EV's, Gas/Oil, and The Future- another swerve split from- JT Hints Boosting Canada’s Military Spending

[Brad Sallows]

What would be the reason these net exporters continue to import?

One of the reasons is "price".

Another, related to that, is who controls the infrastructure. A lot of countries have national companies involved, and those companies won't simply be allowed to collapse. Where governments are involved, politics is involved; where governments and politics are involved, inefficient and counterproductive outcomes will happen.

 

[Good2Golf]

Cheaper stuff…

So as long as Oil/Gas/other fossil fuel remains cheaper than other options no one is going to throw it away.

You were supposed to put your hand up…


Food for thought:

Financial Post

We keep you updated on Canada's electric vehicle industry. Read our stories, analysis and updates on all ongoings in the businesses and sector.

financialpost.com

Canada has what it takes to become hydrogen leader

David Layzell, an energy systems architect at The Transition Accelerator, speaks to the Financial Post's Larysa Harapyn about Canada's deal with Germany to supply hydrogen, and why Canada has more opportunities than other countries to be a hydrogen leader.

financialpost.com

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Is that true?

Canada doesn’t need to be an importer, yet we are.

America doesn’t need to be an importer, but they are too.

What would be the reason these net exporters continue to import?

Here in BC we export 40% of the feedstock from the existing Kinder Morgan pipeline to Washington State, which comes back to us as refined product which has to be bought in USD and barged up. This is because BC only has two refineries, one 56,000 BPD and the other 26,000 BPD.

Now online and coming

Export Propane facility - Prince Rupert
Export Propane facility - Prince Rupert - pending
Export LNG facility - Kitimat - pending (soon)
Export LNG facility - Kitimat - pending (FID positive)
Export oil facility - Vancouver - Now operational
Export refined fuels - North Van -operational (smaller)
Export LNG facility - Howe sound - Under construction

 

[foresterab]

I often talk with relations - many of whom are working in the manufacturing plants in Southern Ontario - about wages and what different economies pay.

When I see a cousin advertised "great" jobs for $19/hr starting or Red seal welders at $23/hr I have to question how anyone can afford to live there. And frankly if it wasn't for the constant cross border shopping expeditions (oh look milk is on sale in Detroit...better grab some) or the cheaper food costs I don't know how they live.

I look around the folks I hang out with and almost every one of them is making a $100,000+ wage and it's considered normal due to professional trades or STEM fields. Now for comparison there are also alot of service industry/low paying jobs in town and many households have a large spread between the two incomes.

But when I consider alternate careers it's amazing how many jobs would be a 50% drop in pay for me and Forestry is not exactly setting pay records currently. So while switching to alternate fuels, vehicles and other sources is important I also wonder often about the underpinning economic cost if we move to poorer paying jobs (but look everyone is employed) and what social impacts that will have.

For now, at least out here, Solar and EV user's are primarily folks with well above average incomes, there's the normal folks who do what ever, and then there is a growing number that are trying to do anything possible to save the power bill due to fixed incomes/reverting back to burning firewood. When I get calls from 80 year old pensioners asking about how to get firewood because they can't pay to heat their homes....we have an issue.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Here in BC we export 40% of the feedstock from the existing Kinder Morgan pipeline to Washington State, which comes back to us as refined product which has to be bought in USD and barged up. This is because BC only has two refineries, one 56,000 BPD and the other 26,000 BPD.

Now online and coming

Export Propane facility - Prince Rupert
Export Propane facility - Prince Rupert - pending
Export LNG facility - Kitimat - pending (soon)
Export LNG facility - Kitimat - pending (FID positive)
Export oil facility - Vancouver - Now operational
Export refined fuels - North Van -operational (smaller)
Export LNG facility - Howe sound - Under construction

It's tragic that our national refining capacity is so paltry...

 

[childs56]

It's tragic that our national refining capacity is so paltry...

