In January, Alberta Oil published its annual C-Suite Awards issue. In this edition,  seven energy executives representing some of the best and brightest minds in the sector were profiled. (You can read all of the profiles here.)

Thursday night in Calgary, the magazine held it's annual C-Suite Awards gala with all the award recipients in attendance. What I found noteworthy in all the acceptance speeches was that every single recipient stressed how critical teamwork has been to their success.

While it's always a good idea to be gracious in victory, I don't think the comments were cases of false modesty. No senior manager – no matter how good they are at their job – can do it alone. It takes a great team to get great results. And based on what I heard from all the 2012 Alberta Oil C-Suiters, it's clear they are keenly aware of this fact. I guess that's why they've risen to the top of their respective professions.

But the teamwork comments weren't the only noteworthy things said by this year's C-Suite Award winners. Below are a few of the more notable quotes from the gala.

Steve Snyder (TransAlta) – CMA's Chief Executive Officer of the Year

In accepting his award, Snyder, who retired as TransAlta's CEO in January, said that events like the C-Suite Awards gala were an invaluable way to acknowledge the impact the energy industry – and the people who work in it – have on today's society.

We need to do more to celebrate this sector. So I'm very proud to stand up and celebrate the energy sector and the contribution it makes.

Robert Spitzer (Apache Canada Ltd.) – Top Government and Community Relations Executive

As chairperson of the Horn River Producers Group, Spitzer noted that consulting early and often with the people who live in northeastern British Columbia's Horn River area, and are affected by shale gas exploration, was vital in gaining local buy-in for the group's development plans.

If that's not done, you would end up with a lot of people not feeling too good. So there are two guiding principles to this – treat people the way you'd want to be treated and keep it simple. If you do that, it will all work out in the end.

Art MacNichol (Progress Energy Resources Corp.) – Top Chief Financial Officer

Natural gas producers have to be depressed as they watch prices for the cleanest burning fossil fuel sink below the US$3 mark. But MacNichol says there is light at the end of this very dark tunnel. And that light is coming from the likes of Progress Energy and other companies who are currently pursuing projects to export liquefied natural gas from British Columbia's West Coast to lucrative markets overseas.

This will unshackle B.C. gas from North American pricing. It's a very challenging period for those of us producing natural gas. But the future is very bright.

Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) has approved an export license for B.C. LNG Export Co-operative LLC to ship up to 1.8 million tonnes of the super-cooled gas per year for 20 years from British Columbia's West Coast at Kitimat. The project, a 50 per cent partnership between Houston-based LNG Partners and the Haisla, joins the Kitimat LNG venture sponsored by Apache Canada Ltd. as the second export scheme to win approval from the federal regulator in the last six months.

At least 13 parties have signed on to become members of the shipping collective, which plans to move its first tanker of LNG by 2014. No sales and purchase agreements have been signed with potential customers, although the co-op counts prospective buyers among its members. A final investment decision is expected on the first barge-based liquefaction train, estimated to cost $400 million, by April 15, Nathan VanderKlippe and Carrie Tait report at the Globe.

Market watchers are also expecting a decision on the much larger Kitimat LNG venture this quarter. That project would ship five million tonnes of LNG annually, or 700 million cubic feet per day, in its first phase to overseas markets. By 2018, plans call for construction of a facility big enough to pump out 10 million tonnes of the stuff each year, or a whopping 1.4 billion cubic feet per day.

Both projects are supported by growing supply projections from B.C.'s Montney and Horn River gas plays, as well as the promise of diversified markets at a time when North American natural gas, beset by surging supplies and mild weather, is trading at bargain basement discounts. In approving the export co-op, the NEB "recognizes that the forecast annual LNG demand growth in Asia provides a new opportunity for Canadian producers to diversify their natural gas export markets."

In addition, the board said the co-op would "allow smaller natural gas producers and marketers to participate in a market that otherwise would have been cost prohibitive due to the high, front-loaded costs associated with developing a liquefaction project."

Those costs could escalate quickly. The export co-op is smaller than its Apache-sponsored rival, and proponents believe they can keep a lid on inflation by building the initial train remotely on barges. Both projects will require specialized steel and engineering, however, which could lead to higher costs, according to FirstEnergy Capital analyst Martin King.

