It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, April 03, 2024
Drought poses key risk to Canada's natural gas producers in 2024: Deloitte
Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press
Persistent drought conditions are poised to challenge natural gas producers even as they aim to ramp up in anticipation of Canada's first liquefied natural gas export terminal opening, a new report warns.
The report by Deloitte Canada identifies potential water shortages in Western Canada as a key risk facing the oil and gas sector in 2024.
Some of the most extreme drought conditions currently are in northeast B.C. and northwest Alberta, a region that is the epicentre of Canada's natural gas drilling industry.
The report notes Alberta's government has already set up a drought advisory panel to begin water usage negotiations, while B.C. Premier David Eby has called his province's situation "the most dramatic drought conditions that we've seen."
Water use is important for the natural gas industry — most development in Canada today involves hydraulic fracturing, a process that uses a combination of water, sand and chemicals to develop pathways to bring the gas to the surface.
And the drought comes as the industry anticipates increased demand for natural gas, coinciding with the expected opening sometime next year of the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C.
“It is really interesting to see, because this is the moment the natural gas industry has been waiting for 10 years, and we’ve now got another complication," said Andrew Botterill, national oil, gas and chemicals leader at Deloitte Canada.
The $40-billion LNG Canada project will ship liquefied natural gas overseas and open up Asian markets to Canadian natural gas for the first time.
Much of the $5 billion in capital spending projected to take place in B.C. by oil and gas producers in 2024, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, will be driven by natural gas drilling to supply LNG Canada as the project's completion date draws closer.
"I still think companies, especially those who have committed to putting gas volumes into a very expensive LNG plant that’s been built, will meet all of those requirements ... It’s just going to be harder work and probably will mean some extra costs around water management," Botterill said.
In December, the Alberta Energy Regulator warned the oil and gas industry that they could face restricted access to water in the event of severe drought in 2024. The provincial government has already launched negotiations aimed at trying to get major users to reach water-sharing agreements.
Meanwhile, the B.C. Energy Regulator has provided advance warning of the potential for water restrictions for industrial water licence holders if conditions deteriorate.
Botterill said as restrictions come into place, gas developers will need to explore increased use of alternative water sources. Using recycled water — which means treating and reusing previously used fracking fluid — is an option, but is typically more expensive and more technically complicated than using fresh water.
In 2022, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator, just over one per cent of the water used by hydraulic fracturing operations was recycled water, with the remaining 99 per cent being primarily fresh water.
“I think we’re going to see companies be able to manage, but there’s going to be a lot more work that goes into it," Botterill said.
"I see it as an expense and a complication to operations."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 3, 2024.
CANADA
Homebuyers facing 'toughest time ever' to buy a home: economist
Daniel Johnson , BNN Bloomberg
Prospective home buyers are facing peak unaffordable market conditions amid elevated interest rates and high prices, says one economist.
Robert Hogue, assistant chief economist at RBC, said in a report Tuesday that Canadians are experiencing the “toughest time ever to afford a home.” The report said the Bank of Canada’s historic interest rate hiking campaign, which began in March 2022, continues to weigh on the nation's housing market despite more recent moves to hold interest rates. Specifically, Hogue said higher rates have greatly diminished purchasing budgets among house hunters.
“We estimate they’ve shrunk the maximum budget for a household with a median income ($85,400 at the end of 2023) by 22 per cent since the first quarter of 2022 to just under $500,000,” Hogue said adding that those figures assume a 20 per cent down payment and a 25-year amortization.
While higher interest rates have worked to erode the budgets of prospective homebuyers, the report outlined that prices have not drastically moved lower.
“Home prices, meanwhile, have fallen just 1.8 per cent over the same interval. It’s no wonder homebuyer demand has cooled so much. The ability of many Canadians to get into the housing market has greatly diminished,” he said.
As a result of the poor affordability conditions in Canada’s real estate market, Hogue highlighted that many buyers are waiting for rates to go down before getting off the sidelines.
However, the report highlights that Canadian homebuyers could see improving market conditions ahead.
“An improvement in affordability could in fact come sooner if long-term interest rates ease ahead of our central bank policy pivot and household income continues to grow at a solid clip. The outlook will brighten the deeper the Bank of Canada’s cuts get next year,” the report said.
