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The Pipeline Lie · The Environment in Canada Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_02: 61% of Albertans oppose subsidies for a new pipeline, according to probe research.
0:05
SPEAKER_02: And two-thirds say a province's economy is too dependent on oil and gas.
0:09
SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, according to Abacus data, 69% of people across Canada and 62% in Alberta support government regulations to limit oil and gas companies' greenhouse gas emissions.
0:19
SPEAKER_02: Albertans and other Canadians alike also wanted stronger industrial carbon prices.
0:23
SPEAKER_02: And there are multiple polls that show this from different polling firms, including showing that Albertans are against subsidies for this pipeline.
0:31
SPEAKER_02: Again, multiple different polls.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: Cuts to climate policy and the construction of a new pipeline are not necessary for national unity.
0:40
SPEAKER_02: And these actions only enable a small group of oil, gas, and tech interests who want to keep pushing for more division and leverage.
0:47
SPEAKER_02: And I have just learned that pushing for division and leverage works.
0:51
SPEAKER_02: The Pampina Institute points out, to quote, Alberta and Ottawa said any new pipeline would be privately funded.
0:57
SPEAKER_02: That promise was broken.
0:59
SPEAKER_02: A private company will cover just 10%.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: Taxpayers will front up tens of billions of dollars.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: So here we are talking about building a pipeline to a market which the market itself says, no, we don't want your stuff.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: They say when you go over there, they say, oh yeah, right now we could use, you know, 200,000 barrels a day for this petrochemical plant because you know the uh international heavy market is is tight.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean if you're gonna build a 50-year piece of of infrastructure, which the taxpayer will inevitably uh help fund, what they need today is not adequate.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: You need to know or have a pretty good guess that they're gonna need that same amount of oil in 25 years and that you can you can provide it competitively.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: And nobody ever asks that question.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Not the Prime Minister Mark Carney, not his energy minister Mark Mark uh Tim Hodgson, and not Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and not any of the oil CEOs.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: They assume it to be true.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: And assuming is not good enough when taxpayers' dollars are on the line.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: I have a uh a mole, uh, as journalists are wont to do, in in our NRCAN, and they tell me that inside the department, those conversations are verbotent.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: You don't discuss it.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: The government is committed to oil and LNG and pipelines.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And you best not, if you want your uh keep your job and keep your career on track, you best not contradict what the the minister wants.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: And I want to get back, circle back to this uh you know, the values Kearney versus Goldman Sachs Kearney.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Tim Hodgson is a former Goldman Sachs banker.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: He worked with Kearney at Goldman Sachs.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: When Kearney went over from Goldman Sachs to the Bank of Canada, he followed him as his deputy, and and then his uh uh Hodgson's reputation is he's a deal bulldog.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: He's a he's a deal maker, man.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you want to get a deal for a pipeline or whatever it is, he puts it together, he gets the capital, he'll make it, he'll make it happen.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: And it's no secret, it is no, to me anyway, why uh Carney chose him as the Minister for Natural Resources.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: It's to do deals.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: It's to get all of these big projects that are going into the major projects office and to get them funded and to get them up and running as quickly as possible and bring them across the finish line.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: That's Tim Hodgson's job.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: It's not Tim Hodgson's job to be thoughtful.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: It's not Tim Hodgson's job to think about the energy transition and where the global energy system is going and how demand is changing in Asia and how it's probably going to change pretty quick.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: That's not his job.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: He's a deal maker and he's got his blinkers on, and that's all he's doing.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: So it falls to people like energy, you know, it falls to energy media and a few others to basically try to build a, you know, educate the Canadians about it and build a political constituency for change.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to another episode of the Environment in Canada Podcast, a podcast about the Environment in Canada by Sierra Club Canada.
4:20
SPEAKER_02: I'm Connor Curtis, Director of Communications with Sierra Club Canada.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: And today we're going to be talking first about the announcement of a plan by the federal government to publicly build a pipeline as opposed to, I don't know, building something like housing or renewable energy that happened yesterday on July 2nd, 2026, and all the problems with it.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: And then we will have an interview with Markham Hislop of Energy Media that's energy with an eye on the end.
4:45
SPEAKER_02: That's actually from April 2026.
4:48
SPEAKER_02: So a couple of months old, but it gets into a lot of the reasons why the federal government is now building a pipeline and why they're deeply floored.
4:55
SPEAKER_02: So, in case you haven't heard, Canada is going to pay for another pipeline, even if the PM would rather call it an investment.
5:01
SPEAKER_02: As heat waves, wildfires, and flooding endanger Canadian lives and even disrupt Canada today, Canadians are united in wanting climate action and not wanting a publicly funded pipeline.
5:13
SPEAKER_02: Paul showed us consistently, including in Alberta.
5:16
SPEAKER_02: But the Prime Minister instead announced Canada will not meet climate targets and will purposefully enable further oil and gas expansion, as Rachel Gilmore reported on the day before Canada Day.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: And now it's just being announced that we're building a pipeline that both the Canadian and Albertan governments will invest in, and that will be constructed by the Trans Mountain Corporation, a federal crown corporation.
5:37
SPEAKER_02: 61% of Albertans oppose subsidies for a new pipeline, according to probe research.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: And two-thirds say that a province's economy is too dependent on oil and gas.
5:47
SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, according to Abacus Data, 69% of people across Canada and 62% in Alberta support government regulations to limit oil and gas companies' greenhouse gas emissions.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: Albertans and other Canadians alike also wanted stronger industrial carbon prices.
