Alberta Politics Thread v2

[CaptainCrunch]

Premiere announces the next step in Alberta's independent energy plan is a refinery


https://edmontonjournal.com/news/pol...nergy-strategy


I leave it to the experts, but if companies were interested in building a multi billion dollar refinery this probably would have been talked about a few years back when things were good.


Also would the pipeline issue still not be a problem of certainty, would any one be willing to throw cash on the table without final approval of transmountain?

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Premiere announces the next step in Alberta's independent energy plan is a refinery


https://edmontonjournal.com/news/pol...nergy-strategy


I leave it to the experts, but if companies were interested in building a multi billion dollar refinery this probably would have been talked about a few years back when things were good.


Also would the pipeline issue still not be a problem of certainty, would any one be willing to throw cash on the table without final approval of transmountain?

Off the cuff, the main (only?) benefit of a refinery would be to open up line options. You could move refined out of Alberta to other locations for distribution, not just to an out of province refinery (of which our options are limited) and then out.

[DiracSpike]

We would still need new pipelines to transport the refined product, most likely to Vancouver to be loaded on oil product tankers for delivery down the west coast. Somehow I doubt that the toxic NIMBY's will be fine with that though, despite their BS red herring arguments about raw bitumen being extra super duper dangerous and urging to refine more product at home.

I don't really like this plan. The Sturgeon refinery opening in the next month is the first new refinery in 40 years for a reason. Most of the refining capacity in NA is in major population clusters like the Gulf Coast and the midwest for a reason. The most efficient value-adding exercise for our economy, by far, is exporting raw heavy oil to overseas markets. That's what needs to happen. The Government needs to devote their resources on making a full court press to make TMX happen.

[Azure]

Yes it is costly, and yes there probably isn't a huge amount of private market interest, but given how many billions the province is losing every year I find it very strange that there hasn't been more investment into this over the last 30 years.

$10 billion per refinery isn't that bad if you are losing that plus more in revenue from the provincial bottom line every year.

[CaptainCrunch]

I remember reading somewhere that the argument against building another refinery is that we aren't utilizing the ones that we have now.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Azure

Yes it is costly, and yes there probably isn't a huge amount of private market interest, but given how many billions the province is losing every year I find it very strange that there hasn't been more investment into this over the last 30 years.

$10 billion per refinery isn't that bad if you are losing that plus more in revenue from the provincial bottom line every year.

One of the Professors from MRU was on CTV after the announcement and he's doubtful that any private company is going to be willing to respond to this without major government backing.



He mentioned that if nobody wanted to spend 10 billion during the good times, they're not going to want to invest 10 billion in an uncertain environment at this time.


He basically thinks that this is a hail mary by the government and probably won't garner much interest in responding to the RFI.

[wookster]

Originally Posted by Jacks

Are we looking at quality or quantity?

Going through that list and looking at the major things that were being discussed during the campaign the following stuck out to me.

Promises kept:
Gender balanced cabinet
Long form census
Cancel Northern Gateway
Legal pot

Promises broken:
Deficits
Electoral reform
Blood ban
Postal delivery
Omnibus bills
Transparency
Veterans benefits
I guess we all might remember certain things more than others but most people don't study the party platform for promise #214. I think most people remember the major promises that they talk about in stump speeches and in the debates.

That's not even taking into account the multiple ethics breaches by senior ministers including Trudeau himself.

I find it quite scary that if your talking about quantity, the majority of the "red/broken" items fall under the Economy tab.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by DiracSpike

We would still need new pipelines to transport the refined product, most likely to Vancouver to be loaded on oil product tankers for delivery down the west coast. Somehow I doubt that the toxic NIMBY's will be fine with that though, despite their BS red herring arguments about raw bitumen being extra super duper dangerous and urging to refine more product at home.

I don't really like this plan. The Sturgeon refinery opening in the next month is the first new refinery in 40 years for a reason. Most of the refining capacity in NA is in major population clusters like the Gulf Coast and the midwest for a reason. The most efficient value-adding exercise for our economy, by far, is exporting raw heavy oil to overseas markets. That's what needs to happen. The Government needs to devote their resources on making a full court press to make TMX happen.

Outside of those refineries on the coast already being in place, is there any other reason there is a bigger benefit to building the new refineries in the same area versus closer to the source of the oil?

Also, isn't shipping all our oil to the coast to either be refined or to go to the world market to be refined limiting the potential money we could make per barrel? Why are we so opposed to getting access to the millions of resources & benefits the world sees come out of a barrel of oil every single day? Is it simply because it isn't financially feasible or because the market isn't going this direction?

