Plenty of other countries ready to take over Canada’s market share if Canada exits the oil business
By Mark Milke and Ven Venkatachalam Canadian Energy Centre The killing of the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline due to anti-oil activism and politics will change nothing about worldwide oil demand. All it does is hand an advantage to Canada’s competitors. Worldwide oil consumption has been on an upward trajectory, and with the COVID-19 pandemic subsiding…
Anyone who thinks the U.S. can do without Canadian oil, especially heavy oil, is misinformed. Canadian oil is critical to the Americans
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre The United States banned exports of crude oil in the mid-1970s, as the result of an oil embargo directed at the U.S. by Middle Eastern countries. The embargo began as a result of American support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In response, some…
No more than a sliver of Canada’s natural resources should ever be controlled by non-democracies
Canadians are used to peace and relative prosperity compared to the rest of the world and are occasionally naïve about it. They assume it’s a regular state of affairs rather than an exception. Canada is an exception, in large part because the country is surrounded by three oceans with one neighbour, the United States, a…
Higher wages and better productivity contribute to an industry that’s a dominant part of Canada’s economy and its GDP
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre It’s hard for anyone but mathematicians and economists to conceptualize numbers in the billions. To get around that problem, and as a prelude to comparing major Canadian industries, let’s start with a smaller number and a question: How would you like to make $2,740 every week?…
Are we prepared for the economic consequences of shutting them down?
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre There’s nothing like real life as a corrective to Disney-like musings, where fantasies are concocted absent any connection to reality. The newest example comes from a recent ransomware attack directed against Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline. The American pipeline company, which ships 100 million gallons of refined fuel…
We have to beware tyrannies and autocracies that use oil and natural gas as weapons
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre History shows tyrannies and autocracies use oil and natural gas as weapons when interacting with democracies. This is obvious during wars – tanks and jets don’t run on vegetable oil – as well as peacetime. For example, in 2009, Russia cut natural gas supplies to Ukraine in…
By Mark Milke and Ven Venkatachalam Canadian Energy Centre If you’ve heard that Canada should skip plans to export natural gas to Asia, including from a few anti-oil-and-gas academics, you’ll notice one theme pops up: how Canadian firms really shouldn’t waste their time because there’s no money in it. This reasoning is daft. If there…
In 2019, Canada recorded a 49% reduction in flaring from just five years earlier. And Canada is responsible for just 0.7% of worldwide
By Mark Milke and Ven Venkatachalam Canadian Energy Centre If you’ve spent time in Western Canada near an oil or gas well or refinery, you might have noticed a smokestack-like pipe with a flame at the top. Or you might have seen such a flame in pictures of refineries in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Texas, or…
453,000 km worth of tubes provide a plethora of jobs
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre “Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities,” wrote Vaclav Smil a year ago. Smil, a University of Manitoba professor of the environment (emeritus), wants less…
Canada was the only free-country supplier of foreign crude oil to the U.S. between 1993 and 2020
By Mark Milke and Lennie Kaplan Canadian Energy Centre Imagine you’re in Germany and wonder if it’s a good idea to rely so heavily on natural gas imports from Russia, where the governing regime is accused by German politicians of killing journalists and the attempted murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. German Chancellor Angela…
By Mark Milke and Ven Venkatachalam Canadian Energy Centre The killing of the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline due to anti-oil activism and politics will change nothing about worldwide oil demand. All it does is hand an advantage to Canada’s competitors. Worldwide oil consumption has been on an upward trajectory, and with the COVID-19 pandemic subsiding…