6:01
SPEAKER_02: And there are multiple polls that show this from different polling firms, including showing that Albertans are against subsidies for this pipeline.
6:09
SPEAKER_02: Again, multiple different polls.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: Cuts to climate policy and the construction of a new pipeline are not necessary for national unity.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: And these actions only enable a small group of oil, gas, and tech interests with, uh, shall we say, some alignment with South of the Border, who want to keep pushing for more division and leverage, and have just learned that pushing for division and leverage works.
6:34
SPEAKER_02: The private industry partner on the pipeline project, and I say private industry partner for a reason, Pambina Pipeline Corporation appears to be really more of a cover for a publicly built pipeline.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: As CBC reports, quote, the private sector Pambina Company said that it shall have no at-risk development capital at this stage, which likely means that for the moment it is not risking a substantial amount of money, if any.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: And since CBC reported that, it's looking like at most the private company will cover just 10% if they decided to that leaves 90% for us to cover.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: As Jimmy Thompson pointed out on Blue Sky, quote, the new pipeline is expected to cost between$35 to$44 billion of mostly public money, according to the Alberta filing.
7:19
SPEAKER_02: There are three things to know here.
7:21
SPEAKER_02: Number one, there might be a private partner, but for a pipeline like this to even be built, it would still need massive public financing, and that will be a loss to the Canadian public.
7:31
SPEAKER_02: Number two, it's very likely any private sector partners will realize this pipeline doesn't make sense at some point.
7:37
SPEAKER_02: You can bet that story ends with the public picking up their part of the bill as well.
7:41
SPEAKER_02: As the IEEA notes, the chances for recouping public funds that have been sunken into the previous TMX are slim.
7:50
SPEAKER_02: Number three, carbon capture and storage projects, such as the Pathways Project connected to the pipeline, do not work for reducing emissions and are themselves a way for government to subsidize oil and gas, representing more public investment.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: Now, that may complicate things just a little bit by quoting the Pambina Institute, which is not the Pambina Pipeline Corporation, but rather a clean energy think tank.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: Sorry for the confusion.
8:14
SPEAKER_02: The Pambina Institute points out to quote, Alberta and Ottawa said any new pipeline would be privately funded.
8:21
SPEAKER_02: Today, that was yesterday, that promise was broken.
8:24
SPEAKER_02: A private company will cover just 10%.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: Taxpayers will front up tens of billions of dollars.
8:30
SPEAKER_02: And note that, quote, there is nothing in today's MOU announcement between Canada, Alberta, and pathways companies that actually compels the companies to move forward on this project.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: So as far as pathways and carbon capture and storage, if you hear the Prime Minister saying that it's going to reduce the emissions of a pipeline, there is nothing to actually compel those companies to even build carbon capture and storage, even if carbon capture and storage actually worked.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: So, one thing we do know for certain is that oil and gas expansion is not economically profitable.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: There was not enough future demand for oil and gas to justify a new pipeline, nor new LNG projects before the Iran war.
9:09
SPEAKER_02: The war has convinced countries to go renewable even faster, destroying even more demand for LNG and gas and oil.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: No amount of trust will overcome that.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: So if a new oil pipeline requires public financing, then that means the public will pay the price for the pipeline and there won't be any reward, just a bill to pay.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: Remember how Transmountain was going to be solved to a private entity?
9:33
SPEAKER_02: As the Energy Mix reported recently, quote, cabinet ministers and officials originally insisted they did not intend for the public to be the long-term owner.
9:42
SPEAKER_02: But now Trans Mountain Corporation and its financial overseer are making a pitch to keep the controversial$34 billion pipeline in the government hands indefinitely.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: The T also reported that Trans Mountain's profitability could be an accounting illusion.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: Again, oil and gas interests will do everything they can to undermine climate policy, which is why false pragmatism that lowers climate targets only ensures we achieve nothing at all.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: It's a bit like aiming a cannon at a target by aiming it straight at the target, or even lower than it, and not accounting for gravity or wind resistance.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: You need to aim higher to reach the target.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, you're just aiming lower and yelling, I'm practical for some reason.
10:22
SPEAKER_02: As far as equity partnerships with First Nations, as well as financing via the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, one need only look to LNG and the risks that is born to communities to look at the risks that a new pipeline in that regard would take to those communities.
10:36
SPEAKER_02: As D Smog reports, as Mark Connie fast tracks Canadian LNG projects, First Nations face hidden financial traps.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: Critics say new LNG ventures in British Columbia settle in digital communities with debt, opaque ownership structures, and financial risks that could leave them owing billions.
10:53
SPEAKER_02: A Southern route for the pipeline does not magically make its hurdles nor its climate impact go away, as the energy mix reported recently.
11:00
SPEAKER_02: Quote, four Southern First Nations remain opposed to TMX, and there's no sign they would support a pipeline expansion, and a route to Delta would engage a different set of nations.
11:09
SPEAKER_02: The International Energy Agency still projects declining demand for oil and gas with no new production needed, as Catherine Abreu explained at the IEA Energy Efficiency Conference in Montreal this week.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: And this is the Prime Minister's pipeline.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: The Prime Minister must really get credit for this pipeline proposal alongside Alberta.
11:29
SPEAKER_02: After all, he has made sure we will all invest in it.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: The federal government has taken actions that have sought to enable this pipeline at every step, and threatening BC if BC didn't cooperate was undoubtedly vital to getting to this point.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: We know it's a genuine love of pipelines that fueled these decisions.
