Ducks and development

Development could well trump duck deaths as western Canada increasingly becomes a target for energy-hungry Asian tigers

By Jeff Lewis

March 05, 2010

An interesting, though hardly impartial, take on the so-called dead duck fiasco appeared in this morning’s Edmonton Journal. Oil sands consortium Syncrude is in a St. Albert courtroom today for the first day of a two-month trial stemming from charges filed after 1,600 water fowl perished in one of its tailings ponds two years ago.

If convicted, the company could be fined up to $500,000 under Alberta law and up to $300,000 with a six month jail sentence for executives under federal penalties. Momentarily eschewing the fence-sitting vantage common to his trade, reporter Darcy Henton speculates that the ducks could very well be the canaries of the tar pits.

Could be, but there’s a sense, too, that the bird brouhaha obscures the forest for the trees. The controversy hasn’t, for example, prompted a dramatic rethink among firms looking to capitalize on Alberta’s energy assets. Nor has it caused foreign investors to lose sleep.

Korean National Oil Corp. certainly isn’t coasting. The firm snapped up Calgary-based Harvest Energy for $1.8 billion last October, and is poised to spend upwards of $6.5 billion more on foreign acquisitions this year, according to the Journal’s Gary Lamphier.

In fact, evidence suggests it’s business as usual in the bitumen belt. More than a dozen projects – the majority of them using comparatively benign in situ extraction methods – have come off the shelf in recent weeks.

Elsewhere, another Asian entity, Korea Gas Corp., recently gained a $1.1 billion toehold in the shale gas plays of northeastern B.C. The firm expects to extract a trillion cubic feet of gas from a tract of land owned by EnCana Corp. of Calgary, the Globe and Mail reports.

The move is no doubt bolstered by plans to build an export terminal at Kitimat, B.C. Korea Gas has a 40 per cent stake in designs for the $3 billion export hub, which is being developed by Kitimat LNG Inc. and has also attracted investment from U.S. gas producer Apache Corp.

What does Syncrude’s day in court amount to? A blemish, sure, but development could well trump duck deaths as western Canada increasingly becomes a target for energy-hungry Asian tigers.