Milestones and Memories: Peter and Jackie’s Six-Year Retrospective
This week on the podcast, Peter and Jackie reflect on the six years since the podcast started. With over 250 episodes and counting, they have commented on a range of topics and events shaping the energy industry in Canada and beyond.
In this episode, Peter and Jackie reflect on the podcasts and events that have stayed with them over the past six years and the topics that keep arising, including divestment and energy security. They also discuss their philosophy of interviewing guests.
Special thanks to the loyal ARC Energy Ideas podcast listeners and to Beau Shiminsky at Ear Candy, our sound engineer since day one.
Content referenced in this podcast:
- Energyphile stories on Apple (Audio only)
- Energyphile stories on the website (written and audio)
- Ear Candy Studio
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Episode 256 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back.
Do you get stuff on your phone about how much screen time you use?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I do.
Peter Tertzakian:
Mine is way up, just ridiculous. But then, I’m a voracious reader. Candidly, I’m not really that much on social media or doing stuff. I’m just reading, reading, reading articles as they come and there’s just no end to the articles. And I would argue my screen time has replaced paper time because I used to read newspapers, magazines, and so on in then, tactile form
Jackie Forrest:
Right, you’re not playing Wordle and other.
Peter Tertzakian:
No.
Jackie Forrest:
Looking at cat videos or stuff like that. Come on, Peter.
Peter Tertzakian:
But newspapers seem to be not quite out.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
When was the last time you read a newspaper?
Jackie Forrest:
Well, I stayed at a hotel recently, as part of a conference, and I got the newspaper delivered and I kept them for the two days, and then on the weekend, I actually read all the articles. And you know what I thought? It’s been a long time since I read a newspaper, first of all, they’re much more manageable than they used to be. Remember the weekend editions? Oh yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
Oh, yeah, all of the New York Times, or even-
Jackie Forrest:
Even The Globe and Mail.
Peter Tertzakian:
Look at The Calgary Herald Weekend and it was just like, I don’t know, half an inch to an inch thick.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, you’d knock off three hours of your weekend or something, right?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah.
Jackie Forrest:
But they’re much more manageable. Maybe they’re like 15 or 20 pages, they’re very thin now. But at the same time, you know what I thought about? It got me reading articles that I don’t normally read. Right now I’m only reading about energy, because that’s what I follow and what comes into my feed, and there was articles about what’s going on in the province, provincial politics, there was information on what’s going on in the city of Calgary, and I think I actually quite enjoyed it and I think I’m going to maybe, I don’t know how, it’s very hard to find these things these days, but I might, on the weekends, get one of these newspapers more than I have in the past.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, well I think that’s a good idea. That’s certainly the digital age creates selection bias for you, in other words, the articles are selected for you unless you consciously go out of your way like I do to get all sorts of perspectives. The paper era was definitely one where you would scan and find all sorts of different articles.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, and I love the ones when people write in. I was thinking that’s one thing I didn’t have, the opinion piece and things like that.
Peter Tertzakian:
Oh, yeah, letters to the editor.
Jackie Forrest:
And there was a couple things on the green line, which I have to say I don’t even understand at all what’s going on there.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, let’s not go there. Let’s not go there.
Jackie Forrest:
But no, but it’s just things that I haven’t taken the time to understand, and if I had a traditional newspaper, I probably would know a lot more.
Peter Tertzakian:
I miss the ink on my fingers after reading the newspaper, you had to go and wash your hands because they were grayish black and so on. But no, I do miss the newspapers and sitting in a cafe and just reading or even on an airplane or wherever. Okay, so speaking of getting information, let’s talk conference.
Jackie Forrest:
All right, so we are going to do a bit of a different episode today. At the end of September, so aways ago, we spoke at the Global Business Forum. And for those that don’t know, the Global Business Forum has been around for 25 years. It’s headed by the Honorable Lois Mitchell, who was the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta. And also she was joined by Scott Thon this year, from Berkshire Hathaway.
Peter Tertzakian:
He was the co-chair.
Jackie Forrest:
And he was the co-chair. So excellent conference and it was really great to take part of it this year. It was in the beautiful Rocky Mountains and that’s where we got the newspaper delivered. And there was some always excellent speakers at this event, they bring in speakers from around the world. There was a lot of discussion around geopolitics and global issues.