11:48
SPEAKER_02: After all, the federal government's AI strategy is purposely meant to burn more gas, as D.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: Smog revealed recently.
11:53
SPEAKER_02: That's along with all the other environmental deregulation that we are seeing that breaks the national unity narrative, like the deregulation of pesticides that actually hurts our ability to implement trade diversification.
12:08
SPEAKER_02: That doesn't fit into the national unity cover story because it's just a cover story.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: Again, I highly recommend reading a three-part series and a T on the influence of the pro-oil, pro-LNG, and pro-AI group Build Canada on Federal Policy to understand this more.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: It's a group whose founders did not want Canada to retaliate when there was aggression from south of the border, and who cherish Musk.
12:30
SPEAKER_02: That's the problem with not being able to hear the word no, a word the PM does not want to hear.
12:37
SPEAKER_02: It makes one very likely to fall for scamps.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: 4D chess is a lie.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: This idea that the Prime Minister was playing some 4D chess game to secretly stop a pipeline while making it look like he was doing one.
12:50
SPEAKER_02: And many of us might even have told ourselves that lie at some point, but it's not too late to untell yourself.
12:56
SPEAKER_02: It just means that you realize that the pipeline was a bad idea, even if the Prime Minister doesn't get that.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, that's a very smart thing to realize.
13:04
SPEAKER_02: It's just the PM didn't realize that.
13:08
SPEAKER_02: And it's a massive lie.
13:09
SPEAKER_02: It's a lie that could cost Canadians tens of billions of dollars.
13:12
SPEAKER_02: It also begs the question of what other lies about the direction of policy are out there that we may believe.
13:19
SPEAKER_02: Because I have to say, what was most disturbing is that the Prime Minister twice recently referenced the abnormal weather and heat we are having right now, noting the biblical weather in Ottawa, even as he announced the pipeline plan.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: Without a trace of irony, he said these things, as Gilmore pointed out.
13:37
SPEAKER_02: Nor without any realization that what was causing that extreme heat is linked to using fossil fuels, and a pipeline will make that worse.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: People in France are dying because of this.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: Mortuaries are having trouble finding space.
13:52
SPEAKER_02: The World Weather Attribution Organization that quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of extreme weather events has a release out today about the heat we are experiencing in Canada, and to quote, scientists find that humid heat impacting the World Cup and national celebrations in Canada would have been virtually impossible without climate change.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: In a climate that is 1.4 degrees centigrade cooler than it was before human-course climate change, the WBGT levels forecast would have been so rare that it would have been virtually impossible, at most, not expected to occur even once in many thousands of years.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: Even in today's climate, it remains relatively rare, expected about one in every 200 years as a best estimate, though there is high uncertainty in this given the extremity of the event.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: The researchers found no role, Falino, in driving these temperatures.
14:45
SPEAKER_02: I wrote most of this episode of this podcast in my apartment during a heat wave with the ACON blast, which I normally try to avoid using, but even with it on, it was hot and hard to focus, and I can only imagine how bad it is right now for people who are at risk from extreme heat or can't afford cooling technology right now.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: The cost of not acting on climate change is going to be severe.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: It does not outweigh the cost of acting on it.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: So what truly disturbs me are the statements by the PM that try to throw this situation off as if it's worthy only of a witty comment about the biblical impacts of weather in Ottawa, or can be fixed merely by a water break.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: If you're still listening to this, then I imagine you feel somewhat the way I do and would like to do something about it.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: If you want, take action by spreading the word and talking with others.
15:34
SPEAKER_02: There's a guide about how to effectively talk with others at the link in the description.
15:38
SPEAKER_02: Call your MP and oppose this pipeline.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: Share this podcast or share our social media posts about this issue.
15:47
SPEAKER_02: Find sources for all of this, all this information I've just talked about, and the actions you can take at the link in the description for the newsletter.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: And sign up to our newsletter for more updates like this.
15:58
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, here's the interview with Markham.
16:00
SPEAKER_02: And you know, Markham and I don't agree on everything.
16:03
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, but we had a really great chat about some of the actual solutions to problems we're facing in Canada and why the federal government isn't even examining them or looking at them, and why instead they seem so focused on an oil pipeline that still doesn't have an economic case and that we're sinking billions of dollars into now.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: Um, anyway, as I say, it's from April, uh, so it's a little bit older, it's before all these recent announcements happened.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: So keep that in context.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: But do be sure to go check out energy media, that's energy with an eye, on YouTube as well.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: I'll link to it in the description.
16:32
SPEAKER_02: They have lots of videos that come out pretty regularly on energy subjects, and it's a really interesting place to hear a different perspective on all of this.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: For those tuning in, who are you and and what do you do?
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, Markham Hisslith, and I'm an energy journalist and the CEO of Energy Media, that's E-N-E-R-G-I.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: And essentially, I mean, we're in our 18th year.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh we we're um uh we're one of those overnight successes, you know, 18 years in the making, because uh our form of energy journalism, which is to interview experts.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about economists and and uh engineers and you know mostly technical people.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Um and we do it half of our roughly 500 interviews a year are in uh uh outside of Canada, and then half are inside Canada.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: And since we're interviewing about the energy transition primarily, the idea is to bring the lessons that we've learned uh with our international work into the Canadian context and say, how does this apply?