Our refining capacity is pretty decent. We are a net exporter of refined product.
The West Coast refining deal is interesting on the agreements made for supply to the Northwest Refineries from Western Oil. Not a bad read if you google search it.

We ultimately have to provide a product the client wants or needs. It does us no good If we Refine aviation fuel at a plant. The customer needs Asphalt?

We do upgrade the product that goes down the pipeline. Which equals lots of jobs
Many synthetic products are refined/blended from Oils sands Oil.
We provide a product for the client to decide what they want from the end product.

A better question to be asked, why does Eastern Canadian refineries import foreign oil and natural gas over Canadian oil and gas? That is a entire discussion in itself

I have to ask the question. Do we build and deliver houses to Japan as a finished product. Or do we harvest, mill and then ship lumber for them to build as they see fit?

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Our refining capacity is pretty decent. We are a net exporter of refined product.
The West Coast refining deal is interesting on the agreements made for supply to the Northwest Refineries from Western Oil. Not a bad read if you google search it.

We ultimately have to provide a product the client wants or needs. It does us no good If we Refine aviation fuel at a plant. The customer needs Asphalt?

We do upgrade the product that goes down the pipeline. Which equals lots of jobs
Many synthetic products are refined/blended from Oils sands Oil.
We provide a product for the client to decide what they want from the end product.

A better question to be asked, why does Eastern Canadian refineries import foreign oil and natural gas over Canadian oil and gas? That is a entire discussion in itself

I have to ask the question. Do we build and deliver houses to Japan as a finished product. Or do we harvest, mill and then ship lumber for them to build as they see fit?

We export far to much raw timber and our refining capacity out here is barely adequate for the need and we are screwed if a major earthquake hits.

 

[childs56]

We export far to much raw timber and our refining capacity out here is barely adequate for the need and we are screwed if a major earthquake hits.

Raw lumber exports are a domestic issue caused by a lack of Investment and forethought by Canadian companies.

Canada is a Net Exporter of refined product. We do have a major issue with shipping east to west. Refining capacity in Canada is up. Will continue to grow as need increases unless eastern elites shut it all down for the west

 

[Humphrey Bogart]

I often talk with relations - many of whom are working in the manufacturing plants in Southern Ontario - about wages and what different economies pay.

When I see a cousin advertised "great" jobs for $19/hr starting or Red seal welders at $23/hr I have to question how anyone can afford to live there. And frankly if it wasn't for the constant cross border shopping expeditions (oh look milk is on sale in Detroit...better grab some) or the cheaper food costs I don't know how they live.

I look around the folks I hang out with and almost every one of them is making a $100,000+ wage and it's considered normal due to professional trades or STEM fields. Now for comparison there are also alot of service industry/low paying jobs in town and many households have a large spread between the two incomes.

But when I consider alternate careers it's amazing how many jobs would be a 50% drop in pay for me and Forestry is not exactly setting pay records currently. So while switching to alternate fuels, vehicles and other sources is important I also wonder often about the underpinning economic cost if we move to poorer paying jobs (but look everyone is employed) and what social impacts that will have.

For now, at least out here, Solar and EV user's are primarily folks with well above average incomes, there's the normal folks who do what ever, and then there is a growing number that are trying to do anything possible to save the power bill due to fixed incomes/reverting back to burning firewood. When I get calls from 80 year old pensioners asking about how to get firewood because they can't pay to heat their homes....we have an issue.

People haven't figured it out yet. Automobiles, traveling, etc are going to be privileges for the rich and powerful in the new World. The rest of us are going to be priced out of it with the excuse being that, "we generate too much carbon".

We used to find ways to solve these problems but our Institutions are trending towards failure and decline.

What truly amazes me is how useless the average person has become without modern amenities and technology.

 

[Brad Sallows]

What truly amazes me is how useless the average person has become without modern amenities and technology.

Arguably the modern amenities and technology are what made them useless.