But what I took away from it is I think the uncertainty about the future always seems high. We just came through Covid, but it seems very high today, as well. We’ve got elections around the world that are creating a lot of uncertainty, not just in the US and Canada, but in other parts of the world, as well. Geopolitics seems higher than it’s been in a long time. We’ve got China, the financial war, I guess some people called it, with China, potential declining of US power relative to some of the other powers out there. And of course these trade wars, AI, one of the comments was don’t be scared of AI, but of course it has the potential to really change how we do our jobs and how many people are needed.
And what I took away from it is there’s large error bars in predicting the future. And I think we have to remember that. You and I are always asked to predict the future, give views on the future, but business leaders have to appreciate that there’s a lot of scenarios that can evolve here that could affect their businesses that are hard to predict.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, actually on that word prediction, I find that not a lot of people are giving predictions. They’re always hedging their bets and there’s a good reason for that, because the conference really validated this tremendous period of uncertainty and instability. We have economic instability, political, geopolitical uncertainty, environmental degradation, new technologies that threaten labor, all this sorts of stuff. To me, the level of uncertainty and instability is reminiscent of the Cold War era that I grew up in. The 1970s certainly was similar, and the level of anxiety in society, the level of anxiety amongst business leaders, in terms of how to cope with the issues, it just seemed like a deja vu to me. But a bit on steroids, because certainly now I’m old enough to reflect, but also to digest and analyze what’s going on far better. But for me, making predictions right now is almost a hopeless task because of so many variables out there that are so volatile.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and one comment that was made that the leaders of the western world are so focused on domestic politics and there isn’t the statesmanship and the diplomacy that there might’ve been 20, 30 years ago, and not thinking of the long-term or some of these foreign affairs. So I think right now, because of all these elections, it’s natural, but I hope we get back to thinking a little bit more about the role that Western leaders have in foreign affairs.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well, one of the things that we were asked to do at the conference was look back at our podcast and reminisce a little bit, and we thought that would be fun for all of our listeners to hear, too. And it was fun to think back about when we got started, and we didn’t really acknowledge it, but we just had, at the beginning of September, our 250th episode and our first episode, believe it or not, was in October of 2018. So we’ve passed our six-year anniversary. Unbelievable.
Peter Tertzakian:
Wow. I thought it was five, but it’s actually six.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, it goes fast, doesn’t it?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, yeah.
Jackie Forrest:
I thought it was even less than that.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right, right.
Jackie Forrest:
So people may be interested in how people tune in, too. We get great stats on the podcast. About 62% of you join through the Apple app, 13% on Spotify and 5% on the website, so that’s good. I remember when we first got going, we had a lot of people, most of the people coming through the website, and we actually wrote a blog about how you could actually listen to the podcast on your smartphone through these apps. So I’m glad everyone’s figured out the convenience of hearing it on your phone.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, no, it’s great, and we want to extend a thank you to all our listeners for being such loyal fans. And day doesn’t go by that I’m walking downtown or somewhere, or even in other cities like Toronto, Vancouver. I was at a wedding in Burnaby and people come up and say, “Hey, great podcast.”
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I know, and it’s really. Hey, for all of you, if you see us, come talk to us about it. We love to hear what you like, and even we get lots of good ideas about future podcasts and even things we should improve on, as well. So top downloads people may be interested in all these six years. What are some of the top downloads we’ve had? Our very top download, what do you think it was?
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, I know. So I’ll say it. Is the Eric Nuttall.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, Eric Nuttall, bullish on oil. Hey, with a name like that, no surprise, so we had-
Peter Tertzakian:
Well also, Eric has a huge fan base, as well. He appears regularly on BNN and talks about stock market and money and oil and gas equities. So it’s not surprising that a lot of people listen to him.
Jackie Forrest:
Now, a close second, no surprise, it was Dan Juergen, and that one we had actually, we’ve had him on a couple of times, but the one that rose to the top was when he brought out his new book, The New Map, and actually foretold a lot of things that were going to come, especially with the conflicts that we’ve seen in Russia and Ukraine.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, no, both of those top speakers are highly influential in their own fields and I’m not surprised.
Jackie Forrest:
The third most download is our interview with Mike Rose in 2023 from Tourmaline. So Mike has a lot of followers, no surprise.