17:36
SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, if you you know, if you sitting in Canada, you probably think the energy transition really isn't much of a thing, and you know, oil and gas and still rule, and that's gonna be, you know, the basically the future of economies for for decades to come.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: Get into Europe, different in uh perspective entirely.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Get into China, and now you're now this is you're in the first electrostate, and the changes that are coming in their transportation sector, which is electrifying, in their in their power sector, which is uh they're building out solar and wind and batteries at an amazing rate, never mind hydro and and nuclear, which they're adding to it, uh they're electrifying their economy.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh they're already now, you know, we're at about 20% electrification, they're at 30% and rising, about one to two percent a year.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: So by the time 20 uh 50 comes along, where are they going to be?
18:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, 60, 70, 80 percent electrified?
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the reasons, and and it's not just China.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: What China has done is starting about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, it identified new energy technology, so electric vehicles, batteries, as a core strategic and economic advantage, a geopolitical advantage, and it poured enormous, and I mean enormous sums into building out those industries.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: So you're not only developing the technology, but you're also scaling up the manufacturer.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, they may they have the capacity to manufacture 50 million automobiles.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: 50 million.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: And and we know, I mean, they've they because they've told us in very clear terms, their goal is to kill the internal combustion engine and to dominate uh international auto manufacturing with electric vehicles.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: That's the goal.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: And they're well on their way to do it.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: They made 34 million uh electric vehicles last year.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: I think they they the internal market they had uh bought 17 million, something like that.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like a 52% uh of all the vehicles sold in China were electric.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: So the and you can take that model in transportation and then apply it to buildings because now they're adopting heat pumps at scale, and you can take it and apply it to industry because now they're using industrial heat and they're using industrial processes that are electric.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: So they've got this massive build-out of their power sector, massive scale up of electrotech manufacturing, massive adoption in their consumer economy, industrial economy, commercial economy, and it's and what they've done by doing it at home is they've driven down the costs and increased their manufacturing capacity so they could serve export markets.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, in uh May of 2024, when Joe uh then president Joe Biden said, no, we're putting 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, and then Canada did it in September.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: And I said at the time, I said, all they're gonna do is China's just gonna pivot to the global south and say, so long, we don't need you, and it's exactly what they've done.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: And so you see them not only exporting more and more and more V uh EVs and other electrotech uh out into places like Brazil, into Bangladesh and Pakistan, uh, and so on.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but uh they're also building plants.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, BYD is building a plant in Brazil, and there's Hungary and Turkey and and other places in Europe because Europe has got tariffs, but they're much more friendly to Chinese EVs, on and off.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: This is an industrial uh strategy tied to geopolitical strategy.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And we here in North America, we're in Fortress, North America, right?
21:25
SPEAKER_00: So we're dominated, we're both, you know, both Canada and the US are are the US is the number one natural gas LNG exporter and oil exporter, and Canada is number four, and I think in gas we're number five.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: So we are essentially petrostates.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of people in Alberta bridle at that, but the truth is we are.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: And so we see what's going on internationally in the in the global energy system as through the lens of a petrostate, and we are the incumbents.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh, our markets have been disrupted by new technologies, these electric technologies.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: And in classic incumbent style, we deny it.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: We minimize it.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: We pretend that it's not happening.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: And we double down.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: Incumbents always double down on the status quo at a time of disruption.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: You can go, it we we are the blockbuster to China's Netflix.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: It's as if we're back in the Cold War and the space race, and like as if America decided, okay, so the Soviets have just built uh you know markets capable of reaching orbit, and we are going to build biplanes.
22:39
SPEAKER_02: Like that's how that's how this feels to me at this point.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: Because like, well, you know, fair enough.
22:43
SPEAKER_02: I I can understand people being concerned about growing Chinese influence overseas, but if you want to compete with that, to my mind, the thought is you have to figure out how you're going to have some share of that market, how you're going to actually be, or at the very least, have the supply chains internally to your own nation for renewables, that you're not then relying upon China for that you're you're able to produce some of these things in-house.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever noticed that when the discussion around pipelines, so we're talking oil, and LNGs, we're talking natural gas, that nobody ever in Canada ever talks about customers.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: They always talk about how, oh, we have really cheap gas, which we do.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: We have really cheap, heavy, sour, crude oil, which we do, and it's dependable and you know it's it's not uh doesn't suffer from geopolitical disruptions in the same way that you know we're seeing it with the Strait of Hormuz and the war on Iran.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: But we always talk about, uh, and I just critiqued uh uh an economist uh studied a couple days ago on this very topic.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh they say if we build a pipeline, all of the there will be all of these economic benefits,$31 billion a year for the West Coast pipeline that Alberta wants to build.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: And my question was, oh, and who are you gonna sell it to?
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh do you know?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: And what price are you gonna sell it at?
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh are do you have competitors?
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, because you know uh right now it costs you$16 to get a barrel to a Chinese refinery, and it costs the Saudis two, and it cost the Iraqis two, and it cost Venezuela five, and how are you gonna compete against that?
24:27
SPEAKER_00: And not only that, but we have Chinese, you know, the Chinese, they're not they're not um they're not stupid people.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they've been doing this modeling themselves, and you can find it from Sinopec, the state-owned refinery, and you can sell the the uh CNPC, the China uh Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, state-owned, the Peking University, and they do these demand studies and they say, oh, well, you know what?
