Murray Nunns plays guitar and piano. He rides a mountain bike up to 125 kilometers a week. Music and sports imagery help him describe work at the top of Alberta energy firms, like his job as chief operating officer of highly entrepreneurial Penn West Energy.

Prima donna is the least accurate portrayal. Nunns compares a senior business role in a 1,000-employee company to four-part harmony or squad captain. “From my perspective you can have a million ideas but nothing happens without the team,” he says. “I’m just the ring leader on the surface in terms of making growth happen. We’ve got top-end people. I throw the lawn dart down the grass, give them something to aim at, and cut them loose. They’re the ones who turn a sense of direction into something real.”

His attitude is realism and not false modesty, confirm other peers of the business realm like TransCanada Corp. general counsel Sean McMaster and Cenovus Energy Inc. chief financial officer Ivor Ruste. Each emphasizes that they lean on big clans of specialists to help them make sense of complicated issues in their firms’ executive suites – where group work on understanding and planning prevails rather than snap decisions, they add.

Self-confidence is abundant in executive suites. It has to be among industrialists – as opposed, for instance, to skittish stock traders whose commodity is fast money. Corporate decisions are based on production of tangible commodities and services with years- or decades-long effects on livelihoods, the wealth of communities, supplies of essentials, safety, and the natural environment.

But self-confidence is not the same as blustering swagger. Experience and ability to learn from it temper the energy executive personality. The prevailing character is a blend of professional reserve, advanced education, little interest in personal publicity, humble roots in small centers or rural communities or big families, long climbs up the employment ladder, a knack for rubbing shoulders with all ranks, a sense of humor and wide interests that often include a penchant for team sports. When encountered for the first time, the type routinely surprises outsiders steeped in cartoon stereotypes of imperious tycoons.

A business counterpart to natural selection takes place in western Canadian industry. The late Bill Hopper observed, as chief executive of the former Petro-Canada during 1980s oil and gas price crashes, that the notoriously boom-and-bust energy cycle takes the starch out of the stiffest stuffed shirt as surely as a stint at roughneck labor on an oil rig. There is no stigma attached to a checkered career with a hard landing or two spun off by rapidly changing fortunes among employers.

After two severe economic contractions and numerous energy policy upheavals in less than 30 years, or well within the normal time span of careers, the current generation of senior Alberta oil leaders is a wary crew. “It’s something all of us felt personally and makes us careful in our decision-making,” says Ruste. “We have to make sure we have the resilience to weather the storms.”

Photography by Bryce Krynski

When Albertans fought federal energy taxes, price management, export barriers and their Liberal party architects in the 1970s and ’80s, the national political and academic elites invented the theory of western alienation. It was easier to sidestep the resistance as deranged than to deal with a complicated case rooted in constitutional resource ownership and jurisdictional rights.

The pattern is repeating itself. Nowadays the theory is “the curse of oil.” It pops up from Alberta university campuses, where bull sessions about regime change after 39 years of Conservative provincial government are more popular than political grunt work on making it happen, to the corridors of power in the United States.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton embraced the theory when it came up during a question period after she addressed an autumn meeting of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. In California, the caricature of a mainstay energy supplier since the 1960s as a lower economic and political order may soothe any pangs of conscience that revenue-starved state authorities might feel over preparing to inflict financial penalties on Alberta in the green guise of a planned low-carbon fuel standard.

“It is fair to say that there is a so-called oil curse,” agreed the former American First Lady. “Because when countries discover oil, start marketing that oil – if they’re not smart, if they’re not visionary – very often it becomes a small elite that benefits from it. The benefits are not broadly shared and the progress of democracy and freedom is halted. And the necessity to deliver services for people in order to maintain support for democracy is unfortunately diminished.”

Alberta has ammunition to shoot down the cartoon image. Impeccably professional economic reports by the Canadian Energy Research Institute document the wide distribution of oil sands project benefits. A pioneer foray into new ways of mining Statistics Canada’s national economic accounts, sponsored by the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, has generated a portrait of the oilfield support sector as a bigger contributor than the auto, forest products or mining industries.

