Alberta's Climate Change Emissions Management Corporation continues to deliver the goods. The environmental investment house today announced $28.1 million in funding to clean up fossil fuel production and bolster carbon capture and storage technology.

The money comes from a $71 million pot drawn from the province's $15 per tonne levy on errant emissions from industrial sites. Again, here's a breakdown of the recipients:

• Calgary-based E-T Energy received $6.86 million to develop its electro-thermal dynamic stripping process in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region
• The Enhanced Solvent Extraction Incorporating Electromagnetic Heating consortium received the biggest chunk of change: $16.4 million. This venture is a partnership between Florida-based Harris Corporation, Laricina Energy Ltd., Nexen Inc. and Suncor Energy Inc. As its long-winded name suggests, the group aims to pilot a combination of solvents and electromagnetic heating to replace steam at in situ underground extraction operations
• HTC Purenergy Inc. received $315,000 to study the feasibility of a proprietary method of capturing Co2 at Devon Energy's Jackfish underground SAGD site
• Global infrastructure, finance and media giant GE got $2 million to develop and demonstrate the viability of a ceramic membrane-based technology for the capture of Co2 from synthetic gas streams
• Suncor Energy Inc. received $2.5 million for a carbon capture scheme called the Oxy-fuel Demonstration Project. A pilot plant is planned for Cenovus Energy's Christina Lake in situ operation site

The CCEMC awared $5.7 million for energy efficiency projects last week and $37.5 million for renewable energy projects the week before that. Looking ahead, another $40 million has been earmarked for commercially proven energy efficiency schemes.

Another week, another round of funding. Alberta's Climate Change Emissions Management Corp. today announced $5.7 million in funding for six energy efficiency projects. The money comes from a $71 million pot collected via the province's $15 per tonne tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Here's a breakdown of today's recipients:

• $250,000 for Evergreen Energy Technologies Inc. for a device called a Power Pod, which promises to reduce emissions and eliminate losses of natural gas at well sites.
• $569,700 for May-Ruben Technologies, which is developing a thermally driven refrigeration system.
• $700,000 for Nova Chemicals Corporation. The firm is working to reduce energy use in ethylene manufacturing.
• $790,000 to Suncor Energy Inc. to develop the Alberta Oil Sands Energy Efficiency and GHG Mitigation Roadmap.
• $1.57 million to Great Northern Power Corp., which aims to convert waste-heat from reciprocating engines into electricity.
• $1.849 million to Genalta Power Systems Inc. for a waste energy to power utilization scheme at an amine facility

The CCEMC is now accepting submissions for a new round of projects. Fully $40 million is being made available for energy efficiency projects that are at or near commercialization. The deadline for submissions is Aug. 13. The CCEMC fund has amassed $187 million to date. Go here to see the suite of renewable energy projects that received $37.5 million last week.

Shale gas is just about everywhere these days. If you're in the energy business, you know the story: enough gas for 100-plus years thanks to the technical advances of horizontal drilling. American companies are looking farther afield, to Europe, in the hunt for mammoth supplies of natural gas trapped in densely compressed rock layers. Northeastern British Columbia is another hot spot for frontier gas exploration.

But not everybody is as keen to jump on the shale bandwagon. A groundswell of criticism is afoot. Filmmaker Josh Fox recently spoke to National Public Radio in the U.S. about his latest effort in this vein, Gasland. Billed as part travelogue, part expose, the film examines the proprietary 'fracking' fluids used by companies to unlock gas from dense geological formations. The documentary won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and recently premiered on HBO.

Now, the NY Times called Fox a "less manic Michael Moore," complaining that the filmmaker "capitalizes on people's refusals to be interviewd." Still, concern about the secret stew of chemicals used to tap stores of shale gas is likely to intensify as interest in the unconventional fuel accelerates. Here's the trailer:

Initial reports from the Gulf of Mexico were that as much as 25,000 barrels per day of crude oil was gushing from the sea floor following the Deepwater Horizon wreck. Visualizing and contextualizing that much oil is nigh-on impossible. Here's how video game developers think 25,000 bpd might look if each barrel were stacked one on top of the other. (Not sure about the scale or methodology here, but an interesting visual exercise all the same).