Perhaps we should think outside the box here on a VERY big scale. Alberta has a massive amount of smart, unemployed engineers with tons of experience working with oil. Why can't we put them to task designing the most efficient refinery the world has ever seen? One that takes that one barrel and gets more value out of it than anyone else?

Aren't there projects coming online right now in Alberta that are starting to do that?

[DiracSpike]

Originally Posted by Azure

Outside of those refineries on the coast already being in place, is there any other reason there is a bigger benefit to building the new refineries in the same area versus closer to the source of the oil?

Also, isn't shipping all our oil to the coast to either be refined or to go to the world market to be refined limiting the potential money we could make per barrel? Why are we so opposed to getting access to the millions of resources & benefits the world sees come out of a barrel of oil every single day? Is it simply because it isn't financially feasible or because the market isn't going this direction?

Perhaps we should think outside the box here on a VERY big scale. Alberta has a massive amount of smart, unemployed engineers with tons of experience working with oil. Why can't we put them to task designing the most efficient refinery the world has ever seen? One that takes that one barrel and gets more value out of it than anyone else?

Aren't there projects coming online right now in Alberta that are starting to do that?

My understanding of the problem is that refining centers need to be close to the demand centers that they feed. Once you separate out the different components and blends (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc) they get transported separately to where they are needed. The economics of each blend get challenged the further you have to transport, and once separated it doesn't make sense to blend back together to realize economies of scale. The Middle East companies used to refine products and send the blends out in product tankers, but once Crude carriers realized a certain size (much smaller than today) the economics no longer made sense to do this given the distance traveled, and now almost all the oil shipped out of the Gulf is crude oil in VLCC's or ULCC's.

I'm on board with any exercise to get us to think big and realize value, but for us I think that lies in being and exporting powerhouse to developing economies.

The Sturgeon refinery makes sense because from what I've read it will use heavy oil and refine into diesel or petroleum products that will be consumed locally, thus taking ~80,000 bbl/d of product that would have been crammed into our meager export lines out of the system. Trying to refine products like jet fuel here and then ship to China for example wouldn't be all that useful because we would still need to have a pipeline to get it to the coast and that jet fuel would be more expensive than fuel the Chinese could buy locally due to transportation distance.

[GGG]

The CEO of Northwest Redeatwr that owns Sturgeon has big visions of refining product here first before distributing. Of course he is one of the beneficiaries of such an approach. But Macgreggor is a pretty neat visionary of what could be and is interesting to listen to if you ever get the chance.

So if the economics aren’t there to aatraxt private industry because of the risk bs investment return. It could be a place where government subsidy could make it attractive and the benefits associated on the extraction side would make up for the subsidy.

I don’t know if you could do it at a meaningful scale of 750,000 bbls. I often wonder if some kind of partial upgrading is a solution to the Dilbit problem where 25% of volume is light oil. Could you get more takeaway capacity at a better price if everything got to WTI spec or since refiners need heavy stock would we be worse off?

It’s interesting though I think it’s pretty high risk on the boondoggle scale.

[red sky]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

"From Oil & Gas, to puff and pass!"

Of how about From Oil and Gas to 'Oil and Grass'?

[Azure]

I just find it very hard to believe that we only have the one option to transport our oil.

The whole Alberta oil economy was built because people were able to think outside the box to make the oil accessible. I think we need to seriously figure out a way to do it again on the refinement side.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by Azure

I just find it very hard to believe that we only have the one option to transport our oil.

The whole Alberta oil economy was built because people were able to think outside the box to make the oil accessible. I think we need to seriously figure out a way to do it again on the refinement side.

Wasn't there recently a novel idea to transport the oil via solidified nuggets? That one is interesting. Not necessarily for refinement improvements though.

[BigNumbers]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

Wasn't there recently a novel idea to transport the oil via solidified nuggets? That one is interesting. Not necessarily for refinement improvements though.

CanaPux - CN Patented them. They float and can be transported on normal rail cars and ships. A+++

https://www.cninnovation.ca/

[BigNumbers]

[guzzy]

There is also a pelletized version of bitumen. Not sure of the process but end product is similar to pellets you would see from a sulphur prill.

[Ozy_Flame]

What about transportation on trucks? That would be a game changer I would think.

[Manhattanboy]

My hate for Trudeau is off the charts.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

What about transportation on trucks? That would be a game changer I would think.

If its pellets can we use a rail gun?

[Nsd1]

Maybe Elon Musk can build us a hyperloop and we can ship underground.