Alberta professional, occupational and trade associations are studded with personal examples of rises to commanding heights on open industry ladders, like Leroy Field. In a half-century oilfield career that he recalls as a blend of adventure travel and romance, he went from small-town rig laborer to drilling chief of a corporate giant.

Michael Binnion, president of Questerre Energy Corp., sets an example of tackling hard but rewarding chores that await the industry’s bolder spirits. To open up Canada’s new eastern shale gas frontier, he enters the lions’ dens of Ontario campuses and Quebec environmental reviews.

“As an industry we’re finding that it’s going to become more and more important to be better at dealing with the public,” Binnion says. All the studies and stellar personal examples can only correct the caricature of a cursed oil society if representatives who know better step outside the industry’s sheltered inner circles to make converts by breathing life into its benefits.

Oil companies are not alone in having reputation problems. Their green critics have similar headaches, especially when allowance is made for differences in emphasis on advocacy and levels of aggressiveness. Despite a decade of vigorous eco-publicity, the biggest national energy-environment-economy poll done to date shows that no environmental organizations have status as go-to sources for oil sands information, for instance. A majority of Canadians and Albertans alike look to others, show the results of the Leger Marketing survey.

The poll explores conditions on battle lines that have been forming since the mid-2000 World Petroleum Congress (WPC) in Calgary. At the time, the Kyoto treaty on carbon emissions cuts was three years old. The then-Liberal government in Ottawa was under fire for being slow to fulfill international commitments.

Alberta’s role as the top Canadian source of greenhouse gases and the policy’s main target was clear. Oil sands development was accelerating and stood out as the world’s biggest new supply source outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The WPC attracted representatives of international environmental organizations from as far away as Washington, D.C. Among the critics, the “dirty oil” image of the province was fully articulated. A logo of a green counter-WPC group showed a giant iron dragon looming fiercely over the planet, with colossal talons piercing northern Alberta and a sea of blood-like black goo gushing out to darken the blue and green globe.

Since 2000, the green counterculture has become mainstream by moving from the margins to high spots on mass media, marketing and public education agendas. Much credit for the change belongs to reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and especially to Hollywood hit movies that rendered the science into epic duels of good and evil with planetary disaster poised to strike if the bad guys win.

But in Canada the cartoon versions of complicated environmental issues are being challenged by an emerging industry counterculture. It shows signs of learning from a WPC public relations disaster. In 2000, memories of unruly street demonstrations at a Seattle meeting of the then-G7 industrialized countries’ heads of state were fresh. Petroleum congress organizers let nervous civic authorities barricade their events against small platoons of protesters behind steel fences and squads of police clad in black riot gear, and thereby fell for one of the oldest tricks in the radical politics book: Goad the establishment into a sinister show of force.

The new poll’s results are all over the opinion map. It was done during this year’s dark time of pipeline and offshore drilling spills, but also after the Canadian industry broke out of its siege mentality to start a reputation recovery campaign. The survey suggests no single faction has seized all the moral high ground in energy-environment-economy debates.

Canadians still see livelihoods in fossil fuels. They have not all lost faith in industrial technology and talent. The court of public opinion is open, seeking accurate information and showing a willingness to hear intelligent ideas about resolving energy and environment conflicts.

A line has been drawn between industry and the arts since Adam Smith invented economics. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the banker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” wrote the Scottish scholar in his 1776 classic, The Wealth of Nations.

The new “tight oil” fits Smith’s mold. At Arcan Resources Ltd., senior engineer Paul Pedersen reports getting five or six wells for the cost of two – and that they would stay profitable even if oil prices were cut in half – by using advanced methods of cracking open deep deposits in dense rock with horizontal drilling and multiple fracturing injections of fluids under high pressure.

But to visit a tight oil site is to discover a soul in the machinery. It becomes obvious that the widest possible meaning must be given to Smith’s observation about self-interest in order to make economics an accurate depiction of industry.