More than the co-op, the $5-billion Kitimat LNG venture must also compete for labor with the oil sands and federal shipbuilding contracts. Proposals in the works by Shell Canada and Progress Energy, plus those planned for the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. West Coast, will surely add to the strain. "People have to watch the cost side of the equation and factor that in to what they think prices are going to be, because you're looking at three or four years down the road before you can start to monetize the assets," King said in a recent interview.

Australia provides a case study in cost blowouts, with some LNG projects there as much as 50- to 70-per cent over budget. "Some of these are into the $20- or $30-billion range," King said. "That's a lot of money."

You can link to the NEB decision on the co-op here.

Are Republicans spooked by Northern Gateway? You might be inclined to say yes, given the pitch and frequency of pipeline-related commentary so far in the GOP primary race. Or is that just the sense one gets from watching Newt Gingrich, whose chances of actually reaching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are, as Konrad Yakabuski at the Globe put it yesterday, "sinking faster than the bids on a Tampa bungalow"?

Gingrich has certainly made Keystone XL, the fabled Gulf Coast link proposed by TransCanada Corp., his business. Where Mitt Romney has been diplomatic, Gingrich has been a shade light of bombastic. In a wild speech following his sound drubbing at the hands of Romney in the Florida primary, for instance, Gingrich implored Canada to "not cut a deal with the Chinese," Bryn Weese at Sun Media reported Tuesday.

It was a line the former House speaker was toeing 72 hours before his Florida no-show, at a Tampa-area retirement home of all places. "Right now the Canadians are looking seriously at a partnership with China," he told an assembled crowd that included David Weigel at Slate.

The suggestion that Gateway's fortunes will be decided by a firm handshake between Enbridge Inc. CEO Pat Daniel and, perhaps, Fu Chengyu, Sinopec's recently installed chairman (Reuters has an excellent profile of the man), will strike many who have watched the pipeline drama play out to date as a tad too simplistic.

Does Ottawa view Gateway and Chinese energy demand in general as a sort of trump card, an ace in the hole that might force Washington's hand on Keystone? Not according to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. "I wouldn't call it leverage," he told assembled reporters at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce last week, "but we're always better off when you have more than one customer."

"Look, we have a very friendly, productive relationship with the United States," the minister added. "We expect that to continue."

Still, the diplomatic ante could be upped next week, during Prime Minister Stephen Harper's trip to China. The visit could result in a series of "co-operation agreements" between the two countries, Sneh Duggal reported yesterday at Embassy. Among them is a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, which Ottawa and Beijing have been haggling over since 1994.

Oliver describes the Sino-Canadian relationship as run-of-the-mill. "We need to diversify our customer base," he said recently. "They need to diversify their sources of energy." But it's clear China brings a stronger hand to the negotiating table in 2012 than it had in the mid-1990s. Indeed, one gets the feeling that the country is not so much feasting, but rather selectively nibbling from a buffet offering of Canadian energy assets. The latest crumb to catch the dragon's fancy is a 20 per cent stake in Shell Canada Ltd.'s Groundbirch shale gas property, bought for an undisclosed sum by PetroChina, in northeastern British Columbia.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford has a big idea. She calls it a national energy strategy. It’s an interesting, and for Redford, politically risky gambit: any talk of such a strategy brings back memories in Alberta of Pierre Trudeau’s reviled National Energy Program (NEP).

But Redford’s vision is no NEP – The Sequel. The premier views this strategy as one that would be driven by provincial, not federal, interests. The provinces would be setting the agenda, and it would recognize the provinces’ jurisdiction over natural resources without preventing them from co-operating on energy matters. It’s a tricky thing Redford is trying to pull off. But it’s noteworthy that normally parochial Quebec recently voiced support for the concept. “It makes immense sense,” Quebec Premier Jean Charest told reporters last month after meeting with Redford in Quebec City.

Getting provinces and territories with often widely different interests to sit down and hash out a coherent plan of attack with regards to energy won’t be easy. Yet Redford appears to have hit on something here. Industry leaders like Shell Canada’s president Lorraine Mitchelmore have long been beating the drum for a national energy strategy.

There now seems to be some political momentum for the concept, too, with British Columbia and Saskatchewan also backing Redford’s idea. If she can pull this off, the benefits could be immense for Alberta and Canada. With the provinces and territories united on big-ticket issues, a national energy plan could aid Alberta as it seeks to develop and export more of its oil and gas.