While some improvements in affordability could “rekindle some buyers" enthusiasm,” Hogue said they will be small when compared to the “dramatic loss of affordability that occurred during the pandemic.”
“Under our base case scenario, the share of an average household income needed to cover ownership costs would only fall to mid-2022 levels by 2025.,” the report said.
The Calgary Real Estate Board says March home sales were up 9.9 per cent from last year as interprovincial migration to Alberta contributed to tight market conditions.
The board says 2,664 units changed hands last month, while the benchmark price across all home types was $597,600 for March — up 10.9 per cent from a year earlier and two per cent from February.
Relatively more affordable housing types, such as row and apartment-style homes, saw the most significant year-over-year price gains.
New listings fell 4.3 per cent to 3,172 and there were 2,532 units in inventory, 22 per cent lower than last year and half the levels traditionally seen in March. The board says inventory levels declined the most for homes priced below $500,000.
Ann-Marie Lurie, chief economist at CREB, says conditions for March have not been this tight since 2006, which also marked the last time Calgary experienced high levels of interprovincial migration.
Properties were on the market for an average of 20 days before selling in March, down 24.3 per cent from last year.
Trudeau pledges billions more for apartment construction loans
Brian Platt, Bloomberg
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the upcoming federal budget will put $15 billion (US$11.1 billion) more into an apartment construction loan program, the latest in his efforts to address Canada’s shortage of housing as its population surges.
The additional money would bring the size of the federal loan program to $55 billion, allowing it to finance the construction of more than 131,000 new apartments within the next decade, the government said.
The program will also be reformed to extend the loan terms, expand access for student and senior housing projects, and allow for multiple projects to be financed at once. The government said it will speed applications for “proven home builders.”
In effect, Trudeau is applying the BC Builds program across the country. That program, set up in the west coast province of British Columbia, provides low-cost financing to accelerate homebuilding and aims to shorten approval times for projects.
Trudeau has been making a series of announcements ahead of the budget’s release on April 16 in an attempt to show his government is addressing Canada’s soaring housing prices and lack of supply.
On Tuesday he announced a new $5 billion infrastructure fund that provinces could access — but only if they remove certain barriers to building housing, such as freezing municipal development charges and allowing up to four units on every lot
Young people paying 'astronomically high living expenses': insolvency trustee
Daniel Johnson , BNN Bloomberg
Following reports that younger Canadians are willing to make sacrifices to own a home, insolvency trustees say many should consider renting instead.
Rob Kilner, an insolvency trustee with Spergel, said in a news release on Wednesday that many younger Canadians should choose to rent. He said he sees a lot of “entitlement” among younger people as salaries have not kept pace with inflation and rising home prices amid higher interest rates.
“Someone will say ‘I deserve a house by myself.’ Well, sometimes you can’t afford a home by yourself. You might need a roommate,” he said.
“You now have a younger generation who are paying astronomically high living expenses. They are taking the beating the most. It’s almost like the older generation took up the ladder with them, and said ‘good luck climbing the wall.’”
In January, digital real estate platform Wahi released findings from its Homebuyer Intention Survey with results from 1,508 Angus Reid Forum members, finding that 24 per cent of Canadians between 18 and 34 indicated they are likely to buy a home this year. The survey found those individuals said they were willing to make sacrifices like reducing spending, working longer hours or taking a second job to purchase a home.
Samantha Galea, also an insolvency trustee at Spergel, said in a statement that she recommends people change their attitudes toward home ownership.
“People need to shift the idea that to be successful you have to own a home. It’s just not going to be in the cards for some people, and they’re in a worse position for trying to own a house,” she said.
Last week, a survey from Houseful, an RBC company, found that younger first-time home buyers were making compromises to get into the real estate market. Some of the trade-offs included looking for smaller and smaller homes, purchasing homes they may not stay in over the longer term and expanding their preferences on location.
The survey found that 65.2 per cent of younger first-time buyers would embrace a smaller space compared to 47.2 per cent of older buyers. Fewer younger buyers, 53.3 per cent, indicated they purchased their dream home, while 72.6 of older buyers indicated they did.
