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Canadian Gas Output To Plummet
Supplies forecast to shrink 15% in slump
Claudia Cattaneo, Financial Post
CALGARY – A major downturn in drilling for natural gas in Western Canada will shrink Canadian supplies of the clean-burning fuel by as much as 15% in the next two years, the National Energy Board predicted yesterday.
Canada’s energy regulator said it expects Canadian production to plummet to as little as 14.5 billion cubic feet a day by 2009, revising earlier predictions that gas deliverability would stay flat at around 17 bcf/d, or roughly where it has been since 2000.
“There is a pervasive drilling downturn that’s impacting most resources in the Western Canada basin, where 98% of the gas is produced,” said NEB gas supply analyst Ken Martin.
“We see it starting in mid-2006, and it’s continuing on into 2007 to the current date, and it doesn’t look like that there is anything that will pull us out of that in the short term.”
(11 October 2007)
No more water and trees; Canadian economy is all about oil and minerals now
John Partridge, Globe and Mail
As the Canadian dollar continued to make parity look simple Thursday morning, opening at a stellar 102.33 cents (U.S.), a new study from Ottawa pointed to a quiet revolution in the nation’s commodity sector that has helped push the currency aloft.
The key message in the study, conducted by Philip Cross, chief of current economic analysis at Statistics Canada, is that the old saw about Canadians being hewers of wood and drawers of water is way out of date. What the country now boasts is a true “underground economy” where subsoil resources are providing most of the power.
“Since 2002, there has been a large shift in the resource sector away from trees and towards commodities found mostly underground, notably oil and metals,” Mr. Cross says in the study, which appears in the October issue of Statscan’s Canadian Economic Observer. “It is more accurate (if less catchy) to say Canadians are now ‘conveyers of crude and moilers of metals’.”
The shift reflects what many have dubbed a “super cycle,” the longest and largest upswing on record for commodity prices, he says.
(11 October 2007)
Arctic waters are changing for oil drillers
Associated Press via Anchorage Dailiy News
OTTAWA – Climate change may make Arctic energy resources easier to reach but it could also make them harder to exploit because of changes to sea ice, a U.S. scientist said ahead of an international oil and ice conference in Alaska.
(9 October 2007)