Alberta and Canada need more people like Redford bringing forth new ideas that could be game-changers. Keeping the status quo alive is not an option in the energy sector. Any jurisdiction that stagnates will drift into irrelevancy, bypassed by other regions that are more innovative and efficient. That’s why we need bright people thinking about (and pursuing) bright ideas. If the oil and gas industry and leaders across Alberta and Canada don’t foster innovation, the sector won’t evolve and North America will be living in the past when it comes to energy. That’s not good.

In an industry that is as volatile and has as many moving parts as this one does, one can never be certain what the future will look like. But that shouldn’t stop us from coming up with new ways and new technologies to shape that future. And that’s why big ideas and innovation are the focus of this issue of Alberta Oil. For the individuals, companies and organizations that work in the energy business, the future is now.

What a difference 10 years makes. A decade after PanCanadian Energy Corp. and Alberta Energy Co. were joined at the hip to create Encana Corp., at least one of the commodities that fueled the merger offers investors about as much certainty as a game of ring-toss at a small-town carnival.

Certainly there are as many wild cards at play. As Encana last week celebrated 10 years of operations – one imagines the occasion did not warrant champagne, what with the state of the firm's stock and so many vultures circling overhead – U.S. President Barack Obama was midway through a policy pirouette, announcing in his address to the nation that developing shale gas "will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy."

Other choices are not so easily resolved. The Conference Board of Canada notes in its latest winter outlook this morning that U.S. economic growth could hit 2.7 per cent this year, up from 1.8 per cent in 2011, provided legislators in Washington find common ground on lower payroll taxes and other measures to stimulate short-term growth.

The outlook assumes Europe doesn't slip from its current precipice into recession, a shaky proposition amid continued disagreement over how to engineer a controlled collapse of Greece. "There are obviously huge downside risks to the current outlook, given the poor track record of politicians in Europe and the United States for dealing with their respective debt challenges," write Kip Beckman, principal research associate, and Paul Darby, deputy chief economist, with the Conference Board.

Scratch from your wish list, in other words, a short- or medium-term recovery in natural gas prices, at least one driven purely by demand. Even the ballyhooed production shut-ins announced last week by Chesapeake Energy Corp. and other gas titans – a development that has raised more than a few eyebrows on its own – offered only a "momentary floor" for prices, Bob Brackett of Bernstein Research told clients this morning.

The U.S. gas rig count remains above 750, and drillers targeting oil and liquids are increasingly producing so-called associated volumes of natural gas in spades. Brackett also calculates that one billion cubic feet of production curtailments is only enough to offset one degree of abnormally warm temperatures in the short-term. "That means one [billion cubic feet per day] of production curtailments need to occur for 4-5 months just to make up for January's warmth," he writes.

Producers are unlikely to exercise such restraint, Brackett concludes. He suggests that those companies that can stand to might even prolong the current price funk in an effort to starve industry weaklings, setting the stage for a round of consolidation in the fashion of Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller. Brackett notes that the famed oilman, while keeping his thumb on prices, once quipped that a "good sweating" was "healthy" for Standard's rivals. Investors might wonder whether Encana, fresh from a year of asset juggling, could stand to lose a few more pounds.

As numerous companies look to advance liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects on British Columbia's West Coast – with the aim to send the chilled fossil fuel to lucrative Asian markets – the conventional wisdom is that these companies need to worry about competition from the likes of Qatar and Australia.

But Canada's big neighbor to the south also has designs to export LNG, as producers there look to find attractive markets for all that unconventional gas they are extracting from basins like the Eagle Ford and the Marcellus in the Lower 48. In its weekly LNG supplement,  FirstEnergy Capital notes that Sempra Energy recently received approval to export LNG from its proposed plant in Hackberry, Louisiana. Sempra has been given the okay to export 1.7 billion cubic feet a day (bcf/d) of LNG to countries with free trade agreements with the U.S.

The Sempra project is one of seven export terminals being proposed in the U.S. (to see all of them, plus three Canadian projects slated for the B.C. coast, click on this link.) It's interesting to look at the numbers provided in the link. The three B.C. projects would export a combined 1.95 bcf/d, while the total for the American projects is 12.1 bcf/d. And that number doesn't include the 2.8 bcf/d export facility in Brownsville, Texas that Gulf Coast LNG Export LLC has applied to build.