 

[ytz]

Cheaper stuff…

So as long as Oil/Gas/other fossil fuel remains cheaper than other options no one is going to throw it away.

And Balance of Payments. There isn't an oil importing country that doesn't try to conserve energy. This is particularly true for developing countries. Like I already explained. Having to buy oil eats up precious foreign currency and basically uses up resources those governments want to deploy to improve their economy and Quality of Life in other ways.

People who live in oil exporting countries who have never had to live through a Balance of Payments crisis or a devaluation find this idea hard to understand. Classic Western (mostly) ignorance.

 

[ytz]

Is that true?

Canada doesn’t need to be an importer, yet we are.

America doesn’t need to be an importer, but they are too.

What would be the reason these net exporters continue to import?

Developed countries don't have exceptionally export dependent economies. They essentially increase economic consumption to boost quality of life by running trade deficits.

Developing countries tend to prioritize investment and capital formation (savings) over consumption. It's the only way they can grow faster.

 

[foresterab]

We export far to much raw timber and our refining capacity out here is barely adequate for the need and we are screwed if a major earthquake hits.

Raw lumber exports are a domestic issue caused by a lack of Investment and forethought by Canadian companies.

...

There is also a wide range of political legislation and policy that hinders and/or undervalues the return Canadians receive from crown lands.

For example when a couple of years ago lumber prices were at record highs...

• in New Brunswick the crown dues for sawlogs are fixed...so no additional return was generated during the boom (Irving says thank you by the way).
• In BC the dues are calculated differently where the average of the previous year is then applied to the next years dues....this is great if prices are going up for the companies...but prices spiked fast and then crashed fast....and then your stuck with companies paying dues based upon record prices when the product sells for average prices = too little profit to justify investment.
• In Alberta they take the wholesale Chicago bulk commodity price every Friday, convert the price to $CDN, and then come up with a monthly average (for sawlogs only). So your timber dues reflects last months market prices and tracks much closer with market conditions up or down.

Unfortunately the Forestry industry is game of volume and market access. Hence why some European companies can ship from Europe container ships of product due to their mill on the ocean with dock access cheaper than we can truck from remote parts of Canada to the same market. Rail cars are relatively cheap but you need the trains running on schedule, with the right mix of empty and loaded cars, to secondary lines or dead end terminals which is in some ways counter productive to the needs of trans-North America Intermodel shipping. And it's worse on the west coast with almost all the traffic going through Vancouver due to lack of alternatives.

But this is true for a lot of the natural resources. In order to be effective you need to develop good infrastructure, often in remote/difficult areas, and then somehow find a labour force willing to work in the area (or train from scratch), and then you produce a raw good/partially refined good.

We as a nation are bad at taking that next step and developing the local/international development needed outside of a couple of examples and its' where a number of our increasingly wealthier competing nations are eating our lunch. One of the parts not talked about when talking about the Norwegian wealth funds is that the FEDERAL government took money from non-renewables and have invested a significant part of the revenues back into the country into alternate fields. There is a reason they are world leaders in the forest industry for their equipment technology (due to research and design), mill components, and have strategically invested into "poorer" countries who would provide the low cost feedstock to allow for high return products (think Brazilian pulp mills for production of office paper).

Canada has much more potential than hewing a few trees down to ship to England for the Royal Navy, or pulpwood exports to the US, or raw logs to the Pacific countries. But it takes both a cultural change (not every tree is sacred around a city in Europe - a.k.a. less NIMBY), strategic thinking on where you need access today and 50? 100? years from now, policy change to be competitive, and being open enough to create good business environments instead of trying to pick winners.

 

[ytz]

But it takes both a cultural change (not every tree is sacred around a city in Europe - a.k.a. less NIMBY), strategic thinking on where you need access today and 50? 100? years from now, policy change to be competitive, and being open enough to create good business environments instead of trying to pick winners.

