For all the talk of whether Canada needs a new oil pipeline, there’s one thing missing: a company wanting to build it.
In June, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said there was “no proponent” and no proposal on the table by any company, but pledged, “There will be soon.”
So far, that has yet to materialize.
Seems there is a business case for selling Canadian liquefied natural gas to Europe after all.
The Mark Carney government, unlike the Justin Trudeau government before it, said this week that it is willing to consider — possibly, maybe down the road, in the medium term — selling LNG to Europe.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Prime Minister Mark Carney “revised” his first major Parliamentary bill as Canada’s leader on August 8, by mandating that industrial projects deemed fit for speedy approval “must” serve the interests of indigenous peoples.
This unilateral reinvention repudiates the legal text of Bill C-5, passed into law on June 26, which only states that indigenous interests “may” or “can” be considered.
Fusion energy is not only cheap, clean and limitless, it is also the “engine” that will drive the enormous increases in artificial intelligence (AI) that will be the ultimate super-weapon of this century. AI requires power — enormous amounts of it — that only fusion energy can provide.
If there were a formula for who will dominate the 21st century, it would be: Fusion Energy + AI = World Supremacy.
Our nation, however, is now faced with a new and dangerous 21st century threat.
No pipeline is coming. Not under Prime Minister Mark Carney. Not under any federal leader. But the promise of a pipeline—the vague, lingering maybe—is too useful to kill. That promise allows Ottawa to discipline the West, delay their demands, and extract cooperation without ever offering reciprocity. A built pipeline delivers oil. An unbuilt pipeline delivers obedience.
Western provinces that believe a Carney government might succeed where Trudeau failed misunderstand the nature of the offer. Carney won’t say yes—but, more importantly, he won’t say no. He will keep the dream just alive enough to remain useful: a chip, a valve, a leash.
Nearly three-quarters of Canadians would back a national energy corridor and pipeline extending from Alberta to Eastern Canada, a new survey suggests.
Fifty-one percent of the 1,120 Canadian adults surveyed by Nanos between June 1 and June 3 “support” a cross-country pipeline, while 22 percent indicated they “somewhat support” the concept.
Twelve percent of respondents said they “oppose” the idea of a pipeline while another 12 percent were “somewhat opposed” to the idea, the survey found. Three percent of Canadians polled said they were “unsure.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith went into the first ministers’ meeting calling for a commitment to an oil pipeline to the northern B.C. coast. Some Eastern Canadian premiers suggested they’re keen on an oil pipeline that would go across the country from west to east.
Neither exists yet. There’s no company proposing to build either. But even as concepts, they are very different. They would serve very different purposes.
Only pipelines being approved are for decarbonized oil pipelines. pic.twitter.com/EJ6Vx2viy7
— Marc Nixon (@MarcNixon24) June 2, 2025
Decarbonized? Is that oil gone flat?
h/t Mauser
Three weeks ago, all of Spain was startled by a complete electricity blackout without warning. Air traffic control could not contact airplanes, trains stalled in stations or stopped on their tracks mid-journey, telecommunications were knocked out, and a national emergency was declared. These blackouts spread into southern France and Portugal, conveying the regrettable and apparently unsuspected message that if one nation mismanages its grid, it takes its neighbours down with it.
The price tag is in: $20.9 billion.
That’s the estimated cost of the design and building four small, modular reactors (SMRs) at the Darlington nuclear generating station on Lake Ontario east of Oshawa providing a total of 1,200 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 1.2 million homes as demand for power is expected to surge 75 per cent by 2050.
Energy Minister Stephen Lecce revealed the long-awaited dollar figure Thursday as construction on the first reactor began following years of preparations, approvals and site preparation.
In 2030 the first of 4 comes onstream. This is Canada remember have a salt shaker handy.
Social trust will vanish in the dark
It was around 7pm when we heard that the lights were back on in Porto, 200 miles to the north of the small Portuguese village where I was visiting friends. The blackout would only last a few hours longer. At that moment we were at the checkout of an unlit supermarket in a nearby town, having scoured the shelves by the light of our phones. Our shopping baskets revealed that we were not seasoned preppers. They contained 40 litres of bottled water, along with tins of beans, peas and tuna. We also stocked up on red wine and chocolate; morale had to be maintained, after all.
Earlier that day, a power cut originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.
A visionary, an entrepreneur, a futurist, and perhaps one of the most creative of his generation, one still needs to spend considerable time in reading the comments of Elon Musk to determine his current opinion regarding fusion energy.
Prior published interviews suggest he has been a very strong proponent of solar and wind power, energy sources that have brought Europe to its knees economically and that, understandably, are not currently in favor at the White House.
In 2023, Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast that “You could actually power the entire United States with 100 miles of 100 miles of solar.”
On Monday at an energy conference in Houston, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s “irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”
He added that, “Natural gas is responsible for 43 per cent of U.S. electricity production,” and beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there’s “simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.”
In other words, as a federal election looms, once again the United States is diverging from Canada when it comes to energy policy.
As part of his economic plan for change, Mark Carney said his government will develop “ports, supply chains and new trade corridors” to help diversify Canada’s export markets.
The port of Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia claims to be doing just that, in the form of a $1.35-billion project called the Ridley Island Energy Export Facility (REEF) that is expected to be completed next year.
The Prince Rupert Port Authority (PRPA) boasts that it has provided “time-limited exclusive rights” for the export of LPG (liquid petroleum gases that include propane and butane) to REEF, a joint venture between Royal Vopak of the Netherlands and Calgary-based AltaGas .
One June day in 1996, three years after he became prime minister, Jean Chrétien made his way to a recreation centre in Fort McMurray, now the gritty northern Alberta heart of the oil sector, sitting atop the world’s third-largest oil reserves.
We should be richer than Sheiks.
During Monday night’s Liberal leadership debate, there was a lot of talk about President Donald Trump. But whatever your views on Trump, one thing is certain — he’s revitalized his country’s energy sector. Through executive orders, Trump instructed agency heads to identify “actions that impose an undue burden on the identification, development or use of domestic energy source” and “exercise any lawful emergency authorities available” to facilitate energy production and transportation. In other words, let’s become an energy superpower.