Painters, sculptors and composers have no monopoly on pouring heart into their results. “It’s fun. It’s rewarding. I love it,” Pedersen says when he talks about his craft. As an engineer with duties from aiming horizontal wells to choosing fracturing services, he is a conductor of a technology symphony. Wielding his baton for a homegrown energy “junior” – the industry counterpart to an independent film or music studio – makes the role all the more satisfying.

“I’m not just stuck in some little niche. In a bigger company you can end up making some bit part – the threads on the spokes,” says Pedersen, an avid cyclist. “You never get to work on the wheel or the bike, or take it out on the road.”

Out where the technology concerts are played – on muddy stages carved out of thick woods with bears, wolves, cougars, coyotes, birds and sometimes standing-room-only crowds of insects as the only audiences – more than money likewise keeps the players coming back for more. Fossil fuel development is a way of life that gets into a family’s blood, says Ethan Nelson, a 20-year-old pumper on a Trican Well Service Ltd. fracturing truck.

How has he put up with two years of 15-day roving shifts of long drives, early bedtimes, pre-dawn work starts and bursts of labor in harsh northern weather – all at an age commonly associated with longing for bright lights and excitement? The renowned good pay helps. But he is also inspired by a feeling of belonging to a brotherhood. “I’ve always been around the oilfields. My whole family always has been. My dad has his own contracting company as a drilling completions manager,” says Nelson.

“I love it. People call me crazy. But I don’t hate going to work in the morning. Everybody knows where to stand, how to move, when to stay put. Somebody’s always watching out for the new guys. We watch each other’s backs. It’s just like a huge family.”

The generation that grew up in the 1980s and ’90s had a saying that deserves to be revived for the environmental 21st century: Get real. That used to be the ordinary youthful retort to parental nagging which was seen as straying towards idealistic fantasies about perfect behavior. The standard variation was to “get a life.”

The shoe is on the other foot when it comes to relations between the current green generation and the wage-earners, managers, investors, civil servants and politicians held responsible for satisfying public needs. Reality checks are in order as part of replies to demands for a clean new age – right now – of pristine air, land and water. It takes time and work to recognize, understand and fix drawbacks to the contemporary lifestyle of mass production, personal mobility, instant communications, and labor-saving devices and creature comforts for all as must-haves on top of the ancient mainstays of food, clothing and shelter.

No one performs reality checks better than green ethical investment houses like Boston-based CERES, short for the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and the oldest and biggest representative of this emerging tribe. Alberta’s oil sands are maligned, for instance, because Fort McMurray mega-mines use two to 4.5 barrels of water per barrel of production and the ratio still approaches one-to-one at more efficient underground extraction sites. But consider a CERES case history of a household-name garment manufacturer in its network. Levi Strauss & Co. is in the same boat as Alberta bitumen operators: learning to account for its interference with nature and improve its performance, while asking critics and markets to be patient.

“One pair of Levi’s jeans requires a staggering 924 U.S. gallons of water [22 barrels, or 3,498 liters] – from growing the cotton, to manufacturing, to customer care and disposal,” CERES reports. “Cotton cultivation demands roughly half of this water, prompting Levi to offer grants to farmers practicing sustainable cotton cultivation. Levi Strauss has also put in place conservation measures at its most water-intensive distribution center in Nevada that will nearly halve water use at the facility by 2012, increasing business efficiency and reducing costs at the same time.”

Producers of the energy that runs the hardware of green warriors – computers, the Internet and smartphones – are also no slouches at water use. As the top supplier in the United States the American Electric Power Co., a CERES member, every day uses 10.5 billion U.S. gallons – 250 million barrels, or 39.8 billion liters – of water to generate 38,000 megawatts. A task force is scouring the grid for conservation opportunities.

Practical environmentalists are only starting to work on realistic plans for conquering other Everests of the energy landscape, such as the 246 million motor vehicles in the U.S. and 21 million in Canada. Like oil firms that invest in “sustainability” staff and technology, green reformers face a tall order. Fashionable feelings, fanned by message movies and ads, have to be channeled into constructive activity that makes a difference.