Peter Tertzakian:
He’s got a lot of followers. He’s one of the most successful CEOs in the western Canadian sedimentary basin, serial entrepreneur, as they say. And Tourmaline has a lot of employees, I’m sure a lot of the employees tuned into Mike, as well.
Jackie Forrest:
And another top one’s our episode on when the oil and gas emissions cap came out, that actually was really well listened to, which just shows the level of concern and about that potential policy.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, and we also have a lot of listeners in Ottawa, actually.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, we do. We actually actually Toronto, Ottawa.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, thank you.
Jackie Forrest:
Another top one was our interview with Alberta Premier, Daniel Smith.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, and that’s not surprising in our home province of Alberta.
Jackie Forrest:
All right, so we were asked what are some of the big themes, periods, things we remember as we look back on the last six years. One that really sticks with me is, we just started the podcast in October of 2018, and right away we fell into our very first contentious issue, and that was when we had this blowout of the Canadian oil differentials and it’s because we had too much supply coming on from the oil sand. Some new projects had started up and we didn’t have the pipelines. I think originally we were supposed to have Keystone XL and Energy East, but those didn’t happen. And we had like 40, $50 price discounts for Canadian heavy oil compared to WTI.
And in December 1st, 2018, we had an episode titled Western Canada Oil Glut; to Cut or not. And Peter and I argued in favor of the government making the cuts when they announced that, but that was a really polarizing issue and not everyone agreed with us on that one.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, they didn’t, and it’s a tough call because it’s the whole argument between let the free market sort it out versus government intervention. In this regard, though, it’s not really government intervention. The government really acts on behalf of the people of Alberta. The province of Alberta is the custodian of our resources, our oil and gas resources in this instance, on behalf of the people of Alberta. And when the corporations get into a deal with the province and its people, it’s under the mineral rights agreement, which has royalties as part of it that have to be paid.
So if you look at that podcast from the perspective of the people of Alberta rather than the corporate, you have to view the people of Alberta as a shareholder, as well, in the commercialization of our oil and gas. And there was a substantial amount of money being lost as a consequence of overproduction. So it’s a tough call, but we took the side of the province and its people and said that no, we can’t allow this to continue because of the detriment to the taxes and royalties.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Billions of dollars being lost, where if we just cut our production a little bit, we would be making a lot more money than if we allowed those differentials to continue.
Peter Tertzakian:
This is an important philosophy of our podcast, which I want to mention, and that is that we try and take perspectives that are different all the time, that it’s not just, say, taking on the corporate perspective, which we do, or the political perspective and the governmental perspective, which we do, but many different perspectives, and so it’s a difficult position to be in sometime because not everybody agrees with the other side of the perspective. But really what we’re trying to do is foster a sense of, okay, think about it from somebody else’s point of view, or some other institution’s point of view, or some other, in this case, government’s point of view. And so it’s an important part of our philosophy, which we try and keep, but it’s difficult because occasionally, we’ll get flack for taking what are perceived to be certain positions, but those positions are actually different perspectives.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, and sometimes we get flack for not asking critical questions, or questioning some of the answers we get from our guests. But again, we have limited time. But also, sometimes it’s not about debating, it’s about hearing how they view the issue, which is important for people to understand.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well yeah, you and I like a good debate and certainly could take on a lot of our guests and become more contentious if that was the purpose. But the purpose of the podcast is actually not to roast people on our program, not to roast our guests, but it’s actually to allow them to give their perspective. And so it’s not an exercise in being antagonistic and putting on the heat. Sometimes we do, but honestly, it’s really for the audience to decide whether or not they agree with the guest and we give our guests the opportunity to do so.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, to hear their perspective.
Now the next thing that really sticks in my mind was the oil market 2020 shocks. Well, obviously that was, for a lot of people personally, a lot of changes in all of our lives working from home offices, kids home, not even being able to use the playground. I remember my daughter took to climbing our fence for entertainment, even the side of the house, which our neighbor gave us in trouble for, but hey, she had to get out of the house somehow. But that was a difficult time.