24:52
SPEAKER_00: By 2050, we're now consuming 17.4 million barrels a day of oil, and it'll be anywhere from 5.5 million to 7.5 million by 2050.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna lose 10 to 12 million barrels a day of consumption.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and by the 2050, it'll the transportation sector will all be electrified, and the only demand will be well, there'll be some for uh uh aircraft, uh, for aviation and for marine shipping, and then the rest will go into petrochemicals.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: And and that's it.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: So here we are talking about building a pipeline to a market which the market itself says, no, we don't want your stuff.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: They say, when you go over there, they say, oh yeah, right now we could use you know 200,000 barrels a day for this petrochemical plant because you know the there's a uh the the uh international heavy market is is tight.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean if you're gonna build a 50-year piece of of infrastructure, which the taxpayer will inevitably uh help fund, what they need today is not adequate.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: You need to know or have a pretty good guess that they're gonna need that same amount of oil in 25 years and that you can you can provide it competitively.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: And nobody ever asks that question.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: Not the Prime Minister Mark Carney, not his energy minister Mark uh Tim Hodgson, and not Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and not any of the oil CEOs, they assume it to be true.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: And assuming is not good enough when taxpayers' dollars are on the line.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, so I'm curious to shift out east because that's the the West Coast pipeline.
26:31
SPEAKER_02: But like I'm from Newfoundland, Labrador myself, right?
26:34
SPEAKER_02: So again, I I when you talk about being in an echo chamber of oil and gas and not hearing from outside sources that are saying, uh, hold on a second, maybe just some caution here.
26:45
SPEAKER_02: Check what your market is, check if people are actually going to need this in the time it takes to build these projects.
26:51
SPEAKER_02: You know, we're just going through this thing with uh debate an order oil project that's being proposed, right?
26:54
SPEAKER_02: Now it's first oil, ideally, optimistically, is 2031, right?
27:00
SPEAKER_02: Optimistically.
27:01
SPEAKER_02: A good study came out recently showing Equinor's projects, BP's projects, a lot of these projects are happening like way longer in the future than they're planned.
27:10
SPEAKER_02: Um, and you had somebody on the show, your show the other day, talking about potential peak oil because of the Iran crisis, because of everybody going, well, oil's unreliable, let's get off of it.
27:21
SPEAKER_02: Potential peak oil prior to 2029, I mean, how does that impact something like offshore oil and what's the difference there between, say, that and a and a West Coast oil pipeline?
27:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, yeah, that was Dan Walter from Ember Energy that I was interviewing.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: And um when you listen to the Prime Minister or Hodgson or Smith, uh, or BC Energy Minister uh Adrian Dix for that matter, uh, they're very bullish on on oil and gas uh future, right?
27:51
SPEAKER_00: And the but there's a reason for that.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: It's rooted in analysis, bad analysis, but nevertheless it's rooted in analysis.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: So there are three basic uh views of where oil and gas are in the future.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: So you've got on the high end, you've got OPEC, and you've got now the IEA um CPS scenario.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: And so you're gonna see uh oil demand grow from 103 barrels a day, million barrels a day to 120, 125.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: That's the high end.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: Then you've got the IEA's step scenario, which is uh basically a status quo.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: It goes from 103 to maybe like 98 million barrels a day by 2050.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Then you have the uh announced policy scenario, the APS scenario, which uh um the IEA has been under a lot of pressure from the Trump government to abandon because under that scenario, oil peaks in 2030, and then by 2050, it declines by almost 50 percent.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how a Canada uh competes in a market where you lose half of the supply, right?
28:56
SPEAKER_00: So prices, you know, you demand obviously goes down, you've got more suppliers competing, prices, so the price oil prices are going to collapse, yada yada, yada.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is classic, it's a very simple economics 101 is what that is.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: So um the problem here is I sent a media request to both the uh Tim Hodgson's department, uh Department of Natural Resources, NRCAN, and I sent one to Adrian Dix's uh Ministry of Energy uh in uh in BC, and I said, your minister is very bullish on the pro future prospects for oil and gas.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: What are the modeling studies that underpin his public comments?
29:39
SPEAKER_00: And they were very they were very forthcoming.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: They came back and said, it's it's it's OPEC, which is, as you can imagine, ultra supportive of high consumption, yeah, ExxonMobil, Shell, the IEA steps, uh, there's an institute in Japan that's very conservative on this, the U.S.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: Energy Information Administration, which is very conservative as a as a rule.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: It had none of the IEA APS, it had none of RISTAD or Ember or Um, you know, even SMP Global.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it had all of the uh the high-end scenarios, and very few of the of the middle, and none in none at the on the low end.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: So a few in the base case, none on the the low end.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Well, as I just mentioned earlier, you know, the low end AP IEA APS scenario, um, oh, I I mentioned it, but I didn't tell you the the background to this.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: So we have uh an energy transition theory of change here at energy media.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And we you we read I read a lot of energy demand studies, and I'm not a math guy, right?
30:48
SPEAKER_00: I I could I would probably fail grade six math if you put me to the test.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: But modeling is not just about the mathematical model, it's the assumptions that go into it.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay and I can check assumptions.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: So what we did is we went and got the major assumptions behind the OPEC model, the STEPS model, and the APS uh scenarios, is what they are.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: And then we compared the assumptions to the trends that we can observe, the data that we can observe.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: And we said which scenario best matches or s or is closest to the data that we're seeing.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: And it was the APS scenario, hands down.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: Really?
31:29
SPEAKER_00: It's not it's not the high scenario, it's not even the the base scenario, it's the low scenario.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: And so what that tells me is that our uh provincial energy ministers, and we know we'll know where Alberta sits on this uh issue, uh very pro-oil and gas.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: So even in BC and even at the national level, the Mark Carney government is uh guided by and advised by these uh these high uh high demand scenarios out to out to 2050.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: That's why they're so bullish.