Gordon Jaremko

Abrasive ore wears enough steel off mine hardware to make a truck every day. Waste tailings refuse to settle out of disposal ponds for decades. Nothing is easy about the oil sands. Strengthening their economic foundations by building the proposed Asian export route is no exception to the rule.

After pausing for the global financial- and energy-price contraction of 2008-09, growth is back on the oil sands agenda. But is it prudent to keep on plowing vast investment and manpower into production just for the United States, where it has become a popular article of faith – endorsed by President Barack Obama – that oil imports must be cut?

In command of the senior ownership partner in the biggest plant, Syncrude Canada, Canadian Oil Sands Trust president Marcel Coutu highlights the industry dilemma. He calls diversifying markets “a great idea.” At a spring investment forum held by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), he outlined Syncrude plans that financial analysts predict will cost up to $20 billion. The program includes a new satellite mine to pump out raw bitumen, which is the item that he predicts will be the most sought-after if Alberta gains an export route to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India.

“We would support a pipeline to the West Coast,” Coutu says. But that support is only moral, he adds. Like all other bitumen-belt producers, his firm refuses to take the risk of buying long shipping contracts that rival oil Orient express projects sponsored by Enbridge Inc. and Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. need for financing construction and that both have been unable to sell. “We don’t want to spend our shareholders’ money on that,” Coutu says.

Economic inertia is no less of an obstacle against the proposed Pacific pipeline and tanker port than opposition by aboriginal and environmental groups. They are countered by unanimous political support that the British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan energy ministers expressed during the investment forum. The economic trouble is that no shortage of delivery service is at hand to make bitumen developers buy into an Asia connection. There will be surplus export capacity into the U.S. until 2022 because 1.8 million barrels per day in new facilities have been freshly built or approved, CAPP predicts.

To succeed, the Asian market scheme has to fit the demanding oil sands mold of requiring bold leadership and endurance. Philadelphia magnate J. Howard Pew built the first plant, a 1967 ancestor to Suncor Energy Inc.’s greatly expanded modern complex, only by wearing down investor and industry resistance. Syncrude only completed the second plant in 1978 because the Alberta, federal and Ontario governments fought off political opposition to participate as part-owners and lenders. Current projects ride on a hotly disputed, favorable royalty regime crafted by epic 1990s negotiations.

Enbridge’s West Coast pipeline construction application to the National Energy Board is an open invitation. Will leaders able to take Alberta industry to the next level as a global supplier please step forward.

Discard the old cartoon image of the oil and gas industry as a monolith of might. An annual performance survey of the top 100 Canadian publicly traded producers generates a paint-by-numbers portrait of diversity – and, for the 2008-09 period of global financial and energy price contraction, vulnerability.

Ranked by revenues, the top Alberta-based fossil fuel company is 2,675 times bigger than the “junior” firm on the bottom rung of the industry ladder. In oil production, the number one operation is 455,000 times larger than the smallest. The top natural gas performance leads the back of the pack by a margin of 2,840 to one.

As in other branches of Canadian livelihoods from banking to vehicle manufacturing, energy resources wealth is concentrated in a clutch of senior enterprises.
The 10 leading oil developers own 77 per cent of production. Despite a widespread image of natural gas as a more open and democratic field, the distribution of supplies differs little from the concentration of oil in a handful of senior operations. The 10 biggest gas producers have 72 per cent of production.

Translated into money, energy wealth is even more concentrated than the resources and production. The economic slump amplified the uneven distribution of financial returns. In 2009, the 10 most profitable oil and gas producers had $9.8 billion or 88 per cent of the sector’s total $11.2 billion in net income.

As in other Canadian economic fields, the international recession had devastating effects on the energy industry’s financial performance. When year-end 2009 statements trickled out to investors over the winter and spring annual reporting season, 62 of Canada’s top 100 oil and gas companies showed red ink on their bottom lines. Net losses added up to $2.9 billion.