March, 2020, one of the titles we had is North American Oil Demand is Collapsing, Western Canada needs to get ready. That’s when we started to see, hey, demand is coming off very fast here. We are going to have to see production get cut back quickly here, in Western Canada. We had news of the OPEC cut in April, is this OPEC cut achievable? And in May we turned to oil, I’m not dead, as some people were claiming that oil demand would never come back. And just for a reminder, in April of 2020, we saw about a 20% drop in oil demand. I think if you look at a daily basis, at one point it dropped as much as 30% from the pre-Covid level. But considering all that disruption, actually, I thought oil demand was pretty resilient.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, looking back, the whole pandemic and the chaos it caused on everything, including the economy, which therefore, includes oil demand. This is the thing, is that you can look back and look at it as almost a laboratory test, a giant economic laboratory. What happens if demand were to fall really precipitously or what happens if the entire globe was immobilized momentarily? And I think the thing is, is that yeah, the oil demand momentarily went down 20 or 30%. It took a global lockdown, complete immobility with air travel and most vehicular travel to do that. And so if you look at the flip side is 70% of oil demand, actually, was still intact, even with complete global immobility, which tells me, as I said this as a conclusion of the laboratory experiment, is that this is an incredibly difficult source of energy to displace.
Jackie Forrest:
Yes, yeah, of course.
Peter Tertzakian:
And on an annual basis, if you look back at 2020, I think overall global oil consumption was only down about 6%-ish.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, it got down to about 90 million barrels a day on an annual basis, but it wasn’t even at a 100 to begin with.
Peter Tertzakian:
So I think that it’s just a lesson, actually, even for today, in terms of thinking about how difficult it is to substitute and displace this commodity as we think about decarbonization and energy transition, someone going forward.
Jackie Forrest:
All right, so I agree. I agree and I think we are not learning enough from this period as we’re looking at these future forecasts for sure.
The next topic that we’ve been doing over the years, but our first episode on it was in March of 2019, Are Investors in Oil and Gas Doomed? And Peter, this was you had just been in Toronto and you had debated Carbon Tracker. And for those that don’t recall, Carbon Tracker is an organization that put out a paper in 2011 called Unburnable Carbon, and it had a bubble on it and there was a needle popping the bubble. And they argued that all of these reserves that oil and gas companies had were valued too high because we weren’t really going to produce the oil. They really did kick off what I would call the modern divestment movement, at that point, and it definitely has grown.
And we’ve had many episodes on this topic, one that really sticks with me as the Kelly Xu from the Yale School of Management, she’s a professor there, and she talked about some of the movement about divesting of your brown assets or the high carbon assets into green is actually counterproductive because it means that the people that own the brown are less apt to want to reduce the emissions, and yet, the green companies are already very clean.
Peter Tertzakian:
That was a really good episode and actually people can go back and listen to it because I think it’s just as valid today as it was yesterday. And I think that if you look back, really not much has changed, in terms of the debates and the arguments going forward, at even events like Climate Week and so on. People are still debating are we at peak oil or are we not at peak oil? We’ve talked about that on a previous podcast. It’s just like time keeps marching on and we’re just being pulled into the same debates and not a lot changes.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, but some things have changed. I was thinking about it, compared to when we started our podcast, many oil and gas investors have divested of oil stocks. If you can just look at the valuation multiples or how the cash flow is valued compared to other types of public companies, it’s way low for oil and gas. So people are leaving the sector, so I think it’s had that impact. It’s definitely resulted in more reporting on your environmental metrics.
For example, greenhouse gas emissions, back when we started the podcast, there were still a lot of corporations that weren’t reporting their greenhouse gas emissions. Today, it’s like they need to do scope one, two, three, and we even had an episode on this, even scope four now, we’ve invented as another way to track and measure emissions. And in the early 2020s, we had many companies making pretty significant greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals that didn’t exist in 2018. And in fact, if you had asked me in 2018, would all of the oil sands producers make a net-zero goal, I would’ve probably said no. Right?
Peter Tertzakian:
I agree with you a lot has changed, in terms of regulations and policies and attempts to solve the problem. However, I don’t think a lot’s changed in terms of the debates we’re having. I still engage in debates about whether or not oil demand is going up or down.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, the one thing that hasn’t happened, which was, I think, the intention of Carbon Tracker, with their paper in 2011, is we haven’t seen oil demand go down. So it hasn’t actually resulted in lower emissions globally, probably it has in certain companies in certain sectors, but that’s the one thing it hasn’t accomplished. And it’s something we’ve been arguing all along. Divestment was always going after the supply side trying to constrain production, stop producing oil and gas, stop investing in companies that produce oil and gas, and it never dealt with the demand side. So until we actually spend all our time trying to get more efficient vehicles, get more electric vehicles, reduce oil demand, I think it’s not going to work.
