ON, AB, & SK plan for new pipelines | Your stories | Discussion forum

It is an agreement to study some new pipelines and railways. It's not an agreement to build them:

On Tuesday, Ontario and Alberta added Saskatchewan to an agreement signed a couple of weeks ago, specifically to explore trade and plan pipelines and new rail infrastructure.

That plan, outlined in a memorandum of understanding, is to work together to study a potential east-west pipeline made with domestically produced steel to connect to the not-yet-built James Bay deep-sea port in Ontario.

Definitely possible that the study will conclude that the new pipeline or railway would not be feasible, economically or otherwise.

It is good that people are thinking about east-west trade with other Canadian provinces. It was an easy way out to just trade across a southern provincial border with the US.

Manitoba's provincial Prime Minister, Wab Kinew, is of aboriginal descent, and aboriginal descendants are an important part of his political base. I would expect he'll not sign onto any pro-pipeline agreements until he gets a good feeling of support in that constituency.

The other half of that is uncertainty of the future international oil market, and how the quality of tar sands oil (and it much higher costs of extraction) would allow it to compete*. At the moment it has generous federal and provincial supports, but such political advantages can be ephemeral, whereas the high sulfur content and energy input will still be here.

Middle eastern oil's advantages are locked in, too; US oil producers may get a couple of good years out of Trump, but after that - who knows?

*Last I looked, the "multiplier" of profit over production cost for tar sands was just half of that for conventional drilled wells.

@Bill ... There ⬆️ you go using that word 'Never' again❗

LOL

Dean

I used never because I meant it. There never is agreement on anything among even far less people of any description than all the native bands and all their members. How many people do you need on anything before there are intractable differences, 8, 10, 12?

And this is very different times than the 1950s, Eastern Canada seems completely content to gas up their vehicles with pretty much all foreign, other than Alberta-origin product, there will never be new pipelines built to Eastern Canada imo.