Measured as a collective enterprise, by subtracting all the negative scores from the positive total, the Alberta fossil fuel industry suffered a steep drop and a hard landing last year. Overall net income plummeted by 78 per cent to $8 billion in 2009 from $36 billion in ’08.

Last year’s pinch was felt at the top of the industry ladder. Although that $9.8 billion in 2009 net income scored by the top 10 earners was nothing to sneeze at, it was 68 per cent below their big league score of $30.3 billion for the previous year.

Also as in other economic sectors, wholly owned subsidiaries of international companies play strong roles in Canadian energy. Year-end production disclosures by the dozen American, Dutch, British, French and Norwegian firms with substantial operations from Alberta’s bitumen belt to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland add up to about one-fifth of Canadian oil and gas output.

But the energy industry remains the apple of economic patriots’ eyes compared to wholly foreign-owned mainstays of Central Canada such as auto manufacturing. International oil and gas firms are on growth courses across Canada. But so are Alberta firms that followed the 2009 slump’s cues to toughen up organizations and improve technology.

Every spring, industry and government notables gather in downtown Calgary for a display of environmental conscience that attracts zero publicity. There are no red carpets, glamorous stars or paparazzi at the Stewardship Awards, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The event celebrates group labor, more often by oilfield grunts than executives, on measurable contributions to keeping fossil fuels respectable.

Among this year’s 21 nominees and winners, ARC Resources Ltd.’s field hands, for instance, proposed 40 “eco-efficiency” ideas, obtained management approval for 23 of them and completed a first batch of six projects that to date pared 3,200 tonnes off the firm’s annual carbon emissions. BP Canada Energy Co.’s engineers cut land use, water consumption and carbon emissions by using new drilling methods, storage techniques and solar power for the Noel
gas project in northern British Columbia.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.’s Horizon Project staff prevented any bird flocks from landing on oil sands tailings ponds with an advanced deterrent system that evokes Star Wars images. Radar, sonar and lasers guide precision use of devices for warning migrating waterfowl to stay in the air such as propane cannons and air horns.

Elsewhere in the oil sands, Cenovus Energy Inc. cut annual carbon emissions by 46,300 tonnes and saved 397 million cubic feet of natural gas with efficiency adjustments. ConocoPhillips Canada, Total E&P Canada Ltd., Nexen Inc., Statoil Canada Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc. and Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Inc. started a long-range bitumen belt cleanup scheme titled Aggressive Reclamation by planting 180,000 tree seedlings in the Fort McMurray region.

Devon Energy Canada Corp. has cut widths of access roads to forest production sites by up to 50 per cent, and paves them with reusable wood mulch that supports vehicles weighing more than 45,000 kilograms. In northern B.C., EnCana Corp. prevented 39,800 tonnes of carbon emissions and conserved 741 million cubic feet of natural gas in 2009 alone with a special drilling technique that cuts waste flaring and converts diesel motors to run partly on the cleaner fossil fuel from the new wells.

Increasing attention is paid to the human as well as the natural environment, although results of community relations efforts such as good will and time saved in obtaining regulatory approvals are less easy to count than the hard numbers generated by engineering improvements. In northern B.C.’s shale-gas drilling hot spot, 11 companies have tempered traditionally secretive industry rivalry, such as competitive mineral rights bidding and production growth scheming, with co-operation to form the Horn River Basin Producers Group.

The members, a who’s-who of Alberta-based firms led by Apache Canada Ltd., reveal enough to each other for their coalition to collaborate on communicating and adapting development plans to regional aboriginal, worker, business and environmental interests.

Such efforts are more like low-budget independent films than Hollywood blockbusters. But decent local accomplishments are the reasons international blasts of hostile green publicity fail to shame or embarrass anyone into quitting fossil fuel jobs.

