Oil Sands

Industry: Licence to operate, or just a learner’s licence?

The petroleum industry and its government regulators say they know a “social licence to operate” is necessary in today’s society, and they know what they need to do to secure it.

Unfortunately, they’re not doing it, or not doing it enough, some top minds from those sectors told colleagues at a major gathering in Houston today.

The public knows that “what really drives behaviour in an organization is values. We used to think it was the organization that did that,” said Jay Pryor, a VP of Chevron.

And while increasingly corporations and government have “got” that, they remain hidebound by practices that prevent people from seeing it for themselves.

“Fine photos and aspirational statements” litter social responsibility reports, said former Clinton Whitehouse staffer and US ambassador Philip Lader. That’s not communicating values to a skeptical public.

“You need specific metrics,” no less exacting than the “key performance indicators” that financial auditors demand. “We are almost speaking different languages,” Lader said. “Reporting of non-financial performance has lagged far behind” what the public today requires.

From a Government perspective, reporting that the public can access, assess and believe is not merely nice, it’s necessary, said Alberta Energy official David Morhart in the CERAWeek panel presentation, Oil and Gas Industry Stakeholders: “License to Operate”.

“Our accountability is to the people of our province, the people who own the resources,” Morhart said. “We are creating access to the information, and we need to do a lot more on that.”

Alberta is also developing sustainability criteria — those aforementioned “key performance indicators” — that can be third-party audited to demonstrate whether stated policies and goals are in fact being executed to achieve the stated goals, Morhart said.

- David Sands

A History of Great Canadian Women

A History of Great Canadian Women (Blog)

Women’s rights have come a long way, in large part from the efforts of our predecessors–women not content with the status quo who were pioneers in their fields and leaders in the fight for equality. International Women’s Week (March 7-11, 2011) and International Women’s Day (March 8, 2011) honour the past efforts of women and look to the present and future to ensure that all women in Alberta and around the world have equal rights, opportunities and a life free from violence. In honour of International Women’s Week, here are some of Canada’s most interesting and influential women:

1. One of Canada’s most famous women, Laura Secord, made her mark in history in the War of 1812, when she walked alone and defenseless, through occupied and dangerous territory for a distance of 32 kilometers to warn British forces of an impending American attack.

2. Dr. Emily Stowe was the first woman in Canada to practice medicine. Universities in Canada refused her admission, so she had to receive her medical training in the United States. When she returned to Canada to become a doctor, she also became a passionate crusader for women’s rights, creating
Canada’s first suffrage group in 1876.

3. Carrie Matilda Derick was the first woman to attain the rank of professor at a Canadian university, with her appointment to the Department of Botany at McGill University in 1912. She worked tirelessly to promote her far-reaching vision of political and educational equality for women.

4. Agnes Macphail was the first woman elected to the House of Commons in 1921–the first
Canadian federal election in which women had the vote.

5. In 1928, Canada’s Olympic team included women for the first time. The women who represented our country went on to became household names in the 1920s: Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld, Ethel Smith and Ethel Catherwood.

6. In 1929, women were legally declared “persons” under the law. We can thank Alberta’s Famous Five–Emily Murphy, Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby and Henrietta Muir Edwards–and the Persons Case for this feat.

7. The name Emily Carr is synonymous with Canadian art and writing. Carr became most famous in the 1930s for her compelling canvases of British Columbia’s landscape and her documentation of Native villages.

8. In 1982, NDP MP Margaret Mitchell was openly laughed at in the House of Commons when she raised the issue of violence against women. The outcry from women brought national attention to the issue.

9. Thanks to Sandra Lovelace’s successful appeal in 1985, to the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, Aboriginal women in Canada no longer lose their status under the Indian Act through marriage to a non-Aboriginal man.

10. It was January 1992, on NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, that Roberta Bondar became the first neurologist in space and Canada’s first female astronaut.

Midnight oil, morning meeting

He didn’t look like someone who’d spent 18 hours in airline adventures trying to get from Edmonton to Houston, but he did.

