Passing Gas
We need to start using our brains
It’s time for the NO Imagination Association (NO) Energy NL offshore conference energy conference and so the latest provincial energy minister is parroting the same lines the other parrots sqwalked for the past 25 years about offshore gas.
Lots of it out there.
Come and dig it out of the ground.
And no one does.
Bereft of life, the idea of gas development’s shuffled off this mortal coil, and gone to join the bleedin’ Choir Invisible.
If people didn’t keep nailin’ it to the perch, it would be pushing up daisies.
The reasons why are simple.
First, there’s about 12 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas offshore now that folks have known about for 40 years. Most of it is tied up in the current oil production. The operators reinject the gas partly to store it for later exploitation and partly to help get the oil out of the ground. That’s the valuable stuff and they can always bleed off the gas in the back end of the oil field life to make money then.
Second, about a quarter of it is in a single field off the coast of Labrador. No one talks about that field at all, just like no one talks about the gas developments that could happen onshore western Newfoundland and inside 12 miles out to sea. Last year and this year, the talk is about the natural gas in the area in and around the existing oil production. That reflects the existing bias at NOIA/EnergyNL for offshore production.
The Labrador gas field is in shallow water that for a good chunk of the year is iced over. That means it will likely be expensive to get out of the ground. That is why no one is interested in developing gas. What isn’t spoken for is too expensive to develop given the markets, meaning the crapload of really cheap gas already out there. People are not looking at Newfoundland and Labrador because there’s lots of gas already available from somewhere else. They know what’s here and know it can be exploited eventually, when the oil runs out or when the market shifts dramatically enough. But for now all that gas in Newfoundland and Labrador will sit in the ground. All the effort to get someone producing it is just a waste of time and money.
Energy minister Lloyd Parrott’s little show Monday was not for the people in the oil and gas business. They know what’s going on.
Lloyd was bullshitting the punters. You, to put it bluntly. He was blowing smoke up your hindquarters. Not the first minister in this century and not the last. Just the latest.
Lloyd bullshitted about everything, from the fact the Jeanne d’Arc basin gas is all spoken for to the measly cash supports from the provincial government. Too little, for one thing, especially to overcome the fact there’s no business case for gas development. A mere $90 million in exploration money over three years, which is less than the cost of a single test well.
What’s really missing from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador is strategic sense.
There are two parts to the missing sense.
One is an actual strategic economic plan for the province. We haven’t had one now for 25 years and it shows. A proper plan would tell everyone, especially those in government, what’s a priority and what isn’t. The plan would also lay out the development idea: whether it would depend on the public sector, the private sector, or a blend of both. Slap some facts on the tables. Lay down some rules and then live by them. Worked in the 1990s to the extent that all that’s going on today across the provincial economy is rooted in ideas from 30-odd years ago and the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan.
The other is a strategic sense, meaning awareness of where we are in the world physically and what our resources mean in the world. In this century, we haven’t thought that way. Danny Williams gave a Chinese government company sanctioned by the Americans for weapons production access to the workings of the North American energy grid. Not a thought to the national security implications. A couple of decades later, the Liberals were drooling over Chinese involvement in the offshore.
These days they should be equally worried about the Americans or the Quebec crowd, the latter if only for being outfoxed competitively. No one seems to notice the security implications of our rare-earth mineral deposits in Labrador. There’s just more of the “we bring you these gifts” colonial mentality from a century ago. Come! Take our resources. Give us some jobs and we’ll give you our resources at low cost.
Strategic means lots of things. It means being aware of who you are letting in. It also means being careful enough about your spending so you don’t get desperate and cannot say no to any development. The way we have been flogging gas - despite knowing the truth of things - tells the world we are desperate. And we are. The 20 years of no plans has also been 20 years of spend it all and then keep spending more besides. That robs of choices and makes even crap deals like the Andrew Furey one on Churchill Falls seem good.
Same thing goes for Corner Brook, where the mill is now only running because taxpayers are footing the bills. There’s nothing else in the government’s cleverness bank. The bureaucrats and politicians have no idea what to do so they keep doing the same things over and over with no change. Chasing after Equalization - Danny Williams started it and the Liberals kept it going - is just the same. Bankrupt of ideas, they just repeat mistakes of the past even as they tell you they won’t.
At least Tony Wakeham’s crowd had the sense to stop the foolish lawsuit. Now if only they’d stop passing gas on other things, we might get some real and lasting changes for the better.
