Northern Gateway pipeline

[Atomoa]

Are you racist towards Asian people or something? Chinese people are not Canada's enemies.

The Government of China (not Asians) - who we are flashing selling the oil too, filling up their tanks and jets directly. Human rights abuses, their military doctrine and where it's pointed (at us), their political system, their weapons manufacturing and who they sell their arms too, routine use of brutal torture in the prison system, political "disappearances", spying on Canada, bribing public officials and internet censorship are not what Canada aspires to be. Fuel their government vehicles while they drive 50 peasants out to the country to execute them?

The only reason they are not part of the "the axis of evil" is that we rely on the use of their second-class rural workers (who are treated like slaves/blacks during Apartheid) for our manufacturing, and we love when they come over with their piles of money and buy property and businesses. Stephen Harper meets with the dalai lama, then accepts Pandas from the people who ruined, destroyed his country and are trying to jail him/kill him. We tolerate their evil for greed.

[twobits]

Yup, natural gas and LNG will in fact reduce global carbon emissions. That's why you are seeing the proposal to ship Wyoming thermal coal out of BC. Their coal market is already declining as US utilities switch to natural gas..

It is also a driver behind the mess that Alberta finds itself in. US oil markets are actually declining as more efficient cars (record high efficiency average) become the norm, heating oil is replaced by natural gas, some commercial vehicles switch to natural gas, and power utilities convert to natural gas. http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=US

US crude oil production is also way up. The combination means a much weaker market, and that combined with the facts that pipeline capacity is maxed out, and many refineries can't process the bitumen, results in a rapidly declining market for dilbit, and at reduced prices.

The US EPA is moving on CO2 being a pollutant. That makes dilbit very unattractive. Why? Because of petcoke - the leftovers from upgrading prior to actual refining. MORE CO2 than coal. Interestingly, the largest exporter/trader of petcoke in the world is owned by? Yup, the Koch brothers - which explains why they spend so much money promoting anti-science.

http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2013/01/OCI.Petcoke.FINALSCREEN.pdf

If you look at the US coal consumption, you will see it is way down. Coal fired electrical generation (the biggest users of petcoke) is being phased out by natural gas (largely because of price drivers, but also with an eye toward CO2 and the EPA). That trend means that petcoke markets are wobbly in the US. So what to do with the petcoke??

China have been big importers of petcoke. They also are in the process of securing natural gas supplies and switching coal/petcoke electrical generation to natural gas (and LNG).

http://www.greenparty.ca/blogs/7/2013-06-06/it-just-keeps-getting-worse-under-estimating-ghg-impacts-bitumen

Of course the information on petcoke is not easy to find, and the two sources I quote are definitely environmental movement oriented. It does, however, seem that the petcoke issue is the hidden aspect that the industry doesn't want the public to latch onto, and so folks like the Green Party seem to be the only sources of easily accessible information.

Assuming that these sources of information are correct, the Alberta bitumen industry faces some severe challenges. Declining markets for their product and its byproducts. Certainly so in North America, and very likely in the world. Bitumen is, after all, just one step up from coal - and coal markets are trending into a serious decline (coal consumption in the US is down 10%+).

The point of this "ramble" is that our government faces the challenge of a developing "bind". Alberta's economic growth and the revenues from it have masked a host of problems. The push to ram dilbit pipelines down the throats of BC residents makes sense in that context. It is a stopgap, and I emphasize stopgap, to avoid dealing with the structural problems in our economy created by the policies of Mulroney and his acolyte Harper. Just "kicking the can down the road" by doubling down on failed policies (I mean really? Expanded free trade with Chile is going to help us how??).

There is an opinion piece in todays Penticton Herald that blows all of your theories on upgrading, refining capacity, pricing, demand for dilbit etc right to hades. Splains it all very well and makes all of your sermons to date look rather silly. Just wish I could post a link but since the Herald has gone to online subscription I can't seem to get an online version link.

[Rwede]

I think *removed*/ferri racist. But that's just my opinion.

And, too bad for anyone who sucks so badly at their job that a person they are calling down at every chance shows up and does your job better than you ever did. There's a message in that for the racist whiners - get to work and you have nothing to fear from honest, hard-working Asian people who are looking to provide for their families.

[logicalview]

The Government of China (not Asians) - who we are flashing selling the oil too,

I am still trying to figure out what this weird term "flash selling" refers to. So far I've found that it's a retail sales method to get rid of unwanted stock, but this has nothing to do with oil, other than I guess you could say that we are selling unwanted goods in the form of oil that Barack Obama and the dunderheads in his administration are too dense to buy. They'd rather buy oil from extremely tolerant and open countries like Venezuela, who don't get their oil from oil sands. Oh what's that? Venezuela does get a lot of their oil from oil sands? Oh well, they're borderline communist, so that's ok. It's only oil from parts of the world that vote Conservative that cause man-made global warming. It's weird how "science" works that way.

filling up their tanks and jets directly.

Wow - they can run their tanks and jets on unrefined bitumen? We are screwed. They win.

Human rights abuses, their military doctrine and where it's pointed (at us), their political system, their weapons manufacturing and who they sell their arms too, routine use of brutal torture in the prison system, political "disappearances", spying on Canada, bribing public officials and internet censorship are not what Canada aspires to be. Fuel their government vehicles while they drive 50 peasants out to the country to execute them?

I agree. All of the above things you listed are bad things, and this is why we shouldn't be supporting Cuba or letting Canadians vacation there. It is a terrible country run by evil people. Oh wait - you did mean Cuba right? They are guilty of everything you just listed. So yeah, let's boycott those darn commies!

We tolerate their evil for greed.

Actually, I think we tolerate Cuba's evil for warm beaches and cheap booze. But I don't know - that's one place I refuse to visit. I'll leave it up to Jagrup Brar to send me completely unbiased reports. He's got a lot more time on his hands now.

[hobbyguy]

twobits - who wrote the article? I'd like to see the article and see their sources. If I'm wrong, fine - but I find no data to say I'm wrong - so I'd really like to see the article.