Hello all,
A bit late this week but better late than never. This week’s charts are posted at https://aleach.ca/charts.
This week, we have two student stories from Kayla Layden including one on the groundbreaking deal between the BC Government and the Blueberry River First Nation on development. Other Treaty 8 First Nations are expected to sign similar agreements in the coming days, in a process that will be closely watched in Alberta, especially in the oil sands region.
This follows the landmark decision of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in June of 2021 which held that the Crown had infringed Treaty 8 by “permitting the cumulative impacts of industrial development” which meaningfully diminished the treaty rights of the Blueberry River First Nation (see Yahey v British Columbia, 2021 BCSC 1287 (CanLII) at para 1884).
Other than that, I’ve got three bonus pieces for you this week.
First, I think we’ve all spent too much time talking about the Just Transition legislation this week, in the wake of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s apparently willful misunderstanding of a federal memo initially posted by Blacklock’s. The memo, which was prepared for testimony to the Natural Resources Committee of the House of Commons, details the size of the labour force in some of the key resource sectors of our economy - sectors which are expected to be affected by the energy transition. It turns out that, if you add up all the jobs in manufacturing, buildings, agriculture, transportation and energy, you get 2.7 million workers. There is no way to read the memo as claiming that all of these 2.7 million people will lose their jobs, but that’s where we are in Alberta politics today.
The second controversial part of the memo states the outwardly obvious: some skills are important in multiple sectors, and don’t change much when you go from working for an oil and gas company to a solar energy company. The memo chose janitors or drivers, perhaps a bit sloppily, but it could just as easily have read accountants, lawyers, administrators, and project managers. Yes, some people will see their jobs disrupted, and some communities will be hit hard by the energy transition (or simply by the consistent churn of the energy economy) but neither they nor the country or province as a whole were served by the dishonest rhetoric we saw from our government this week on this file.
The second interesting bit I want to flag for you this week is this graph from Rystad (via Keith Stewart). Wow, that’s a gut punch for the oil sands. It shows that, on a levelized cost- and emissions-per-barrel basis, new production from the oil sands is likely to be more expensive and higher emissions than all other remaining global oil resources. Ouch. Rystad tends to be a bit bearish on the oil sands, and as experts like the University of Calgary’s Kent Fellows pointed out, existing oil sands production is very low cost in a global context.
I did a little bit of oil sands emissions graphing of my own this week, updating my visuals for California’s low carbon fuel standard. As you can see, even relative to the average barrel refined in California, Canadian crude streams perform pretty poorly. Although, relative to California’s domestic production, we come out okay.
One more oil-related graph for you this week: gas prices. As of January 1, 2023, Alberta removed its fuel tax as part of election vote buying affordability measures and the impacts 20 days into this are interesting to say the least.
Relative to December average prices, you can see Edmonton and especially Calgary prices saw a huge spike before January 1, and prices here (like many Canadian markets) remain above December averages today. Interestingly, at least for Calgary, for much of the Christmas season, its prices were further below December averages than any other city in the country. Today, Calgary prices are almost 10% above the city’s December average, while most other cities have seen smaller increases.
Some things get lost to comparisons to averages. Edmonton and Calgary gas prices remain among the cheapest in the country but, contrary to what you might have expected, the gap between us and the average appears to have narrowed initially before and just after the gas tax cut, then we moved back closer to normal, before a big jump again this week.
Perhaps someone in the Premier’s office can make a phone call and see if the gas tax holiday is…
Too soon? Yes, probably too soon.
It’s always so weird when people think that job loss due to progression is a bad thing. Then again, it’s the same people that think cutting gas taxes will do something besides increase demand.