Throughout its history and
evolution, the Canadian petroleum industry has faced
significant challenges that have helped define and
shape its policies and procedures, with both
positive and negative results.
One major issue that oil and gas
companies have had to contend with over the years is
the issue of balance between the lucrative potential
of extracting and refining petroleum and its
byproducts, and the potentially harmful effects such
processes can carry on the surrounding environment.
Air, land, and water, all essential to the survival
of life on earth, can all be profoundly affected by
the petroleum development process, and oil and gas
companies have had to take creative measures to
ensure that a proper balance is maintained between
economic gain and environmental integrity.
In addition to the environmental
concerns raised by oil industry activities,
petroleum companies also face issues and challenges
in regards to governmental rules and regulations. On
one level, such regulation can set standards for the
industry and benchmarks for production, but
regulation can be limiting for the industry, or for
the communities that profit from industry
activities. The National Energy Program (NEP), a
federal government initiative introduced in 1980,
was designed to set price controls and taxes on oil
company revenues. From a federal standpoint, this
allowed for the oil revenues to be shared
nationally. On the provincial level, most especially
in provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan, the NEP
threatened to slow the economic gains stemming from
high oil prices.
More recently, the Canadian oil
industry has had to look at the implications of
implementing federal policies based on the 1997
Kyoto Accord. This international agreement, which
was meant to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide with the
hopes of slowing climate change, carries certain
economic obligations that may cut into oil
production profits. This has some people in the oil
industry and in provincial governments questioning
what long term economic downturns may come about in
the petroleum industry and in provincial economies
as a result of meeting the stringent goals of the
Accord too quickly.
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Progress and Problems
One area in the petroleum industry that presents a number of environmental and economic challenges is the business of extracting oil from Alberta’s oil sands deposits. In this excerpt from the JuneWarren publication, The Great Canadian Oil Patch: The Petroleum Era from Birth to Peak, author Earle Gray examines these challenges, and some innovative pilot projects designed to deal with them. Read more… |
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