Peter Tertzakian:
I agree. I tell people think about if you were the health minister and you’re trying to address the obesity crisis that we have in many Western countries, the policy strategy is not to try and put the farmers out of business, which was the upstream supply of food, the strategy is to try and get people to change their behavior, in terms of exercising more, eating better, switching diet. And even now, I guess there’s all sorts of medications and pills you can take to lose weight that are coming on the market. But again, there’s a demand side directives on the food, yet on the energy side, it’s all focused on the supply side.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, let’s hope at this new COP meeting coming up, the UN COP meeting, that there’s more focus on demand. Because it’s interesting, last year they put in that the words around fossil fuel industry phasing out, but I think it’s still too focused on the supply side.
I did want to make one comment, too, this greenwashing legislation in Canada, the C-59, I said that all these companies are reporting. It’s actually quite frustrating for me because I went to try to prove, make a slide about how Canadian oil and gas producers were low emission. There was only one company that I could find data on, was looking at natural gas producers. But it’s really, to me, sad that we can’t get access to that data right now, and I really hope that as the Competition Bureau comes out with their requirements, that we get some of that data back up because it’s really, to me, putting industry in a situation where I think they’re doing great things, but there’s no data to prove it.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, it’s just the restriction of information, in general, for people to analyze and dissect and make the choice and decisions themselves about the veracity of the such information is important in a free market. It’s important in a free speech society. So I don’t understand the purpose of restricting information to the point where everybody is paranoid about lawsuits because they might say something that would get them in trouble.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, and there’s already a movement to not invest in oil and gas. And one of your concerns is, well, what are the carbon emissions and what is the burden on the company? And it’s tougher to make that assessment today.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, it’s not just oil and gas. I think this is a broad problem because the analysis of energy and energy transition in large has to consider not only oil and gas, but the impact of muffling information on the dominant space. Still, the dominant supplier of energy versus new energy is just not going to get us to a position where we can effectively finance the new energy economy.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, so it has unintended consequences. So anyway, well hopefully we’ll have some good news on that and we will follow when the competition bureau comes out if that guidance helps get companies reporting again.
All right, another topic that we like to always cover is new technology and innovations. And we always get good feedback on those episodes, and there’s been so many. We first covered small modular reactors back in 2020 when a lot of people hadn’t even heard of the term SMR. We’ve done things like battery technology, lots on EVs.
Peter Tertzakian:
Geothermal, everything.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, geothermal. Fusion, that one really sticks with me.
Peter Tertzakian:
Oh, yeah.
Jackie Forrest:
The creating little suns on earth. And if we could figure that out, getting to net-zero would be certainly a lot easier.
Peter Tertzakian:
The guest we had on Fusion, Arthur Terrell, he was great. He’s an author, and in November, 2021, he talked about the pace of innovation and fusion. And now, in the three ensuing years, I still follow the occasional news that’s coming. And I think we are on the verge of real breakthroughs here, and I think by the middle of the next decade we’re going to see pilot plants that employ this kind of technology. And it’ll be very, very interesting because if and when this technology is successful, it has the potential to displace all sorts of other clean energy technology pathways.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, if we can get it to work. And up until when Arthur came on, it was mostly governments that were pushing forward the technology in these government labs. But actually after the podcast, there was actually a lot of money put towards private companies. So there’s definitely more people working on this than ever before and look forward to hearing. Because you’re right, it really could solve the problem in terms of our climate change issues.
Now, as much as we love things like fusion, actually where we get the most good feedback is people really love the podcasts we have on things that they might be interested in buying themselves. So the episodes we had on home solar and what the economics and what some of the pros and cons were, or EVs, or now our newest topic, plug-in hybrids, and even our heat pump. I got a lot of good feedback on our heat pump episode that we did in the last year.
