 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community Matters here. Okay, we're back, we're live. I'm Jay Fidel and today is a given Tuesday. And we're talking about energy, Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We love to talk about energy. There's so many things happening in energy. And we have to get perspective on it. You know, on Wednesdays we do energy in America. And today we're going to look at Canada a little bit and see the effect. See it from the Canadian point of view. And with us for this purpose, we have a Canadian right here in our studio. Ken Rogers, a 50 year friend of mine, 55 year friend of mine, who's here from Canada, who's visiting and who can speak to oil and gas because he's been in oil and gas forever, I can. Well, how are you today? Yeah. So tell us, what's the status of oil and gas in Western Canada because it's an important source of those items? Well, an important piece is you can't separate Canadian oil and gas from American oil and gas. There's a sufficient integration that it's kind of one market. But Canadian oil and gas varies dramatically relative to almost any country in the world. Canada has a huge amount of oil and gas that is not pumping into the market. Canada has offshore oil and gas north of Newfoundland, right where all the icebergs flow in the spring, making it one of the more dangerous places to have the large oil platforms. But the experience in the North Sea is exactly what proved to be workable there. And there's a Canadian company that's developed from a small company into one of the world's giants, Husky, that is key in that whole area of Canada. The majority of oil and gas most people think comes from Alberta. But really there are the three most Western provinces are loaded with oil and gas. And the oil and gas has a couple of unique features. One is what people call heavy oil and gas. Some people use derogatory term tar sands to describe one of the biggest resources is really oil sands. Tar is like the tar pit in Los Angeles as opposed to this is just sand with the oil mixed in it. Athabasca. That's where the tar sands are? Yes, or Fort McMurray if you watch the news with some of the spectacular fires other than nose in California. Burning oil. Well, it wasn't the oil actually it didn't damage any of the oil facilities. It just about ruined the city that almost 100,000 people city that had the flames totally around it. And the fire crews were good enough. You tend to see lots of spectacular things on the news on how good these crews are. But that was one of the showcases for the world to see the. That they can put it out. Yeah, and ridiculous scale of fire and heat like the more recent stuff in California. But anyhow that heavy oil is one of the most interesting things about oil and gas is because American interests that like to influence the rest of the world. Not the government itself, but rather what I'd like to call the American plutocrats create these phony public interest groups. Activists, but they're fake activists. Yes, and they pay the Canadian Indians or we tend to use more polite terms than that usually in Canada. But they in effect pay them to object to having any pipelines whatsoever that go to the West Coast to ship any of the oil sands. Why would these big plutocratic interests do that? Because they own the refineries that can process it. They wanted to stay at the refineries. Well, the biggest refinery is in Minneapolis and then the rest are on the Gulf Coast. But that heavier oil takes slightly considerably different processing, but you do very little to it chemically. And it's then the same as every other bit of oil that works for your gasoline or for petrochemicals, etc. The other area for which there are refineries are on the Gulf Coast and they're all owned by the same group of American billionaires and the ones that are paying for the phony show and tell arguments about you shouldn't have a pipeline that could send this oil anywhere except us. Interesting. So what does that fit with Keystone? Well, Keystone just feeds the refineries on the coast because the oil sands probably has the one play that has as much oil as all the U.S. has. I mean it's just absolutely humongous. It's like Saudi Arabia scale. But it's not like when you say Athabasca, but it's an area that's probably bigger than New Jersey. And it's all oil sand? Yes. Tar or whatever. It's not tar. It's actually oil mixed with sand and the difference is how deep it is. Now the first, well a huge portion of it you can mine simply with open pit, dig it up with a big shovel, stick it on a truck, take it over to a conveyor boat, belt, roll it into a huge plant that simply separates the sand from the oil. How do you do that? I mean, chemically? Oh, it's really just a bit of heat, you know, and so you don't, you heat it enough to melt the oil but not to cause any fumes to come off. You're melting it out of the sand? Yeah. And it's lighter or heavier than the sand? It's heavier. So then you can just drop it at the bottom? Yeah, because if you're dealing with oil sands that's deeper than you could do with open pit mining, they have a process, they call it SAG-D, you know, where it really is pumping hot water into the ground in a pipe and causing it to separate from the sand there and then gathering it below that level where you've melted it in a pipe the same way you would gather from a normal oil well. So you're processing it there and that part of SAG-D, you're processing it in the ground? Yes, well, some, it's probably one of the leading areas in the world for research and all of the companies, oddly, have worked well together. You know, the world giants like Shell Oil and Exxon and they're all there in some form or another, now a lot of them have reduced their positions in the oil sands because of the inability to get pipelines to the west coast. Because of the political resistance to that? Well, it's not political as much as it's been these phony... Plutocratic. Plutocratic resistance, if you will, using agents. Yes, unfair games. Okay. However, it is there, but I think that the research that's there is making it a much better environmental