David Morhart, Chief of Oil Sands Strategy and Operations for Alberta Energy, had a full room for his opening presentation at the global energy conference called CERAWeek 2011 in Houston this morning.

Morhart explained that Alberta’s energy story goes far beyond oil sands, but that was the focus as Richard Grissom of Gulf Coast refiner Valero, Mike Palmer of oil sands and refining interest Marathon, and Hongbin Hou of Chinese national Sinopec followed up by explaining their respective assessments of that resource.

In a story that may be familiar to Albertans, Palmer said oil majors like Marathon see in the oil sands what they most need for their customers and shareholders: size and ability to access.

“And Canada is a very stable environment,” Palmer noted.

Sinopec’s Hongbin Hu said that company made the relatively recent decision to partner with existing oil sands players for the same reasons, plus another that doesn’t get a lot of attention. While Alberta often points to a west coast export system as a way to diversify its customer base, turn that around.

Right now, he said, the bulk of China’s imported supply comes from the Middle East, with smaller barrels-per-day from a broader base that hasn’t got capacity to rapidly grow.

“We need a diversified import supply,” and whether oil sands crude is directly shipped or displaces competing markets for other crudes, “Canada will be more and more important in the future.”

Richard Grissom noted that California refineries are typically well-suited to handle Canadian heavy oils like oil sands, designed to process heavy oil now from declining production fields in, largely, Latin America.

But while about 100,000 bpd of our oil currently reaches the Gulf Coast refiners, that’s dwarfed by the consumption and capacity – Mexico’s heavy oil export to the Gulf Coast refiners is about 900,000 bpd, Venezeula’s is 800,000 and California itself is a significant producer.

- David Sands

Energy issues, taken seriously

A former chairman of OPEC. Chairman of Total. CEOs of BP, LUKOIL, Vestas Wind Systema, Microsoft, Peabody. Then there’s former US Presidents Clinton and Bush and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The attendee list of CERAWeek 2011 in Houston is notable for not only the big brains, but the sheer big: There are about 2,000 delegates to this 30th anniversary of CERA’s leading-edge dialogue on energy issues.

Among them, four from the Government of Alberta. Alberta representatives from the departments of Energy and Environment are speaking on panels and in private meetings with the goal of both educating and themselves learning.

Alberta has a significant profile at this event. Its energy resources are widely known among these delegates. That’s true even among the approximately 200 major media covering the event: In two-hour and forty minute series of media interviews yesterday, not a single journalist struggled with the concept of in situ oil sands drilling, and some even knew differences between CSS and SAG-D. This is not common!

Monday was a light schedule. The event gets rolling in force Tuesday, and I’m fifteen minutes away from being able to change that to “today.”

Good night!

- David Sands

Ring around the city

We all know what it’s like to be stuck in traffic. It is one of the most frustrating parts of driving. All we wish for when sitting in our cars is a well designed road that it is going to get us where we need to be efficiently and quickly. Well, this is no longer a dream for folks in the capital region because the final leg of Edmonton’s ring road was officially given the green light at an event in Fort Saskatchewan last week, where Premier Ed Stelmach was joined by Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette at the annual meeting of the chamber of commerce.

“You can have abundant resources, as we do in Alberta and make great products, as Alberta companies do, but you must also be able to move your products where they need to go, when they need to get there,” Stelmach said.

The announcement launches the final stage of construction on the northeast section of Edmonton’s ring road connecting Whitemud Drive East to the Manning Freeway. Construction is expected to be complete by the fall of 2016, and represents the largest transportation project in Alberta’s history.

All told the northeast leg will include:

27 kilometers of 6 and 8 -lane divided roadway

8 interchanges

9 flyovers

2 river structures

47 bridge structures

The NE leg will be completed as a public-private partnership, or P3, and will wrap up roughly three years sooner than if it had been built using conventional methods.

“Now is the time to make investments like these,” Premier Stelmach said. “We’re going to see a big global boom, so we have to move on this project. It’s just the right thing to do.”

Click here for more information on the Anthony Henday Northeast.

-Scott Sehested

Alberta Transportation