Peter Tertzakian:
The heat pumps, the EVs was Lawrence Romanoski. The interview we did with Kai Fahrion of Zeno Renewables, those were really well received, in terms of-
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I think people are interested in these technologies and is there an economic payback? And I think we’ll continue to follow those sort of topics, as well, because I find them very interesting too. Recent topic that’s really hit the radar is AI and energy demand. We’ve been talking about it a lot in the last few months, but I just wanted to say that this was first mentioned by our guest Corey Paddock, in June of 2023. Corey’s from GBE Energy, and when Corey talked about in June, that’s the first time I’d heard about it. At that time, we were mainly talking about how AI was going to take all our jobs away and make things efficient, but no one had really hit to the fact that it could really affect energy demand.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right, and take all our jobs away and our power source away, as well.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, of course. And now Rob West is-
Peter Tertzakian:
Because nobody’s working and everybody’s making cat videos, is that the?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, and that reminds me of the Rob West. But yeah, he expects us 150 gigawatts of demand. And I don’t know if you remember that, but there was huge error bars associated with that. It could even be higher than that, or lower, but it is just really uncertain.
Okay, other topics that we often cover are newer proposed policies. We usually come out with a summary and our take pretty fast on policies. And we’ve been really lucky that we have a lot of guests that are able to, in short notice, help us out. Because I think when those new policies come out, people really have a lot of questions about what’s in them. They’re 300 page legal documents, but what does it really mean?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. No, a big shout out to the legal people we’ve had on the show, most recently on C-59.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. And Alzler’s been a great friend of ours that way. August, 2023, that one sticks in my mind. That’s when we found out, quite suddenly, that the province of Alberta was going to put a pause on renewable permits while they sorted out things, and that was a shock to people. We had something like $4 billion of new capital investment going into renewables in 2023, and that’s when we had Victoria Bellisimo, the President and CEO of CanREA, Canadian Renewable Energy Association come on. And Peter, that’s one where you debated her a bit.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah.
Jackie Forrest:
About maybe the provinces’ perspective on the pause.
Peter Tertzakian:
Victoria was extremely articulate. It was great to have a good debate with her. And it took up the perspective of the province, in part just to stimulate the discussion. But it’s interesting when you take that perspective that I talked about earlier in the podcast, you take a certain perspective just to stimulate the discussion, then all of a sudden I get pasted as being against renewables and clean energy, which is absurd because been an early adopter of electric vehicles and solar panels and so on. So I just want to emphasize again that we try and illustrate perspectives and get out of people some things that the audience has not potentially thought about or heard about, and just to merely to agree with everything that’s being said is not a good idea. We have to challenge the status quo.
Jackie Forrest:
Right and bring in those perspectives. And we did actually have Daniel Smith come on not long after to explain her view on the electricity markets. Politicians, well, we always get out into a hot seat when we bring politicians on.
Peter Tertzakian:
Oh yeah, yeah. We were expected to roast them. And as I said earlier, that’s not our job is to roast them, it’s okay, so what are you thinking, Mr. Wilkinson, or what are you thinking, Premier Smith? It’s that kind of thing. It’s not to roast anyone.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, and we did get lots of feedback on the Premier Smith interview. She had a lot of facts in there, people questioned her battery numbers. I will tell you that we actually do fact-check a lot of the things our guests say. In that case, we had fact-checked it and felt like her battery numbers did make sense. Just a little side note, our top two podcasts from politicians; Premier Daniel Smith was 10% ahead of Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, so we got more downloads for Premier Smith.
Peter Tertzakian:
Not surprising given we’re Alberta based.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Another topic that we like to talk about is Canada’s lack of energy security, and energy security, it waned a little bit, in terms of interest, but I think with the last year or two, it’s definitely more interesting and more of a concern. And I think about them. We used to run your energy file stories and I would encourage they’re all still there on the website. We’ll put a link.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, thanks.
Jackie Forrest:
All of your energy file stories are still there. Peter’s got some great short stories around energy with some great learnings. But the one we had an episode on, The Long Way Around.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, the long way around is the story from 1973 oil price shocks when the Arab oil embargo created shortages of oil. And therefore a lot of countries, including Western countries, started to hoard oil. Canada, at the time, and still now, does not have a cross-country oil pipeline, so we had to get our oil to Central Canada from Alberta by going west through the Trans Mountain Pipeline at the time load onto chartered Greek tankers. Those tankers went around the Panama Canal through the Caribbean up the east coast of the United States and into the Port of Montreal. It’s just so ridiculous to think that a country so endowed with natural resources and produces more oil, even back then, that it consumed that we had to basically take this circuitous route in time of global turmoil.