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Watch for the fog to now rapidly lift off Canada’s Arctic pipeline plan compared to its 66-month regulatory ordeal to date. There is a precedent for the National Energy Board to clear up the haze of 176 recommendations for adapting northern society to a new industrial age that the socio-economic and environmental joint review panel tacked onto the Mackenzie Gas Project last winter.

In April 1989, a dress rehearsal was held in Ottawa and Inuvik for this month’s final board hearings on the $16-billion production and pipeline scheme. The Mackenzie group – then known as the Delta Project team of Imperial Oil Ltd., Shell Canada Ltd. and ConocoPhillips Canada’s ancestor, Gulf Canada Resources Ltd. – filed an export application and swiftly obtained the key policy ruling for Arctic gas development in an August 1989 decision.

At the time, energy deregulation and free trade with the United States were in early trial stages. The case asked: did the 1985 federal-provincial Western Accord truly set aside an 80-year heritage of holding gas off international markets to protect inventories for future Canadian needs?

Yes, said the board. Under the then-new “market-based procedure” of monitoring supplies, Canadian consumers could only demand interference with exports if they proved they were denied gas on equal terms with American buyers.

Arctic reserves are too big and costly to tap for only the home market, and exports are a must for northern development, the board added. The 1980s versions of the Northwest Territories’ tangled aboriginal politics as well as health, education and welfare needs were referred to higher government authorities, as beyond the power of the specialized energy court to resolve.

After much study, the Delta group postponed a production and delivery project. The cost estimate for the pipeline to Alberta alone was $4.9 billion ($7.4 billion in today’s money, little different from the current construction forecast).

In 1989 and well into the 1990s, there was a nastier gas glut than now. Prices stagnated in a hard-times range of $1 per thousand cubic feet. An industry standing joke called the era “the bubble that stretched into a sausage.”

A physical obstacle prolonged the ’90s Canadian glut after U.S. markets revived. If a northern pipeline was built to Alberta, there was no way to ship Arctic gas the rest of the way to buyers. The old grid was full. It took a decade of multibillion-dollar pipeline additions to end the bottleneck.

Today the long-range outlook is brighter. Depletion of old conventional wells, possibly faster than supplies can be added by high-technology shale drilling, is leaving pipeline vacancies. Greenhouse gas regulation only has to cause modest fuel switching to ignite a market rebound, energy board research says. The one billion tonnes of high-emissions coal that U.S. power plants burn every year is equivalent to 31 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 20 per cent more than all North American use of the cleanest fossil fuel. The emerging big picture of environmental energy makes Arctic development look like a prospect again.

Gordon Jaremko

When Premier Ed Stelmach and Energy Minister Ron Liepert last week unveiled results of their "competitiveness review,” they steered Alberta onto a course advocated by markets-rule purists like University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz.

"I never liked 'fair share' as a concept - I don't know what it means," Mintz told an event staged in February by the U of C School of Public Policy for blue-chip business chieftains and the media to unveil a paper that called for an end to treatment of the oil and gas industry as a "cash cow."

The economist, with enthusiastic support from big-business interests like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), insisted "you need to give the industry a competitive rate of return."

Fair share ‑ the slogan that described the hotly contested New Royalty Framework enacted in 2007 ‑ faded into history as Stelmach and Liepert made their announcements.

The official vocabulary is now all about investment and job creation, supported by a substantial lowering of the government's revenue-sharing sights.

Besides well publicized royalty reductions, the government made permanent a five-per-cent rate for the first year of production by all wells that was introduced last year as a temporary counter to slumping prices and field activity.

Stelmach and company also gave industry until May 31 to present arguments in favor of extending the period of the five-per-cent rate for as long as it takes to recover extra costs of deep, complex horizontal wells and "frac" injections required for the new generation of shale gas production.

Much of the competitiveness review focused on changing a pattern which alarmed a government that has relied for more than 10 years on natural gas to be its biggest revenue source. Canada's share in new unconventional shale drilling across North America has to date skipped Alberta and gone into northern British Columbia. But it's not for want of supply.