Assuming all of these U.S. facilities are approved and built, (admittedly a dangerous assumption), where is all this LNG going to go? Only one of the U.S. export terminals is located on its Eastern Seaboard, the rest would be located on either the Gulf Coast or the West Coast. That makes it possible these terminals could target Pacific Rim markets –  just like their Canadian competitors.

Can three small Canadian LNG export schemes lock up long-term customers when those same customers could get it from bigger U.S. plants that have greater economies of scale? It's a fair question. And it's one that the likes of Apache Canada's Tim Wall and the other partners of the Kitimat LNG project must be asking themselves as they make a decision on whether to pour billions of dollars into an export terminal.

Applause rang out at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce as federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver yesterday denounced Canada's regulatory apparatus as "unpredictable" and "needlessly complex." "Bad processes do not produce good environmental outcomes," he told a roomful of oilmen at an industry-sponsored cocktail event.

Away from the podium and his prepared remarks, Oliver promised broad changes to the system – both legislative and regulatory – before the year is out. He envisions a process with "enforceable" time lines, so that project reviews don't go on "forever." "The Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline project took nine years to be approved. Josyln North took six years. This is excessive."

Oliver's unvarnished enthusiasm for Alberta's oil sands is nothing new. Yet Stephen Ewart at the Calgary Herald wonders whether all the bluster and anxiety about "champagne socialists," as Oliver described opponents to Enbridge Inc.'s Northern Gateway project at one point yesterday, is for the best. Canadians are divided over the project, Ewart cautions, and opponents cannot be easily lumped under the same umbrella.

Oliver suggested major reforms lie ahead, promising "system-wide legislative changes, and lots of it."

He insisted that any reforms introduced to Canada's regulatory system are not directly tied to ongoing reviews of the West Coast pipeline proposed by Enbridge. But the two appear intimately linked. There was no mention, for instance, of the need for sweeping changes in a December 2011 report compiled by consultancy IHS CERA – along with the industry biggies, NRCan was surveyed for its views – that compared regulatory processes in Alaska, South Australia and Alberta. "I'm not commenting on Gateway," the Minister said yesterday, "but we're going to be looking at this before the Gateway project is completed."

Environmentalists are wary of such talk, Jeff Jones reports at Reuters. "We certainly want to see our government support the process that the National Energy Board allows, a process that allows all members of the public to have a say on a project that's of concern to them," Jennifer Grant, director of the oil sands program at the Pembina Institute, told the news wire.

Oliver is more sanguine, rattling off oil sands statistics and dismissing outright the suggestion that his government might undermine results of the Gateway review by tinkering with the process at its mid-point. "There are reviews ongoing all the time," he told reporters yesterday. "If we waited for all the reviews to be completed we would never act."

The Joint Review Panel's community hearings roadshow looking into the controversial $5.5 billion pipeline came to the City of Champions on Tuesday. On the same day, Northern Gateway proponent Enbridge Inc. had its top executive on the file – executive vice-president of Western Access, Janet Holder – give a speech on the subject during an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Holder's talk hit on all the themes industry observers have come to expect from the Calgary-based pipeline giant. The Northern Gateway pipeline is a nation-building project; it will open up new markets for Alberta oil; Canada and Alberta will no longer be a price takers; yadayadayada.

What caught my attention as Holder spoke to a receptive Edmonton crowd (with some of the city's police force standing on guard), was when she got to the topic of how the pipeline could radically change the price picture for Canadian oil. She pointed out the differential between West Texas intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude was about US$11 a month ago and that Canadian oil was selling for less than that, relative to Brent crude. But, according to Holder, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the 525,000 barrels per day of petroleum shipped through it from Alberta's oil sands would:

Change all that, at a single stroke diversifying Canada's energy markets and significantly boosting the impact of our nation's most important economic engine

Holder also noted that the Northern Gateway would deliver numerous benefits to Canada, including:

An immediate $2 to $3 uptick on the value of every barrel coming out of Western Canada.

Every barrel? It appears getting a better price for western Canadian crude isn't as simple as breaking ground on Northern Gateway. For starters, only certain producers will be able to ship on the line. In January, five of those companies were finally revealed. That gives them access to offshore markets (and potentially better prices), but it doesn't do much for producers who aren't shipping on the line and still have to send their oil to the U.S. Midwest or other U.S. refining hubs.