32:08
SPEAKER_02: Because they're only listening to one side, and it's not even the the side of those scenarios that matches with the current evidence that you're actually seeing.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: If you look at the current evidence, the trends are more towards those lower end scenarios like APS, which you know, I mean, like to be honest, like I and this is where you know it's always weird, there's this dissonance for me, right?
32:27
SPEAKER_02: Because on the one hand, I care very much about climate, I do not really want to see oil and gas expansion.
32:32
SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, I know that the province I'm from, you know, big party economy relies upon that uh that industry.
32:39
SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, what I want to see is we know that industry is not going anywhere.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: How do we get to something else, right?
32:48
SPEAKER_02: How do we build up the renewable options or even all alternative industries doesn't necessarily only need to be renewables, but alternative industries, you know, there are existing industries like fishery tourism in the province that could do with more support.
32:58
SPEAKER_02: So, how do we offset those that fall out?
33:02
SPEAKER_02: Because that's what really scares me.
33:03
SPEAKER_02: And I think it was something it came up in that interview with Ember Energy.
33:07
SPEAKER_02: High oil prices now, everybody gets it in their head, yeah, you know, high oil prices, there'll be demand way out into the future.
33:13
SPEAKER_02: And then in a few years' time, right around the time a lot of these projects are could theoretically, best case scenario come online, those oil prices collapse, the demand collapses, and you've spent a bunch of.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've already seen this.
33:26
SPEAKER_02: I we about the same time that there's the Bait and Ord announcement in Newfoundland Labrador, there's the pan-Canadian electricity corridor um announcement that came out.
33:36
SPEAKER_02: Notable exception to that was NL.
33:39
SPEAKER_02: They weren't part of that announcement.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: And there are people saying, you see this online, so how much how present this is, but you see people saying, Oh no, we don't need that, we've got oil and gas.
33:49
SPEAKER_02: And that scares me because that says you're making a bet on something based on all these scenarios and you're ignoring other options.
33:58
SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, I don't know.
34:00
SPEAKER_02: Like, we don't have a backup plan.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's the problem.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: And I would say uh I qualify that by saying that um I've actually done a thorough um uh analysis, I will call it, of Mark Carney's uh economic strategy.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: And you can see it on our thoughtful energy journalism substack.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: I did it, published it about two, three weeks ago, and I said, I, you know, I put structure around it.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: I said, here are the four pillars or five pillars of the strategy, and then here are all the you know, sort of the subplans or the plans within each one of the pillars, here's how they all fit together, on and on and on.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: And which the prime minister hasn't even done that.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: The prime minister can't even explain his own economic strategy.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: We had to go and do it, we had to go do it for him.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: But here's I want to get back to the modeling uh issue for a moment, because this is a real bugaboo of mine.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many energy economists we've got in Canada, but it's a lot.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of them in L in uh in Alberta, and there's enough of them in BC and and Ottawa and Ontario, you know, that the work that a journalist had to do to go and identify all the assumptions of the three scenarios, then compare them to the data and the trans.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: That we should have economists doing that kind of work.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, because if you go down even into the US, but boy, you sure see it in in uh uh Europe, where you've got places like the IEA is based in Paris, and you've got the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and in uh in Cambridge, and you've got on and on and on.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are just lots of academics and researchers working on these kind of kinds of issues, and in Canada, you got nada.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: Like we're being let down by the people who should be doing this work and holding the government to account with with their academic research.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we're not.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, invariably our energy economists are all about how does the status quo work?
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And we get, we know, we we debate about how many angels dance on the head of the carbon pricing uh uh pin.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's and we and and we're so inward looking, and we don't ever stop and say, hang on a second, Canada's part of this bigger economy, you know, this global economy and global energy system, and how all of the stuff that we do.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: And it the fact that other countries are doing it, I think helps a lot to focus and structure the conversation that they're having.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: They have a more fulsome discussion of the energy future than Canadians do.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: Canadians, when you look at our media.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: All we ever do is is is is debate about what was said about pipelines.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: What was said about LNG.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: We very seldom talk about electricity, and the only time we do is when the prime minister comes out and says, Oh, here I've got a strategy, we're gonna build a national power grid.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's nice.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Here's what the prime minister said, and then they go away, and nobody ever does any any further reporting on that to identify to you know, identify the fact that this has been around for decades and why hasn't it advanced?
37:10
SPEAKER_00: And what are some of the technical issues, what are some of the benefits, and yada yada.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's it's a whole it's a whole huge conversation that we need to have all by itself is how we build a national power grid and how we double or triple the amount of electricity that we're gonna uh because that's what we're gonna need in 2050.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: How are we gonna get there and what's our supply gonna look like?
37:31
SPEAKER_00: And how do we have to modernize our grid?
37:33
SPEAKER_00: We don't ever have those conversations.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: The Americans do, because they're in a crisis.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, their power grid is in big trouble, it's creaky and old, and now all of a sudden, you know, thanks to data centers, they need like 5% more electricity a year and they just can't get it.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: They're they're pulling their hair out, wondering how they're gonna keep the lights on.
37:54
SPEAKER_02: Breaking news uh just before we we came on, I'm reading that Hodgson is in talks to sell LMG to the US for data centers.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: That's uh something that just came out uh before our chat here.
38:06
SPEAKER_02: I I don't know if you've seen that yet, but as far as I could tell, it literally came out like last hour or something like that.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: Can I swear on your uh podcast?