"Geological estimates show Alberta as possessing a shale gas resource in place ‑ 1,000 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) ‑ that is comparable to that of B.C.," the competitiveness review report says.

"Combined with its remaining conventional natural gas resources of 82 Tcf, coal-bed methane resources of 500 Tcf and tight-gas resources of 400 Tcf, Alberta is certainly well positioned with good long-term prospects," the review observes. "However, realization of this opportunity is not guaranteed. Deliberate action will be required on a variety of fronts."

The review's second recommendation is to "Develop programs if necessary to support strategic initiatives focused on specific resources or technology." Target areas proposed for special action include shale gas and deep drilling.

At the government's current conservative price outlook total royalty reductions for conventional oil as well as all gas types are forecast to rise gradually to be worth an annual $785 million to the industry as of the province's 2012-13 fiscal year commencing April 1.

The projected revenue gain is 28 per cent less than forecast by the partially abandoned 2009 royalty hikes, but still $2.1 billion more than the province's take would have been under the pre-reform old regime.

About $1.7 billion of the anticipated gain comes from increased net-profit royalties on growing oil sands production that was excluded from the competitiveness review.

But the government price forecast, while calling for oil's annual average to reach US$89.50 per barrel in 2012-13, officially sees gas languishing at CDN$5.50 per thousand cubic feet.

Saying prices and production levels are impossible to forecast with any strong confidence, the government refused to estimate the value of the reduced gas royalty rate if markets recover. Another notable gap is the absence of any attempt, at least publicly, to estimate the value of the five-per-cent initial royalty to shale projects; they follow a pattern of very high early production followed by a long, slow tapering off.

The industry is too polite to claim victory and make politicians eat crow publicly. But at the downtown Calgary announcement ceremony, little doubt was left that the business community felt considerable gains had been made.

"It had to be done. It's positive. It's an improvement," said Dave Yager, chairman of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada and an ally of the emerging threat from the political right to the ruling Tories, Wildrose Alliance Party leader Danielle Smith.

"They did what they promised ‑ they engaged with the industry," said Don Herring, president of the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, who also predicted that field activity will likely start showing fresh signs of life by this fall.

In private industry briefings on the adjustments "everybody expressed a view that the process has gone a long way towards establishing a new level of understanding, dialogue and a way of keeping it going," said Gary Leach, executive director of the Small Explorers and Producers Association of Canada.

"The government has made ‑ both in substance and in tone ‑ a significant change," said David Collyer, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

"These changes will help us use innovation to unlock our energy resources, create opportunities and jobs . . . and strengthen Alberta's economic recovery," predicted Stelmach.

It was left to his energy minister to acknowledge that the 2009 royalty hikes backfired because they were adopted on the eve of the global economic and energy contraction. "We can't pretend that oil and gas investment levels haven't eroded or that we don't have a responsibility to current and future generations of Albertans to address that,” Liepert said.

In the fashionable theory of innovation, an embarrassment of riches stunts the growth of Canada, and especially Alberta. Abundant natural resources are said to stifle creativity. Energy price drops provoke disparaging comparisons to countries with other livelihoods and notably, nowadays, information and communications technology (ICT).

A commentary by the Canada West Foundation recites the view in vogue under the title The Albatross: Natural Resources and Western Canada’s Economic Future. “The traditional emphasis on natural resources perpetuates our overreliance on the bottom end of the economic value chain. Pulling stuff out of the ground, whacking down trees and growing grain all contribute to the western Canadian economy, but they also rely on highly volatile commodity markets and do not capture the value that can be added to them down the line.”

Similar thinking inspires a 268-page report – titled Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short – by the Ottawa-based Council of Canadian Academies. The staples thesis, a university economics mainstay for 80 years, explains why. Canada is held back by a colonial past of importing technology to export resources, which breeds exposure to global market risks and a timid business culture. Breaking old habits is the formula for catching up with higher productivity in ICT-rich countries, notably the United States.

The theoretical critiques ignore realities of ICT use and 21st-century resource development.