The other thing is, the global oil market is a big beast. There is a lot that goes into setting prices, and building a conduit that transports 525,000 barrels per day from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia won't suddenly make Canada a global price setter. Those are points Holder didn't mention in her speech.

Don't be fooled by high-profile production shut-ins announced this week by U.S. gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. and its smaller Canadian peers, Encana Corp. and Talisman Energy Inc.

Analysts are growing increasingly bearish about any quick rebound in natural gas prices amid record-high storage levels in the U.S. and mild weather. The view at FirstEnergy Capital in Calgary is that prices are all but trapped at "inescapable" lows.

The commodity "will be sporting a $1 handle in the near future and may have to persist at these depressed levels for some time to generate additional large scale production shut-ins and prevent a test of storage capacity limits prior to the end of the upcoming injection season," the investment bank's Martin King said in a note today.

Bank of America-Merrill Lynch predicted much the same last week. It said the market was headed for a repeat of 2009, amid fears that anemic withdrawals and record-high production will outstrip storage capacity. "In our view, Henry Hub prices will have to drop below $2/MMBtu by October in order to curtail production growth and avoid storage containment," the bank told investors.

Expect Canadian exports to slide further (they have fallen 19 per cent year-on-year since January 2011, FirstEnergy calculates) as U.S. production grows. Even Chesapeake's willingness to cut daily production by one billion cubic feet won't be enough to convince the market that gas deserves a lift.

"Much more work needs to be done shutting in production before one can think of prices being more sustained with a US$3 per MMBtu handle," King writes.

Nova Scotians are used to economic disappointment. Despite its reputation as the most vibrant (business-wise) of the four Atlantic provinces (faint praise indeed), Canada's Ocean Playground suffers from all the problems you would expect from an econ0mic backwater – high unemployment, bad roads and everyone in the 20-30 demographic leaving the province to work in Fort McMurray.

In recent years that disappointment has extended to its offshore oil and gas industry, as Calgary has shunned Nova Scotia due to high costs and disappointing drilling results. In the most recent call for bids issued by the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board, not a single dollar was spent on any leases when the results were announced in July of 2010. You have to go back to 2001 to find a year when the industry bid at least $500 million for the right to explore for hydrocarbons off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Thus, it's noteworthy that the board announced on Friday that Shell Canada Limited has committed $970 million for the rights to four offshore parcels. It's the highest amount ever received for a call for bids in Nova Scotia's offshore.

Why the about face from at least one industry player? It might have something to do with recent work done to reassess the offshore petroleum potential of Nova Scotia. The work  – a partnership between Nova Scotia's Department of Energy, Dalhousie University and St. Mary's University – determined that Nova Scotia's offshore had 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 8.1 billion barrels of oil in place. That's quite a step up from the estimates the offshore petroleum board previously touted. During an interview last summer with Alberta Oil, Sandy MacMullin, executive director of Nova Scotia's Department of Energy's petroleum resources division said of the new analysis:

Inside the department we are excited about this. What Big Oil wants to see is the 'What's new?' story. We think this is a new story.

With the price of oil remaining in the US$100 stratosphere, Shell Canada agreed. The activity may not reach the heights it has in neighboring Newfoundland and Labrador, but at least hope has returned to Nova Scotia's offshore and the people who hope to earn a living from it.

Hear that? It's the sound of Alberta's petrochemical producers heaving a sigh of relief. The release comes care of Canada's National Energy Board (NEB), which this week approved a 580-kilometer pipeline proposed by Vantage Pipeline Canada ULC to connect North Dakota's booming oilfields with Alberta's ethane gathering system.

At a cost of roughly $240 million, Vantage plans to build a high vapor pressure pipe with capacity to ship 40,000 barrels per day of liquid ethane from a natural gas processing plant owned by Hess Corporation near Tioga, N.D., across Saskatchewan to Empress, Alberta. The pipeline is critical for Nova Chemicals Corp., which last year announced a deal to begin sourcing ethane for its Joffre facility from the Hess plant. Nova has signed similar agreements for long-term supplies of ethane for its Corunna cracker in Ontario, part of a broader trend that has seen plastic makers benefit from widespread production of shale gas.

