[Thanos]

At the moment though bitumen is doing much better in Alberta than the conventional product. Conventional is in terrible condition right now. They're the ones walking away from wells altogether and also the ones unable to pay their municipal taxes and royalties to landowners because so many of them are insolvent. It's what's been responsible for a lot of the worst job losses in the field services sector. Oilsands are still doing their yearly maintenance shutdowns and completing older projects but conventional development has slowed to an effective halt. Have to keep in mind one thing - when was the last time a conventional field of any meaningful significance or size was discovered in Alberta? Conventional oil could be on it's deathbed before too long, leaving bitumen and natural gas as the only O&G revenue-generators in the province.

OPEC collapsing the overall price, the US going into overproduction mode, the strangling effect of the new Trudeau regulations & policies - these were the first three horsemen of the apocalypse for Alberta. The end of conventional oil revenue is probably going to be the last of the four to put us under for good. Short term is bleak but long term is even worse.

[bootlegga]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Conservative economics 101:

IN GOOD ECONOMY:
1) If Liberal government, GOVERNMENT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ECONOMY

2) If Conservative government, CONSERVATIVES FIXED THE ECONOMY

IN BAD ECONOMY
1) If conservative government: GOVERNMENT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ECONOMY

2) If Liberal government: LIBERALS RUINED THE ECONOMY

There are no further lessons in this course.

Actually, there is another lesson in this course:


Deficits/Debt


If a Conservative government is in office, deficits are okay because Boomers need a tax cut.

If a Liberal government is in office, any deficit whatsoever will bring on the end times for your children/grandchildren.

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

I'm guess that catastrophic number of jobs lost in Alberta includes hundreds or thousands of public sector workers who have been culled by the UCP. I'd say so much for Kenney being a job creator but it would mean nothing to his followers because most of them actively want to see more government workers lose their livelihoods. That's the nature of this breed of conservatism, using vengeance on the "undeserving" as a weapon to keep their voter base happy. It's like poor whites look at poor blacks in the US - as long as the enemy gets hurt those who will get absolutely nothing at all out of voting for cruel-hearted conservatives will still get a bit of worthless satisfaction at seeing their eternal enemy get nailed. Pathetic. There's no concept anymore that we're all in this together. That's what makes reckless austerity possible, a lack of any sense of community or common interest altogether that allows the allure of hack-and-slash devastation via cuts look appealing.

The left isn't off the hook either. There's no way that 19K of job losses didn't include lots more workers in small businesses like retail and restaurants being laid off due to their employers shutting down. And those businesses are still shutting down because municipal tax hikes in Calgary and Edmonton are too damn high, and that workers are suffering the consequences for it. The left is lucky that there's been too much rancid activity from the right and the federal government lately. It's taken the focus off of them and their actions inside municipal government that keeps damaging the small business climate in Alberta's big cities.

I agree that the cities (largely run by left leaning councillors) does raise taxes a lot, but that's in part because the province is so unreliable when it comes to funding.

The cities are forced to ride the same roller coaster that the provincial government rides because of the province's unwillingness to develop a reliable source of revenue (either income taxes or a PST). In the 90s, it was cut, cut, cut, then the purse strings loosened a bit around 2007, only to get tightened up again by 2014, then loosened again slightly under the NDP, and now severely cut by the UCP.

In the meantime, the cities are growing rapidly and need huge investments in roads, transit, social supports, and all the rest, so they don't really have a choice, especially because cities under provincial law are forced rely on one main income stream - property taxes.

I would love lower property taxes, but I want good schools, decent roads, and a capable fire/police/rescue system in place more.

Thanos Thanos:

Perfect storm of assholery in full effect in this doomed province these days. It's no longer "things will get much worse before they get better". It's more now inevitable that things will get much worse and NEVER get better, simply from the actions of the political/economic extremes who keep going out of their way to ensure the collapse becomes a permanent feature of life in Alberta. Goodbye good times, Alberta, and say hello to your membership as the westernmost part of the Rust Belt.

I don't disagree with you on this and I'm already counselling my children to plan on moving out of this province after they finish university, because I don't see much economic future for Alberta by 2050.

[bootlegga]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

Genuinely curious: How come the existing pipeline network was good enough to produce all the past Alberta oil booms yet Alberta needs additional pipelines just to prevent total economic collapse? That’s the claim, right?

No, not really. My history might be a bit off because I don't work in the patch, but here's what I've learned from reading/watching the news (if anyone sees an error in the following, feel free to correct me).

The problem is that when most of Canada's pipelines were built 40 or 50 years ago, most of the oil in Alberta was conventional oil, so it could be shipped anywhere, to any refinery for refining. We shipped light crude oil across the country and the globe as well.

However, the Western Canadian sedimentary basin no longer produces 95% of Alberta oil, IIRC it's now down to about 30%.

The rest of what is produced now is heavy crude/bitumen, and that con only be refined in refineries with cokers, which most refineries do NOT have - to my knowledge, none of the refineries in eastern Canada have one. To build one at an existing refinery can cost a couple BILLION dollars, so most companies in the East weren't interested, especially when they could get light oil from Newfoundland, Norway, the UK, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Now Alberta has lots of refineries and can refine it here, but not everywhere has the same fuel standards (and refined fuel has a shorter shelf life than raw crude), so it's hard to export refined products.

