domestic energy sources, lowering costs, and securing a more affordable and reliable energy future,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the DCNF. “The number of new oil and gas lease sales simply speak for themselves.”
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has reported 3,608 new oil and gas permits in Trump’s second term thus far, compared to 2,528 permits during the Biden administration, according to the DOI. Trump and the DOI have approved 43% more federal drilling permits than his predecessors had at the same point in their presidencies, according to the agency.
The DOI has also opened more than 450,000 acres of federal land for potential energy development, and the DOI and BLM are set to approve more drilling permits than any other fiscal year in the past 15 years, the agency said.
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump signed an executive order to “unleash American energy” and declared a national energy emergency. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) further directed the DOI to open more domestic energy exploration opportunities, ordering the agency to “immediately resume onshore quarterly lease sales in specified states.”
Trump has emphasized bolstering conventional resources, which stands in contrast to Biden’s stifling of the oil and gas industry, as he froze liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, blocked the major Keystone XL pipeline and halted BLM lease approvals on his first day as president. Biden instead championed a green energy agenda, pushing for major wind and solar projects through billions in subsidies, loans and grants.
Notably, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) previously confirmed to the DCNF that the Biden administration failed to adequately review the environmental impacts of certain offshore wind projects before approving them. The Trump administration has cracked down on offshore wind, halting many major projects and reviewing several more, with Burgum arguing that the energy resource the Biden administration favored is “not reliable enough” at an event on Sept. 10.
Additionally, gasoline prices have been dropping nationally in recent months, with costs hitting four-year lows headed into summer and Labor Day weekend, according to GasBuddy and the American Automobile Association. The average retail price for gasoline is projected to keep dropping due to falling oil prices, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
“[Oil] prices are not set by current supplies. They’re set by future expectations,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, told the DCNF previously. “President Donald Trump is sending signals that the oil industry here is going to be very vibrant. He’s shrinking permitting time for fossil fuel projects, so expectations for fossil fuel supply in the United States are great.”
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