Suncor Energy Inc.'s plan to reduce fluid tailings from its operations by converting them into solid land has been conditionally approved by the Energy Resources Conservation Board.

The company is spending roughly $450 million on what it calls tailings reduction operations, or TROs, to comply with the ERCB's Directive 074. Tailings are a mixture of water, sand, silt, clay and residual bitumen leftover from the extraction process.

The ERCB directive requires mine operators to prepare and submit annual tailings plans, reduce the accumulation of tailings by capturing fine particles and specify dates for construction,  use and closure of the soupy lakes that have been a magnet for industry criticism.

A  commercial application to reduce fluid tailings at a project site 40 kilometers northwest of Fort McMurray has also been approved. The ERCB estimates the application of TROs will reduce the volume of fluid tailings at the project by 33 million cubic meters, or roughly 30 per cent. Suncor's plan does not include the creation of new tailings ponds. The firm will continue to utilize four existing tailings ponds, which are scheduled for decommissioning in 2017, 2029, 2032 and 2035.

Watch this video and see how it works:

The Climate Change and Emissions Management (CCEMC) Corporation announced today that it is funding five renewable energy projects, totalling more than $37.5 million. Funding for the CCEMC and these projects come from the carbon intensity tax where specified gas emitters, Alberta companies that annually produce more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse
gas emissions, have the option of meeting targets set by the government of Alberta by paying into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund at $15/tonne.

The projects and organizations receiving CCEMC funding are:

• Enerkem Inc., $1.8 million for reduction of greenhouse emissions through greening biofuel production and carbon dioxide utilization, from pilot plant to commercialization, in Edmonton
• City of Medicine Hat, $3 million, for the Medicine Hat Concentrating Solar Thermal Power Project
• ECB Enviro North America Inc., $8.2 million for Lethbridge Biogas, Biogas Cogeneration Project
• Plasco Alberta Inc., $10 million for the Plasco Alberta Energy and Waste Conversion Project, in Red Deer County
• Enmax Corporation, $14.5 million, for home generation

These five projects were pulled from a shortlist of 30 which was culled from a total list of 223 submissions. The CCEMC has two more press conferences scheduled for June where they will announce the remaining projects. Project proponents must contribute at least half the funds, or one-third if government money is available for the project.

Alberta Oil and our sister magazine Alberta Venture have done some great work in regards to these companies already. Articles below:

• Enmax's home generation plans finally seem to be inching towards completion, Alberta Oil profiled Gary Holden's plans for distributed generation in the home back in 2008.
• Alberta Venture magazine has a fine profile of Thane Hurlburt and ECB's biogas plans for the Lethbridge area.
• Alberta Oil  just recently chronicled Edmonton's relationship with Enerkem and their plan to turn waste into energy.

You can find the CCEMC press release here.

A tongue-in-cheek cover from The Economist, which has provided U.S. President Barack Obama with his latest epithet: Chastiser-in-Chief.

Leave it to a columnist who writes primarily about media to ask what nobody else will. NY Times writer David Carr argued this week that the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is unique less because of the size of the spill itself, so much as how news of the event has been transmitted.

This is the first spill that has been covered in real time, with streaming high-definition video on desktops and televisions everywhere, network anchors racking up miles flying back and forth, and throbbing info-graphics that track the mess.

The barrage of information has been a headache for U.S. President Barack Obama and BP alike, both of whom are eager to offer assurances that all is well in Louisiana. Carr writes that since the Deepwater Horizon rig went down on April 20, a "hybrid informational apparatus" has developed, where mixed messages about the exact size and impact of the spill prevail.

Meanwhile, efforts to staunch the flow of oil from the ocean floor have met with limited success. And the value of BP stock has been clobbered by anxious investors. Those two factors provoked an unusual (and perhaps unprecedented) response from BP, Carr says. At the same time that the company's "top-kill" approach to stem the spill appeared to have failed, information about the effort was suddenly deemed stock-market sensitive. That meant updates about the spill were governed by disclosure rules of the NY and London stock exchanges.