After 9/11, the US government and the global oil majors decided that instead of importing oil from the Middle East, they would build cokers in the Gulf basin (Texas and Louisiana) and ship our bitumen there, then refine it to light crude oil and ship it wherever they needed to (either in the US or internationally). So they invested billions down there, as well as built a ton of pipelines to get our bitumen down there.

Around the same time, someone figured out that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) could be used in shale oil formations, which lets a company get more oil out of shale oil deposits, which until then had been expensive and uneconomical. By 2014, fracking was causing a huge boom in US oil production, which meant they had less need for Alberta bitumen. To make things worse, the pipelines the US built to carry bitumen mostly terminate in the US midwest, right where the shale boom was taking off, causing the value of our oil (Western Canada Select or WCS) to fall. Around the same time, the Saudis opened the taps to hurt both US fracking and Alberta bitumen.

Finally, the current Trans-mountain pipeline has been at capacity for more than a decade, feeding Vancouver's final remaining refinery, providing diesel and gas to the Lower mainland market, and exporting a tanker here and there to other markets (California, China, etc.).

One of the reasons that gas prices in the Lower Mainland are so high is that even at full capacity, the existing line cannot meet all of the region's needs. Therefore, they are forced to import refined fuels (jet fuel, diesel, and gas) from refineries in Washington State at a premium (because they don't have much extra capacity either).

The TMX expansion will allow for:

1. The main line to be completely dedicated to serving the Lower Mainland's fuel needs.
2. The expansion will allow the ability to serve a growing market (Lower Mainland) with refined products.
3. The expansion will also allow the ability to export one tanker per day (currently about one 50,000 barrel AFRAMAX tanker per week) to foreign markets (US & Asia), where the price of WCS is higher than in the US midwest.

All of that allows for increased taxes/royalties for Canada and Alberta, more jobs because current oilsands projects running at a reduced rate can scale back up to full production, and the ability to meet Vancouver and the Lower Mainland's fuel needs for the next few decades, by which time, EVs should have come far enough to reduce their fossil fuel demand.


In short, oil prices fell and few places can refine bitumen, and the few that can, cannot be reached by our existing pipelines in any sort of scale. That has led to a slowdown in production, and therefore a huge loss of jobs in Alberta, which caused a cascading effect across the province in lots of other industries (restaurants, hotels, automobile sales, housing sales, etc.). The TMX won't solve all of our problems, but it may help kickstart a weak industry.

[Thanos]

bootlegga bootlegga:

I agree that the cities (largely run by left leaning councillors) does raise taxes a lot, but that's in part because the province is so unreliable when it comes to funding.

The cities are forced to ride the same roller coaster that the provincial government rides because of the province's unwillingness to develop a reliable source of revenue (either income taxes or a PST). In the 90s, it was cut, cut, cut, then the purse strings loosened a bit around 2007, only to get tightened up again by 2014, then loosened again slightly under the NDP, and now severely cut by the UCP.

In the meantime, the cities are growing rapidly and need huge investments in roads, transit, social supports, and all the rest, so they don't really have a choice, especially because cities under provincial law are forced rely on one main income stream - property taxes.

I would love lower property taxes, but I want good schools, decent roads, and a capable fire/police/rescue system in place more.

I agree to a certain extent. The only problem is that the cities have done enough to damage their own reputation, damage as great as anything the province has caused to them. Providing the basics is one thing, charging headlong into wasteful projects combined with tax-and-spend, shows that the cities aren't any more responsible at financial management of tax dollars than the province is. There's no angel or good guy in this fight. If anything it's the classic battle between two equally reprehensible assholes who both deserve to get knocked down on their asses and lose.

[FieryVulpine]

Thanos Thanos:

I agree to a certain extent. The only problem is that the cities have done enough to damage their own reputation, damage as great as anything the province has caused to them. Providing the basics is one thing, charging headlong into wasteful projects combined with tax-and-spend, shows that the cities aren't any more responsible at financial management of tax dollars than the province is. There's no angel or good guy in this fight. If anything it's the classic battle between two equally reprehensible assholes who both deserve to get knocked down on their asses and lose.

I see it as something similar to Godzilla grappling with King Ghidorah. The city they fight in will be demolished by the time the battle's finished, no matter who wins. Canadians are some of the most pretentious people on the planet and act under the delusion that our country--as least as far as the West Coast and Windsor-Quebec City corridor are concerned--is a utopia compared to out "nasty Yankees" to the South. I would go even one further and say that Canada will have no future in 2050 because I suspect that even almighty Ontario is one good recession away from collapse. This country has some of the highest consumer debt on the planet and from what I understand, it's near-impossible for my generation (Millennial) to get on the property ladder because it was grown too expensive in the GTA.

Canada DESERVES to fail because of its hubris.

[Thanos]

No argument with any of that. Pride goes before a fall, and wallowing in undeserved pride is certainly Canada's most mortal sin.

[PluggyRug]