In approving the pipeline this week (you can link to the reason for decision here), the NEB acknowledged ethane supplies in Western Canada are in terminal decline. Indeed, the board was told by Nova that Alberta's petrochemical industry has a "serious problem" on its hands. Even with incentives provided by the provincial Incremental Ethane Extraction Program, or IEEP, Nova estimates the province could be facing an ethane shortage of 80,000 to 90,000 barrels per day by 2014, or roughly double what the NEB forecasts for the same time, as production of conventional gas declines.

What Nova doesn't say is that ethane production from the U.S. Bakken, where it is stripped from associated gas pumped up with crude oil, is expected to hit 90,000 barrels per day by 2017, based on oil production of 700,000 barrels daily. In its approval, the NEB was satisfied "that the decline of ethane production in Alberta will continue for some time," noting rather euphemistically that "increased competition with U.S. shale gas, new U.S. pipelines, and relatively low gas prices in North America could negatively impact the [Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin] gas production."

Shale gas is an encouraging development for the petrochemical biggies. Precisely how it will affect Alberta's ethane incentives is less clear. That NGLs stripped from U.S. shale and commingled gas are beginning to make their way north to Canada adds another wrinkle to allegations – denied by the province – that both Williams Energy and Nova benefited from inside information ahead of proposed changes to the IEEP made last spring.

The province tweaked the program to account for the higher capital cost associated with extracting ethane from oil sands off-gas. As a source of petrochemical building blocks, the vapors are widely viewed as a lucrative value-added niche the province has yet to exploit. It will be interesting, though, to watch how the IEEP – created as it was in response to ethane shortages and underutilized petrochemical capacity – evolves to account for growth in shale plays and the increasing focus by drillers on liquids-rich gas. One doubts the program is among the "goodies" Alberta Finance Minister Ron Liepert, a former energy minister, would do without as budget talks get under way.

Today, dear readers, I'm giving you a break from oil sands-related pipeline coverage.

While plenty of newspapers and columnists continue to weigh in on the yesterday's decision by the U.S. State Department to reject TransCanada's Corp.'s application to build the Keystone XL pipeline, not all the news is bad. That's particularly true if you are in the energy services sector.

According to a recent research note issued by FirstEnergy Capital, the next 12 months are shaping up to be very profitable for the sector as US$100 oil compels producers to grow oil sands production and drill for oil and in liquids-rich plays across Western Canada. FirstEnergy expects total cash flow for producers in 2012 to increase 21 per cent from its 2011 estimates. Capital expenditures are also expected to be up 10 per cent.

Of course, when producers have cash to spend, they tend to invest it in building infrastructure and in drilling programs. And when they're spending money in these areas, the need to employ service companies goes up.

The Calgary-based investment boutique does point out that it expects a larger portion of the producers' capex pie to be spent on drilling and completions, as opposed to facilities. That makes sense considering sub-US$3 natural gas prices have the industry shunning "dry" gas targets, and oil development tends to require less facilities compared to natural gas development. But that fact is of little consequence to the service sector. FirstEnergy expects pricing for services to rise by seven per cent in 2012 and another 4.7 per cent in 2013.

One factor that clouds the sunny forecast is labor. Growth could be constrained because there aren't enough people to do the work required. It's not an new problem, but one the oil patch always struggles to keep on top of. But FirstEnergy sees the energy services sector as well-positioned to weather this storm.

When compared to 2005 to 2007 ... a number of service providers now have experience sourcing labor from foreign countries and have become adept at moving people in between regions if an area gets slow."

Activity in the energy services sector will also be influenced by what goes on in British Columbia and the port of Kitimat. But this has nothing to do with the Northern Gateway pipeline, and has everything to do liquefied natural gas (LNG) and the export terminals being proposed by the likes of Apache Canada Ltd. FirstEnergy notes that the pace of development in northeastern B.C.'s Horn River basin  would increase drastically if Apache and other LNG proponents decide to build these things.

Currently, producers are using fracturing crews to prove out reserves, but see no reason to move into full-scale development due to low natural gas prices. Should producers see a need (e.g. Kitimat coming online) to move into full development, there will be major a increase in the demand for fracturing horsepower in Western Canada.

If you're playing the stock market, it sounds like it's time to do some due diligence on Canadian energy services companies.