Additionally, younger buyers were also less likely to value location, with 28.3 per cent of younger buyers prioritizing this compared to 34.9 per cent of older buyers.
Generational wealth
As the cost of owning a home continues to rise in Canada, one economist says many may not be able to attain a primary driver of accumulating wealth.
Earlier in March, Carrie Freestone, an economist at RBC, said in a report that renters are facing barriers to building wealth as they are forced to allocate more of their income to shelter.
“I will say that if we look at wealth accumulation, homeownership has been the primary driver of wealth accumulation in Canada,” she said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg.
“It's accounted for half of the assets accumulated over the past three decades. So it is concerning that renters are not having access to the housing market.”
TD Bank, Google sign multi-year 'strategic relationship'
Ben Cousins, BNN Bloomberg
TD Bank and Google Cloud have agreed to a “multi-year strategic relationship” that will allow the bank to take advantage of Google’s infrastructure.
The companies say the deal, announced Wednesday with undisclosed terms, will see Google work with TD on app development and allow the bank to make changes to its products to meet customers’ needs.
“Our technology strategy is helping us deliver personalized and connected experiences for our customers,” Greg Keeley, senior executive vice president of platforms and technology at TD Bank, said in a news release Wednesday.
"Together with Google Cloud, we are positioned well to continue to evolve our services, and help power new and innovative banking experiences."
The deal will also give TD access to Google’s “global network of engineers” to take advantage of Google Cloud and develop new products.
TD and Google Cloud have an existing relationship, as TDSAT, a Chicago-based subsidiary of the bank, has been using Google Cloud for the modelling of its fixed-income markets.
Shifts in renewable energy infrastructure 'essential,' says Northland Power CEO
Mitchell Consky, BNN Bloomberg
With global energy demands complicated by shifts towards decarbonization, one renewable energy giant CEO says there is a “scarcity of talent” that can develop the required infrastructure to meet requirements.
Mike Crawley, CEO of Northland Power, says the assets his company develops are essential for the next 20 to 30 years.
“If you look at the demands for power globally, there’s huge amounts of power-generating assets that need to be built over the next 10 to 15 years. And that’s what we do,” he told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday.
Crawley, who will be moving on from his position with Northland Power this fall, says long term investors in the renewable energy sector understand how growing demands for power will be more important than short term losses in stock values amidst high interest rates.
“If you look at the go forward — interest rates look like they’re set to come down. Supply chain restraints in the sector are resolving. Inflation is coming down. So everything that was working against the sector in the last year and a half is now turning in its favour again.”
Crawley pointed to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a pedometer for growing power demands. “If you look at AI and cloud computing data centres, right now they use about 1.5 per cent of the total global demand for power.”
Crawley said that, by 2030, “it’s projected to be 13 per cent.”
“All that power generation capacity has to be built out and there’s a scarcity of projects and a scarcity of talent to do that,” he said.
NuScale, the company whose small modular reactor project collapsed so spectacularly last November, is “burning cash at the rate of $185 million per year”. On March 22, the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, sold 59,768 of his shares in the company. This is the same CEO who declared NuScale’s SMR project, aptly named VOYGR, “a dead horse.” It’s clearly on a journey to nowhere.
Wells Fargo, with an eye on prudent investments, has declared, “We think investor enthusiasm for SMR is misguided”. As The Motley Fool reported, “NuScale’s VOYGR nuclear power product has ‘no secure customers’ and is ‘not cost competitive’ says the analyst.”
The splashy cheerleading Nuclear Energy Summit organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Brussels on March 21 proved to be just that. The participants arrived floating on the hot air of their misplaced enthusiasm but “left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions”.
European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros, told Summit attendees to their face that “The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high”. Representatives from the European and Latin American banking worlds said that “their lending priorities lean toward renewables and transmission grids” and that “nuclear comes last”.
Even the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission couldn’t quite bring itself to slam down its rubber stamp on Oklo’s chalet-in-the-woods micro reactor, the Aurora, which remains about as real as its namesake fairy tale princess.
In January 2022, the NRC denied Oklo’s license application outright because it “continues to contain significant information gaps in its description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components,” wrote the NRC.