At 6;30 am I said to my OH, I must see if Ed Hollett has posted this morning, some thing to Brighten my day, make me laugh, as I feel I'm Not Dead Yet. I'm actually pretty lucky, as things wit health care go here. After about only 50 TIA, a few days ago, a few days ago I started a medication called a "Loop" type, kind of a magic pill, at the right dose, meaning just enough to trip your kidney resistance level. Yor are supposed to start to pee like crazy, 5 to 10 time the normal rate, to take off excess fluid that can put you over the line for ADHF (Acute Decompensated Heart Failure), and as it sounds, not a nice thing outside a ICU unit to deal with. Only waiting a mere 7 months for that medication, when fluid started building up in my lower legs, ancles and feet, with stage 4+ pitting edema. So really lucky, as perhaps hundreds needing the Loop and not getting it, especially those like me nearing their nineth decade of life and still kickin.
The Loop is so powerful I may have it give it up today, after only 5 days and not the 14 days planned, and that was at only a moderate dose level.
So........Ed delivered in spades, lots of talk on gas and parrots, and silly people and a bit of Marty Phyton video, and the never ending gong show about natural gas, brain farts, and the outfit, NOIA, that I think might be headed up by No Ethics Charlene Johnson, once our Environment Minister, I think, and now always flogging the virtues of oil and gas, seeing we are, as Ed notes, a Petro State, in our dependence on revenue, and where is our Wealth Fund?
No one seems to ask the question, does the oil and gas serve a key function and critical purpose where it is, in the ground? When earth was made, whether by God in 6 days or, he /she , over 5 or more billion years, regardless it seems that it included a lot of oil and gas was put underground, in the oceans under the sea bed , even under the Arctic and Antarctic areas. Some places, like the Middle East and Texas got more than others, but it is well distributed overall. And it just drives people crazy, like Jed Clamped of the Beverley Hillbillies, Nfld Politicians who would almost drink the stuff, and no one as much as Trump, who takes over a country in South America, and then tried the same in Iran, and still making threats about taking over Greenland and Canada, and makes Albertans go crazy, wanting to leave Canada. I ask, it there a connection in depleting oil and gas and the changing Rosby waves and too the stalling weather patterns, and a bunch of other stuff, like lightening now near the north pole and also triggering so many forest fires? Some one at MUN should know?
And the word Strategic, whenever I see tha,t Ed's previous reference to Elmer Fudd always come to mind.
And the Strategy Economic Plan of 1992,who was Premier then, and who were the authors of that plan? Was that Peckford's or Wells administrations then, maybe Wells?
NO Strategy Plan, so ........ the arse is gone right out of ' er, hey b'y, and no one can fix 'er it seems, and no one even tryin.
Most must be sayin' "wass Ed talkin about, strategic , strategic , all the time" ? Can you buy that stuff, at Walmart, or on Amazon, is it like the magic loop meds? Makes our economy 5 or 10 times more productive? No giving away our natural resources as was the 1827 mentality? Maybe we should have a new Nfld coin with Wakeham's face and the word STRATEGIC on it? How many punters can Ed convert? How many times can the punters be fooled by dead parrots?
Oh Lord, Have Mercy. Or has singer Don Williams would often say, when getting standing ovation applause at his concerts, Mercy mercy, or was it Merci Merci, (is that French for Thank you?, as my third language was Latin, the first being Nfld, the second English.
With the help of buddy,........ Alf, .......... got the full lowdown on the 1992 Strategic Economic Plan , under Clyde Wells govn, then immediately hit by the cod collapse and the an exit of 47 000 NLers all from rural areas, which helped build up the Alberta oil business, and create the Nfld cowboy, the original one being Joey, driving the herd of buffalo, was it?
There were 20 different boards that got funded for almost 20 years and then got scuttled by Harper. There 27 different denominations schools boards and that got reduced to a few and then only one. It required a change of the Terms of Union wit Canada........... Oh Mercy.
Nowadays the NOIA oil crowd claims to represent all NL Energy , fossil or Green. And the total fund for green per year is ( here we need a rum roll) ................7 million dollars to fund hundreds of requests ..............Oh Mercy , Oh Mercy. ...........The Oil Crowd pretending to a spokesperson for all the Green Energy projects...........I wonder if they are dong that in PQ for HQ's 10,000 Mw wind build out? It that what they call Greenwashing , perfected by Mobil and others of the big oil companies.