Resource wealth and the American market has made Canadians exceptionally lazy. Why bother developing a high tech value added economy when you can dig stuff out of the ground and sell it to the Americans?

And if it's not resources? It's cardboard boxes in the sky (condos) to foreigners.

The rest of the economy? Four oligopolies (banking, telecom, groceries, airlines) in a trench coat.

Years ago, I was part of a team that won a regional startup competition. We ultimately disbanded because getting financing in Canada was almost impossible. And the only offers we had were from American angel or VC investors. Meanwhile, if you can breathe you can get a half million dollar mortgage in Canada.

People can blame Trudeau all they want. But the cultural rot runs deep and is obvious to anybody from the outside, but invisible to the average clueless Canuck. Literally any idea that doesn't involve selling housing or resources is immediately deemed too risky by the average Canuck. Likewise anything that threatens those gains is a huge threat. So Gen Squeeze proposing to tax million dollar homes is a threat. Because God forbid investors have to actually invest in anything other than real estate in this country......

 

[Colin Parkinson]

There is also a wide range of political legislation and policy that hinders and/or undervalues the return Canadians receive from crown lands.

For example when a couple of years ago lumber prices were at record highs...

• in New Brunswick the crown dues for sawlogs are fixed...so no additional return was generated during the boom (Irving says thank you by the way).
• In BC the dues are calculated differently where the average of the previous year is then applied to the next years dues....this is great if prices are going up for the companies...but prices spiked fast and then crashed fast....and then your stuck with companies paying dues based upon record prices when the product sells for average prices = too little profit to justify investment.
• In Alberta they take the wholesale Chicago bulk commodity price every Friday, convert the price to $CDN, and then come up with a monthly average (for sawlogs only). So your timber dues reflects last months market prices and tracks much closer with market conditions up or down.

Unfortunately the Forestry industry is game of volume and market access. Hence why some European companies can ship from Europe container ships of product due to their mill on the ocean with dock access cheaper than we can truck from remote parts of Canada to the same market. Rail cars are relatively cheap but you need the trains running on schedule, with the right mix of empty and loaded cars, to secondary lines or dead end terminals which is in some ways counter productive to the needs of trans-North America Intermodel shipping. And it's worse on the west coast with almost all the traffic going through Vancouver due to lack of alternatives.

But this is true for a lot of the natural resources. In order to be effective you need to develop good infrastructure, often in remote/difficult areas, and then somehow find a labour force willing to work in the area (or train from scratch), and then you produce a raw good/partially refined good.

We as a nation are bad at taking that next step and developing the local/international development needed outside of a couple of examples and its' where a number of our increasingly wealthier competing nations are eating our lunch. One of the parts not talked about when talking about the Norwegian wealth funds is that the FEDERAL government took money from non-renewables and have invested a significant part of the revenues back into the country into alternate fields. There is a reason they are world leaders in the forest industry for their equipment technology (due to research and design), mill components, and have strategically invested into "poorer" countries who would provide the low cost feedstock to allow for high return products (think Brazilian pulp mills for production of office paper).

Canada has much more potential than hewing a few trees down to ship to England for the Royal Navy, or pulpwood exports to the US, or raw logs to the Pacific countries. But it takes both a cultural change (not every tree is sacred around a city in Europe - a.k.a. less NIMBY), strategic thinking on where you need access today and 50? 100? years from now, policy change to be competitive, and being open enough to create good business environments instead of trying to pick winners.

There was a group within the BC Forest Service trying to interconnect the logging roads, so product could be directly shipped to Stewart, which now has the "Stewart World Port" and Kitimat also has a rail link. But you are right the rail companies don't give a sh*t unless you need 100 cars at time. Northern BC was better served under BCR. I also wished WAC Bennett had finished his rail line to Dease Lake. A rail line connecting the Yukon with the rest of North America would have long term benefits. Maybe we need another BCR just focused on Northern BC, Alberta, Yukon and part of the territories?