Nevertheless, Oklo brags on its website that it “made history” simply by developing “the first advanced fission combined license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission”, which sums up the second nuclear “renaissance” perfectly: Make a drawing. Hit ‘send’.
Meanwhile, the US military canceled its contract for an Aurora reactor originally intended for the Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska.
And finally, an executive from the industry that has consistently delivered its latest new reactors decades late and billions over the original budget — in one case $20 billion over — suggested they should all just slow down. Said Ian Edwards, chief executive of Canadian reactor producer, Atkins Realis, “we all become too optimistic. We have this optimism bias towards being able to deliver faster. Really we should probably slow things down a little bit.”
But nuclear power is the answer to our current climate crisis! Ya think?
It’s tempting to ask whether things can get any worse for the nuclear power industry, but they almost certainly will. Unless we end up paying for it all. As the Bloomberg article that related the tail-between-legs exit of the Nuclear Summit conferees declared in a headline: “Taxpayers are needed to foot the bill to achieve 2050 targets.”
H.E. Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei of the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the COP28 where the “triple nuclear” pledge was first announced. This must have delighted billionaire Bill Gates who can’t wait to sell his taxpayer-funded, proliferation-friendly reactors to the UAE. (Photo: IAEA Imagebank.)
At the moment, a majority in the US Congress seem intent on making sure that is exactly what will happen. Because after all, why should multi-billionaire, Bill Gates, be forced to pay for his own nuclear toys when he can milk (read ‘bilk’) US taxpayers instead?
The US government has already pledged $2 billion of our money to Gates for his proliferation-friendly liquid sodium-cooled molten salt fast reactor produced by his company, TerraPower (more properly, TerrorPower). Gates can’t wait to export it the United Arab Emirates. Nuclear weapons anyone?
The strokey-white-beard-named ADVANCE Act, has been passed by the US House with 365 voting in favor and only 36 Democrats-with-a-conscience voting against it. By its own description, the ADVANCE ACT aims to “advance the benefits of nuclear energy by enabling efficient, timely, and predictable licensing, regulation, and deployment of nuclear energy technologies.” In other words, do away with burdensome — and expensive — safety regulations.
Indeed, New Mexico Democrat, Senator Martin Heinrich, told E&E News in January that “These regulatory timelines do not lend themselves to fighting the climate crisis.” Oh those wascally wegulations!
Meanwhile, Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia doesn’t want to seat any new NRC commissioners who might be “too focused on safety.”
The NRC’s motto is “protecting people and the environment,” a mandate it demonstrably endeavors to avoid already, but even some vestige of interest in safety is probably better than none. Not that safety oversight will be needed of course because, hey, SMRs are “walkaway safe” and “meltdown proof” and any new light water reactors are too “advanced” to be a safety risk.
This makes the insistence by SMR manufacturers that they must be covered by the Price-Anderson Act (PAA) all the more curious. Price-Anderson, due to expire in 2025, was culled out of the ADVANCE ACT, now moving out of Senate committee and working its way through the reconciliation process, and handled separately. The Senate adopted the House version of the PAA, giving it a 40-year extension to 2026, and expanded limited liability for a major accident to just over $16 billion per reactor.
President Biden duly signed it into law, marking another misstep on what is becoming an increasingly problematic presidency.
Ed Lyman, Nuclear Power Safety Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Nuclear Intelligence Weekly that “The nuclear industry’s push for a 40-year Price-Anderson Act extension is a sure sign that it doesn’t believe its own messaging about how safe the next generation of nuclear reactors is going to be.”
But in a joint statement, Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) declared that “The extension of the Price-Anderson Act in the minibus sends a clear message that we are committed to the advancement of this safe and reliable power source.”
The “clear message” this actually sends is that, in the event of a major nuclear accident, US taxpayers will be thrown under that minibus. The $16 billion coverage will be chicken feed and we will all be stuck with the bill. Let’s remember that the Chornobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters are each racking up costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and counting. We have been warned.
But a bi-partisan group of Representatives and Senators think it’s perfectly fine for all of us to pay for such an eventuality. Meanwhile, if you own a home and are forced to abandon it in the path of a nuclear accident, you cannot claim a dime off your homeowner’s insurance. It will just be a total loss. Think about that for a moment.
