The Alberta advantage

And when it comes to environmental protection, DOE’s Dammer admires the operations and methodologies of Alberta’s institutions, especially the EUB. “That’s one of the very novel institutions that was really able to overcome a lot of the barriers,” he says, pointing to the necessity for communications amongst stakeholders. “You find in developing big projects that, a lot of the time, the biggest problem is communications and understanding the problem. There are just so many myths and misconceptions about developing projects of this scale that people don’t understand. And there are no processes to work through these things. In terms of bringing the public, the state, the feds and the industry together so they can work through development problems in a meaningful way – I think that is one of the largest successes of the Alberta model.”

The admiration notwithstanding, Dammer realizes there are also a number of philosophical differences
– including the two countries’ approaches to government involvement.

“There are quite a few differences,” he says. “In fact, I don’t think we can take the Alberta model lock, stock and barrel. We simply won’t be able to do that because the rights and prerogatives your provincial government has are considerably different from our state governments. On federal lands it’s kind of the same but what you have in Alberta is the owner of that public land is generally the province of Alberta.”

Still, Dammer likes the way Alberta has demonstrated that if you’re going to develop large unconventional processes, it’s going to take time.

“This is a two decade play for any appreciable amount of production, so it’s most important to protect the local population,” he says, and gives an example of past failings with local sentiment. “I had a breakfast a couple of weeks ago in Rifle, Colorado and they’re still talking about Black Sunday when the company pulled the plug on their project. How economically destructive that was and how much pain that caused. That’s something we can prevent this time around. In the 80s it was almost a gold rush mentality and that just doesn’t work in this society any more just like it wouldn’t work in Canada any more. I think what we can bring to this process is the Alberta approach.”
Dammer says the second big lesson the U.S. can learn from the Alberta model is, “don’t let oil prices scare you away.” He says everyone walked away from the industry in the 1980s when the Saudis dumped oil on the market. “A lesson from Canada,” he says, “is you guys stuck with it. And today Alberta is realizing tremendous mineral wealth. We shouldn’t allow the inevitable to guide us into crisis-type development.”

Dammer said a “realistic” timeline for development has 2.5 million bpd coming on stream by 2035 after about six years of development and something like 300,000 bpd produced after the first couple of years.

“A million and a half by 2025,” says Dammer, “but I’d be cautious – this is just a development model, not a policy of the federal government. The only valid thing is we feel certain it can be achieved given the resources available (manpower, capital, materials) and the magnitude of the resource itself.”

And here, too, Dammer looks to Alberta, in this case in what not to model – namely, an ambitious expansion with it’s attendant labour and supply shortages.

“How many Caterpillar trucks can you build, how many tires?” he says. “Can you get pipe fitters?”

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