38:14
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you why.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Because Tim Hodgson, uh I wrote a I did a video uh last fall and it was about Mark Carney, and I said, Hey, I you know, it was called Bait and Switch, Colonel I voted for Values Kearney, and I got uh Goldman Sachs Kearney.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: And essentially the the prime minister set himself up for this because I believe that the values carney, we're talking about his book here, of course, this 2021 book, where he talked about, you know, a whole bunch of that you know global capitalism has to be infused with values for you know that work for people, not just capital and investors.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: We agree with all that stuff.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is once Donald Trump threatened to basically annex Canada and beat us into submission with economic with tariffs and economic warfare, Kearney's response was we're going to no longer integrate with you, and we're going to look for uh new customers in Asia and Europe for our products, and then we're gonna build the infrastructure we need to get those products uh out to those new customers, and we're also going to expand our natural resource extraction while we're doing it.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's basically the strategy.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: And as soon as those words came out of his mouth, I went, uh-oh.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: Because the who's going to lead that process?
39:37
SPEAKER_00: It will be the incumbent companies.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: It'll be the mining companies, it'll be the oil companies and the gas companies and the pipeline companies, and it'll be those who have you know shovels in the ground and can get a project of national interest up and running in short order.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: So the whole strategy was based on the companies who are already in the market, have and and have projects that are ready to go and have access to the capital to make it all happen as quickly as possible.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: And and we were we were we had there there's almost no way out of that now.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: We're we're stuck, we're on that on that track.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we talk about.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: We don't talk about, hey, you know what?
40:24
SPEAKER_00: They're actually in Alberta, there's a provincial agency called Alberta Innovates, they've developed uh a process that will take oil sands bitumen and turn it into carbon fiber.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: A non-combustion use.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you turn bitumen into feedstock for advanced materials manufacturers.
40:45
SPEAKER_00: So it could be carbon fiber, it could be graphite, it could be asphalt binder, it could be a whole, but it's you're not sending it to a refinery to turn it into a fuel, which then gets combusted in a car or a plane or uh, you know, marine transport or whatever it is.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of options here.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to do the same thing we've been doing for decades.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to be, you know, the hewers of wooden drawers of water and the hinterland to the American uh metropolis or the European metropolis or the Chinese metropolis.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: We can add value, we can move laterally into other industries and make add more, you know, up the value chain on our natural resort.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: That's all that should be the conversation.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: Now, I have a uh a mole, uh, as journalists are wont to do, in in our NRCAN, and they tell me that inside the department, those conversations are verbotent.
41:43
SPEAKER_01: You don't discuss this.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: And you best not, if you want your uh keep your job and keep your career on track, you best not contradict what the the minister wants.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: And I want to get back, circle back to this uh you know, the values Kearney versus Goldman Sachs Carney.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: Tim Hodgson is a former Goldman Sachs banker.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: He worked with Kearney at Goldman Sachs.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: When Kearney went over from Goldman Sachs to the Bank of Canada, he followed him as his deputy.
42:21
SPEAKER_00: And and then his uh uh Hodgson's reputation is he's a deal bulldog.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: He's a he's a deal maker, man.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you want to get a deal for a pipeline or whatever it is, he puts it together, he gets the capital, he'll make it, he'll make it happen.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's no secret, it is no, to me anyway, why uh Carney chose him as the Minister for Natural Resources.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: It's to do deals, it's to get all of these big projects that are going into the major projects office and to get them funded and to get them up and running as quickly as possible and bring them across the finish line.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: That's Tim Hodgson's job.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's like this.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: I just want to finish this.
43:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: It's not Tim Hodgson's job to be thoughtful.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: It's not Tim Hodgson's job to think about the energy transition and where the global energy system is going and how demand is changing in Asia and how it's probably going to change pretty quick.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: That's not his job.
43:23
SPEAKER_00: He's a deal maker and he's got his blinkers on, and that's all he's doing.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: So it falls to people like energy, you know, the falls to energy media and a few others to basically try to build a, you know, educate the Canadians about it and build a political constituency for change.
43:40
SPEAKER_02: Well, and and and so this is something that like just let's talk strategy here for for for a second, because I I don't think of values as unstrategic things.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: Like they're strategic assets in in what you do.
43:52
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that the US, if you really look at what's happened there with the the sort of consolidation of power underneath.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Government that's increasingly authoritarian, a lot of that is down to the erosion of any any values.
44:06
SPEAKER_02: And a lot of the same problems are present in Canada, right?
44:09
SPEAKER_02: Like if we don't have some sort of way, we we can't win against the US by becoming them, right?
44:14
SPEAKER_02: Like it's not that kind of conflict.
44:16
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't, it's not World War II where oh, you build up industrial capacity and then you're safe, right?
44:21
SPEAKER_02: That's just not the way these things work.
44:23
SPEAKER_02: They're communications battles as much as anything else.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: And as you point out, it's like, okay, yeah, you can get the best deal maker on the planet doing deals and trying to get projects, but if they're the wrong projects that don't meet the needs of the time that they're going to come online, that's not strat that's not strategy.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: That's not strategic, that's not practical, that's not pragmatic.
44:42
SPEAKER_02: I don't consider that to be like smart thinking.
44:45
SPEAKER_02: I consider that to just be like, I'm scared and I don't know what to do, so let's do this random thing.
44:50
SPEAKER_02: I I don't know, yeah, anyway, your your take on that.
44:55
SPEAKER_00: Here's my take on that.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: And the take is that they're doing what they've what they've always done, and they're doing what industry is telling them can be done, and industry says we will invest, but the government has put itself at a strategic disadvantage in negotiating with industry because now industry knows the government is desperate to get this done, and so industry is saying, Well, you know what, you have these nine regulations like C69 and C48 and and the you know oil and gas emissions cap and yada yada, there's a whole bunch of them.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: We need them gone.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, here's seven of them of the nine.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: Poof we vaporized them, and how's that?
45:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, that's not enough, you know.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: And Sonia Savage, former um uh Alberta Minister of Energy, was on a CBC podcast about a month, month and a half ago.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: And she was saying that, well, you know, in ins because she's a former pipeline lobbyist, that's why I bring her up.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh, well, you know what?
46:04
SPEAKER_00: Um based on what went on with Trans Mountain Expansion, which cost the Canadian taxpayer$35 billion, industry doesn't really like that.
46:13
SPEAKER_00: That we don't think that there's it's commercially viable.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna need public backstopping for a new pipeline.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: And and already the government, the federal government is is is uh paying, it has an investment tax credit worth 50% of the capital cost of carbon capture storage for for the oil sands, which are estimated by the oil sands to cost$50 billion.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: So we've got like$25 billion probably uh committed, and more if if the pipeline, if there needs to be expansion to fill the pipeline.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: You can see where I'm going with this is that is that our government is so desperate to push to to pivot away from Trump in the United States that we're going to we're going to put taxpayer dollars into very suspect projects with that haven't had a due diligence, haven't demonstrated a uh a business case, haven't done the basic freaking math and the homework to understand the the markets they say they want to serve.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: They're basically you know taking the industry uh in Alberta at its word, and and that's where we're we're gonna go and we're gonna bend over backwards to make get industry to the table and and get these projects built.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: That's a really, really bad strategy.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a really bad strategy.
47:28
SPEAKER_00: And and the problem here is that nobody's got a better one.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, we've we've advanced a better one, but I mean for a small media outlet, right?
47:37
SPEAKER_02: Well, where is the and also I wonder if it just ties into it, right?
47:41
SPEAKER_02: Like I think there's this stereotype that probably I hate to say it, it probably exists at the upper levels of Canadian government of, oh, you know, the climate activists, they wouldn't know how to do any of this stuff.
47:51
SPEAKER_02: We must but but yeah, here's the irony with that, right?
47:54
SPEAKER_02: Like when I look at where was all the 51st state rhetoric coming from, still coming from, where is all the climate denial coming from?
48:00
SPEAKER_02: Where's all the pro oil and gas stuff coming from?
48:03
SPEAKER_02: Often that source is the same three things.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: So you're chain you're trying to benefit an industry that is very clearly interested in alignment with the United States government, they they like them, they are interested in exporting more oil and gas.
48:17
SPEAKER_02: The only place they actually really want to export more, as far as I can tell, is the United States, that they genuinely want to export more, more interconnection with the US for Canada.
48:26
SPEAKER_02: Um and yet, despite all of that, they are the trustworthy source for government to go to.
48:32
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, like I'm not gonna uh back everything every environmentalist has ever said.
48:37
SPEAKER_02: I I can't go do that either.
48:39
SPEAKER_02: But like it feels like, you know, the people who naturally could come in and say, hey, we just have a different idea.
48:46
SPEAKER_02: We don't even get in the the door to say, hi, there's it on a path here.
48:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sorry.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example.
48:53
SPEAKER_00: So there's a company called um uh Northern Nations Cooperative, it's based out of BC, but uh it's the the uh technology they have is to take raw bitumen, so not diluted bitumen that you would put into a pipeline, raw bitumen, uh pack it cold into a modified sea can with a plastic bladder around it, and then you you ship it off to Europe or Asia and you sell it at you know two, three, four times what you'd get if you were selling it into a refinery.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: And uh so uh they have the technology, they've got the supply lined up in Alberta, they've got the capital to build the facilities.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: So they tell me uh the technology, this ain't this ain't rocket science.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: It's not like turning bitumen into carbon fiber, it's it's fairly simple.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they cannot get consideration as a project of national interest because nobody wants to talk about anything other than pipelines and LNG.
49:50
SPEAKER_02: And that's not even renewable energy, we're not even talking about like the stuff that we would support, right?
49:55
SPEAKER_02: Renewable energy.
49:56
SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, yeah, you know, we're not a big fan of like we tend to want to move to a circular economy.
50:00
SPEAKER_02: There might be other uses for some things, right?
50:02
SPEAKER_02: Like, not totally open to discussing that.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: But um, even talk, even getting to the stage where we're talking about wind and solar power and batteries and all these solutions that we really advocate for, let alone that they're not even interested in other uses for the bitumen.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: That's how higher value uses.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: Because uh Alberta Innovates has done the math, and they say that if you sell a barrel of bitumen down to an American refinery, and you if you're getting$50 for that barrel, you if you did asphalt binder, you would get$100 to$125 for that barrel.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: So they're actually leaving money on the table.
50:39
SPEAKER_01: They're not even Yeah.
50:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, so this is this is the power of incumbents.
50:45
SPEAKER_00: Incumbents are gatekeepers, and the incumbents love the status quo.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: They're they've got all the capital, they've got all their expertise, all of their company organized to maximize the benefits, the value from the status quo.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: And until that status quo is so disrupted that they can't continue uh doing that, they that's what they're going to that's what they're going to support.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: And so what we have in Ottawa now is a prime minister and an energy minister who are bought into the status quo, into the and their support the incumbents.
51:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, Connor, I I have to run actually.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: I have to get off to another interview and and and do what I do.
51:26
SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much for joining me.
51:28
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51:42
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51:52
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51:59
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