The development, as well as reports that oil-soaked birds were being hidden from view under the watch of National Guard troops, prompted Carr to wonder: "Should the volatility of a company’s stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?"

Ending fossil fuel subsidies will encourage energy efficiency and help trigger a switch to less greenhouse-gas intensive fuels, the International Energy Agency says.

In its 2010 World Energy Outlook due out later this year, the Paris-based organization says fossil fuel consumption subsidies jumped from the equivalent of $342 billion (U.S. dollars) in 2007 to $557 billion in 2008. Iran had the largest subsidies in 2008 at $101 billion. According to the IEA, phasing out subsidies, which reduce the price of fossil fuels below levels that would prevail in undistorted markets, between 2011 and 2020 would:

• Cut primary global energy demand by 5.8% by 2020. This is equivalent to the current energy consumption of Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand combined.

• Cut global oil demand by 6.5 mb/d in 2020, predominately in transport sector. This is around one third of current US oil demand.

• Reduce CO2 emissions by 6.9% by 2020 – or 2.4 GT of CO2. This is equivalent to the current emissions of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK combined.

From the IEA website:

Below is the letter submitted by Kinder Morgan Canada to the National Energy Board questioning the viability of Enbridge Inc.'s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project.

Black gold can still be found in Alberta's resource basin. Barely four per cent of the province's crude bitumen reserves have been tapped since commercial oil sands production started in 1967, according to the Energy Resources Conservation Board.

In an overview of Alberta's energy reserves for 2009, the industry watchdog pegs remaining established reserves of crude bitumen at 169 billion barrels. Bitumen production topped 300 million barrels last year from the Fort McMurray mining district. That compares with 242 million barrels from in situ operations in places like Cold Lake and Bonnyville. Combined, that's the equivalent of 1.49 million barrels per day.

The ERCB forecasts that production of raw bitumen will reach 3.2 million barrels daily by 2019. Significantly, production from in situ operations will surpass the output of mega-mines by 2015, the ERCB says.

On the conventional crude oil front, established reserves top out at 1.4 billion barrels, according to the ERCB. Conventional production totaled 168 million barrels - or 461,000 barrels daily - in 2009. The number of producing oil wells decreased by 41 per cent to 1,046 in 2009. Drilling activity is expected to pick up as crude oil prices rise. Producing wells will reach 1,500 this year and 1,700 in 2011, before leveling off at 2,000 by 2013.

Kinder Morgan Canada is questioning the commercial viability of Enbridge Inc.'s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline project.

In a letter to the National Energy Board, KMC says the Gateway filing - submitted on May 27 - is not supported by the requisite open season process. That is, the proposed pipeline, which would deliver bitumen from Edmonton to a supertanker port at Kitimat, B.C., has failed to attract any level of binding, commercial support in the form of firm shipping commitments, KMC says.

"Without at least some real and substantial evidence of need and necessity, the application appears to be intended to provide the applicant [with] some type of competitive advantage so that it may pursue commercial support that it has not been able to achieve to date," the letter says.

Unnamed parties have put up $100 million thus far to see the Gateway proposal through the regulatory process. The financial commitment is good for up to 50 per cent capacity on the 1,172-kilometer route, which will also serve as a channel for importing condensate. "This, in itself, is a substantial demonstration of market support and commercial viability," says Enbridge's regulatory filing.

KMC operates the decades-old Trans Mountain Pipeline System, which runs from Edmonton to Vancouver and satisfies demand for oil in the B.C. lower mainland plus in northwestern U.S. markets. The firm has also flirted with a rival route of its own to Kitimat in the form of a 400,000-barrels-daily branch line from the existing network.

KMC urges the national regulator to weigh the potential commercial and environmental effects of the $5.5 billion Gateway scheme against the TMX North expansion. "It seems reasonable ... that an assessment of the sustainability of a new greenfield project requires a thorough assessment of an alternative that may obviate the need for the new facilities."