And why that story is important, and it’s important today is because actually, nothing much has changed. And also the turmoil that we’re experiencing in the Middle East, which is just a tinderbox right now, if the global flows of oil are somehow hindered and it creates shortages, we’re in the same position. Countries are going to start hoarding. We don’t have a strategic petroleum reserve here in this country, in central Canada. And so it’s quite likely that the Trans Mountain Pipeline is going to have to load up tankers that would go through the Panama Canal up the east coast of the United States and into Central Canada. And I think it’s just, have we not learned in 50 years that we need to think about energy security?
Jackie Forrest:
And there’s been a number of other episodes that have highlighted that our biggest weakness is that the oil pipeline system goes through the US and then comes back into Canada. And we had a weakness there with that Enbridge line five that transports oil into Ontario via Michigan, and Michigan wanted to shut that down due to concerns about oil spills in the strait there, and so we are vulnerable. And natural gas is another one we’ve talked about.
In the case of natural gas, we actually do have a trans-Canadian pipeline that moves only through Canada taking gas to Ontario and Eastern Canada. But we allowed the Americans to take a lot of market share, and actually we’re not fully utilizing the trans-Canada pipeline today because the Americans have taken away our market share there. So it continues, I think, to be an issue that-
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, yeah, and I think this creates, in the background, a sense of vulnerability. We’re dependent upon others, we don’t know what the new American administration is going to do, in terms of how it views Canada from all sorts of commodities, including oil and gas. And if faced with a global crisis where supplies are curtailed, countries get into a hoarding mentality, and I don’t know where that leads us, because like I just said, we produce far more oil and gas than we consume in this country, but we are far from energy secure from coast to coast.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. But with the current politics, I don’t know that we’re going to be building a bunch of oil and gas infrastructure, but I agree.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, we’re not.
Jackie Forrest:
It should have been done probably a long time ago.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. Well, we just need to think more strategically. I’ve said it many times on previous podcasts, we need an industrial strategy. We need an energy strategy that really thinks about the country from multiple dimensions, not just from, say, reducing carbon dimension.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay, last topic. We unfortunately, we could just keep reminiscing, but one topic that’s really changed since we started the podcast in 2018 is the equity partnerships with First Nations and indigenous communities on energy projects. That has been a massive change, and I think it was really catalyzed by the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation, which Premier Jason Kenney, at the time, launched.
Peter Tertzakian:
It was a billion dollars, wasn’t it?
Jackie Forrest:
It was a billion dollars, but it served the purpose of helping indigenous groups pay for the equity portion of these projects.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right.
Jackie Forrest:
And if you remember, we had Enbridge partnering with Indigenous Communities on the Pipeline as one of our shows, and they talked about the fact that that source of capital was really, really important. And I’m happy to say that now federally, it’s maybe not in place, yet, but with the budget, we now have the potential for a similar type loan program coming from the federal government, which will help First Nations across the country.
Peter Tertzakian:
We’ve had several indigenous leaders on the 250 shows, but we’re due for another one.
Jackie Forrest:
So we’ve had other ones like the Six Nations of the Grand River Development, we had Ellis Ross on talking, and we’re expecting to have another future episode soon.
Peter Tertzakian:
All right, well, Jackie, it’s just been an absolute pleasure producing these podcasts with you. It’s been amazing. What started out as just you coming into my office and sharing a coffee, which is how it all started, and I said, “You know what? It would be really interesting for people to hear our conversation.” And that precipitated us partnering with your candy studios here, in downtown Calgary, where we record these. Thank you. Shout out to Bo Schaminski, who does an excellent job as our Sound Engineer. And here we are, 250 plus episodes later, and I look forward to each and every one.
Jackie Forrest:
I do remember, Peter, it was a couple of months of you continuing to bug me saying, “We should really do this podcast,” and I was like, “We’re too busy.” But now it was, like always, you give me great advice, and starting this podcast has been really rewarding.
Peter Tertzakian:
And thanks to our audience again.
Jackie Forrest:
Without you, well, we’d just be talking to ourselves. So I did want to say, I always finish with, if you like the podcast, rate us. And of course I do look at those ratings and I’m only going to cherry pick the good ones here, but I did want to talk about one that came from PCGYYC, and it was titled, Getting Better with Age, balanced, open minded about a number of energy topics, not shy with a healthy dose of skepticism, which I attribute to you there, Peter.
Peter Tertzakian:
We’re all skeptics at some point.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well thank you to our audience. And if you like this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
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