In the U.S., digital tools are cornerstones of industries that look hugely productive on statistical charts of revenues per employee: health care, financial and insurance services. Texas billionaire Ross Perot, an ICT pioneer whose feats included a credible run as an independent presidential candidate against the first George Bush in 1992, made his fortune as a health-care computer contractor. Before the bubble burst in 2008, the financial sector’s share of U.S. gross domestic product doubled to eight per cent, or more than $1 trillion.

But big ICT users are vulnerable to market risks. Perot is also famous as the biggest individual loser ever on the New York Stock Exchange because the value of his shares in his computer firm fell $450 million on one bad 1974 day. The U.S. financial sector is forecast to lose at least $100 billion a year and 700,000 jobs in the current market spasms.

Economists are starting to question whether the natural resource sector deserves its dinosaur image. “Innovative firms are found across all industries,” says a research paper in the winter edition of Statistics Canada’s Canadian Productivity Review. The study proposes including resource exploration in national ledgers of wealth generation. “An expanded definition of innovative activity is necessary to analyze fully the role of scientific knowledge creation in advancing economic growth.”

Fashionable opinion needs to take Statistics Canada’s cue and quit ICT worship. To open minds, a wide streak of creativity is obvious in the energy industry. It lives and grows by mastering – partly with ICT – adversities from gyrating prices and costs to increasingly difficult resource deposits and regulation.

Gordon Jaremko

What is it about thinly populated places like Saskatchewan? The royal jelly that feeds great careers is abundant where making a living is notoriously hard. Five of six recipients of Alberta Oil’s first annual C-Suite Stars awards [p. 29] are from the Prairies or small centers.

Saskatchewan roots have always been common in the drivers of Canada’s economic locomotive, from entrepreneurs to regulatory agency chiefs. Among energy industry pillars with Prairie pedigrees are Daryl (Doc) Seaman, Ken Vollman, Gerald Maier, Doug Baldwin, Bob Peterson, J.R. (Bud) McCaig, Bill Mooney, Murray Edwards, Hank Swartout and Charlie Fischer.

Bonnie DuPont bumped into the shared heritage all along her route from a Swift Current farm to Enbridge Inc.’s executive floor and a breakthrough term as the first woman president of the Calgary Petroleum Club. “I was struck by the number of people in senior positions who come from small towns, the Prairies and farms.”

She has a theory. “After you left the farm, nothing that you did was as hard as farm work. Going to school was easy by comparison. Working in an organization wasn’t like slogging away out in the fields and barns.”

Rural and small-town upbringings on farming or industrial frontiers forge character – the right “values,” DuPont says. “In part it’s the work ethic, the feeling that you always have to give an honest day’s work. It’s just required in farming. Do anything less and you’ll have nothing to harvest.”

She expands on her theme as a role-model speaker at events such as a Women of Influence luncheon sponsored by Deloitte. “Farm life means quite literally reaping what you sow and it means not always having complete control of the situation. It means continuous preparation, but it also means the tremendous satisfaction of seeing the direct results of your labor, the sense of community that comes from neighbors helping each other,” DuPont says. “It was on the farm that I learned about the bedrock values that underpin a successful life: integrity, personal accountability, resiliency, involvement in the community and productivity.”

Instincts formed in the country transfer well into urban industry. DuPont describes strong firms as consciously collective successes where employees know how their livelihoods intersect. “High performance is not a solo act.” Rejecting popular caricatures of industrial and business leaders as prima donnas puts her in good company. Qualifications for rising to the top include an ability to set aside a big ego and work in groups as the only way to have enough expertise for tasks that simultaneously raise issues in multiple fields from geology to finance and law. All of the Alberta Oil C-Suite Stars executives emphasize they are team members, not stars.

“This is not a mechanistic model. This is an organic system. In fact, it sounds a little bit like a farm,” DuPont says. “On the farm, you don’t succeed in isolation. Your fate is tied to the fortunes of your family and friends, the health of your livestock and fields, the wisdom of your parents and grandparents.”