type of scenario than it has been historically. And I think Canada generally is far more environmentally conscious than all of our rules are far stricter than the US. Interesting. Like the one that I find most interesting has to do with fracking or this is where they... Now we're talking about gas for a minute, yeah. Well, no, really the major reason that the US is more energy self-sufficient or oil self-sufficient is because of what's called Shell Oil or Tight Oil. And this is where in order to get the oil out you need to pump down the well a bunch of sand and chemicals to basically break the rock deep underground. And that process in Canada is far more restricted than the US. In the US you can have fracking just a few hundred yards from an elementary school in Canada. You can't get anywhere near anything that... Look at what fracking is done in the state of Oklahoma, you know, with multiple seven, eight hundred small earthquakes every year because, arguably, because of fracking in Oklahoma, yeah. Well, I mean depending on how you measure earthquake, I mean the whole point of any underground explosion, I mean if you're simply doing seismic to try to determine what is the formation, you set off a minor underground explosion and you could measure that in the surface. Would you call that an earthquake? I wouldn't. No, but what my understanding is that in Oklahoma homes are regularly damaged by the size of these small earthquakes. And people have to fix their homes all the time or replace them because of this. There's a lot worse than that occurring and a lot of it is the very difference between the Canadian and American regulations with regard to fracking. You know, in Canada you can't do fracking at the same shallow depth that you can do in the US. You have to prove in Canada in a much more rigorous way that the fracking is not going to affect the local water table. The most jolting things on fracking are when you can see somebody turn on a water tap and click a match to it and the water burns. That is jolting. And those demos are part of why you've had resistance in places like Pennsylvania where there's this shale gas that's there, that they have a fear of fracking because they've seen these horror movies. If they adopted the standard that Canada uses, fracking could be no problem at all. Well, I shouldn't use no problem, but the risks and any concerns that would arise from those risks are just so minimal. And if they're not tight enough or not tough enough, you change the rules and regulations a little worse, which keeps peace to why the Canadian industry is doing well. It's a big industry and it includes drilling for oil in the East. It includes, may I say, the tar sands. Is it the wrong term? The oil sands. Being from Canada, if I called it tar sands, somebody thumped me a couple times. So you've got plenty of oil and I take it you've got plenty of gas too. Oh, natural gas, Canada probably has a couple hundred years supply in let's take some formations in northeast British Columbia. That's, you know, if you were taking the Alaska Highway, you know, about 300 miles before you make it to Alaska, you'd be driving through these humongous fields or areas and they're, you know, much bigger in area than the oil sands area that I mentioned. I mean, they're the size of an average U.S. state. So your market is global. You have an export market in energy, oil and gas that goes global. Not quite. Well, natural gas for many places is limited to where you can ship it by a pipeline. Well, then you have a industry that's one of the more successful and growing parts of the energy industry is what's called liquid natural gas. So a country like Japan. That's LNG, isn't it? Yes, LNG. We have, we've been talking about LNG here for a while. Oh, well, you should be if you're interested in anything to do with the energy in the U.S. or the world. But the key places where it has an effect is somewhere like Japan, where what do you use to produce energy in Japan? And nuclear was obviously their number one pick until Fukushima. Well, if you're going to bring in coal, you know, to burn for a power plant or you're going to bring in oil to burn for a power plant, well, coal is cheaper. So, you know, but what do you do? Well, natural gas is an awful lot cleaner. It produces less CO2 and other, you know, ridiculous, what they call GHGs, greenhouse gases, the pollution, the air that natural gas is far better. And so Canada has this, you know, probably more than 100 years supply for Canada and the U.S. only if you limited it to that. But the U.S. is a huge percentage of the world market. Well, as is the natural gas really only goes, it's either Canada or the U.S. Yeah. And because we have no liquid natural gas. Now the equivalent of keystone pipeline for natural gas, the natural gas distribution network is pretty good around the U.S. So where the U.S. has approved liquid natural gas plants, the Canadian side has the same effort to prevent natural gas making it to the West Coast as well. The same kind of phony objections. Yeah. And part of it is, well, why not send the natural gas through the U.S. so that it can be then put into LNG at a U.S. port for some U.S. billionaires firm or the equivalent. But like the world's international oil companies aren't, you know, angels of the world either, even though in Canada they're good citizens generally. Well, so it's a lot of revenue for sure. Let me take a short break, Ken. Ken Rogers, retired Canadian businessman who is well skilled in oil and gas and many other businesses, important businesses in Canada. And it gives him advantage, a special observation of how energy works. And I'm going to take a short break. But before we do, I'd like to just get one of his quotes because he's got these great quotes. Pick one quote for us, Ken. Well, one I thought was an interesting one was a member of parliament said to Disraeli that's an ancient British prime minister. Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease to which, Disraeli replied, that depends, sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress. There you go. It's Canadian humor, but it's also British humor. We'll be right back after this break. My name is Mark Schwab. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea, Allah. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I present Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manila where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest both to Hawaii and around the world. So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manila. Okay, we're back. We're live with Ken Rogers, a retired Canadian businessman. We're talking about oil and gas. And we're also talking about climate change and those two things react, at least from his point of view. But before we get to that subject, I just want to get one more quote from you, Ken. What do you got? Well, with respect to the American billionaires that do the fuddleduddles with the American oil industry, I'd like to say they have all the virtues I dislike and none of the virtues I admire. I borrowed that from Wynton Church. It wasn't my own brilliant use of words. Okay, so we know that Canada has huge supply of natural resources like these. And I wonder if Canada is into renewables, I mean non-fossil fuels. And I wonder if Canada thinks about climate change and the larger environmental picture on the world today. And where that fits in a country that is so wealthy in terms of fossil fuel energy. I would say Canada is far more environmentally conscious than the US and far more active in doing something about it than the US. Now one of the first things that I think is important in that regard is that the use of fossil fuels for energy is not simply going to go away. It's going to be with us for a long time. Why do you say that? Why can't we replace it with renewables? Do you call nuclear a renewable? No. Well, it sort of is. Sort of is, but there are one of the historical objections, if you will. Well, if you leave out nuclear, and let's suppose you're going to say, or you make the assumption we're going to have all electric cars sometime soon. Okay, let's assume that. Well, where are you going to get the power to charge up the electric car? From the utility. Well, where is the utility going to generate the power? Big question. Because you simply cannot generate it from a combination of wind, solar, and geothermal. Why not? Or let's call it normal geothermal. Why not? Right now we curtail on wind. And we have more solar during the day than we can use. And, you know, we have to use batteries to try to level it and sort of store it for overnight use. So if I have too much at a given time during the day, why can't I charge all the cars with the excess? Well, you can't produce enough. Okay. I mean, you can have these humongous solar farm, and they really produce diddly squat in energy. I mean, your hydro is a fantastic renewable. We have some of that, actually. You have lots of it, not as much as Canada fortunately has. It's not harness, but we do have some hydro. Right. And you have some of the Canadian facilities, particularly, you know, in the northeast area that produced electricity by hydro and exported to the U.S., similarly from right north of Minneapolis, the province called Manitoba, does hydro. Waterfalls and all that. Yeah. Well, Canada's blessed with probably 25% of the world's fresh water. And lots of it goes downhill sufficiently that you can produce power with that momentum or the energy caused by the water momentum. However, wind farms, you know, you've got a bunch of wind farms on the big island in particular. Well, if you ever get anywhere close to them, you know, they're awful thing. They're ugly. They're noisy. They kill birds. They have, like, everything has a problem. But the problem gets exaggerated when you do them in great quantity. If you take a country like Denmark, which has, you know, way ahead of Canada or the U.S. in attempts to have, you know, renewable energy, but really they want to have energy to avoid the problem of escalating costs and the fossil fuels. It wasn't solely because it was environmentally wonderful. It was a combination of cost and that. And so do we. It's energy security, you know. We don't want it jumping up when the barrel of oil jumps up. But if you tried to propose, you know, all along Santa Barbara and areas near Los Angeles, well, we'll have all these offshore wind farms like Denmark. You know, I'm sure the public would say, not a chance. They'd ruin all our beaches. They're just ugly things. People here feel the same way. And you can't go boating. You know, an awful lot of sane people would say, that's just an unacceptable alternate in that scale if you could take way up on the top of Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa. You know, especially... Mauna Kea is somewhat problematic these days. Yeah, on the side that nobody's looking at. And if you can put a bunch way up there in the wind, that's a wonderful choice. Now, you know, Canada's blessed with having, you know, one-tenth the population of the United States in roughly the same total geographical area if you count Alaska. You know, otherwise it's considerably larger than the U.S. in the area. So we have tons of places you could put wind farms. You know, like I live in British Columbia. Well, British Columbia is full of mountains like Switzerland and Austria, but the size of British Columbia is more than twice the size of California. So how far advanced is wind in Canada, especially in western Canada, especially in those mountains? Are you making great headway or building a lot of wind turbines? There are a lot of wind turbines. And interestingly, you have major energy companies are the ones that are... Like oil companies. Yeah, that are the front and center leading, you know, this. They have stood in their head to experiment with every alternate to fossil fuels. And one of the reasons they keep pushing the fossil fuels is they recognize the economics of the renewables. You know, they're not all that wonderful. You take away monstrous subsidies and they don't work, but what a lot of people miss is how subsidized the oil and gas industry is, you know, whether it's the United States or Canada or anywhere else in the world. I mean, it's one of the most ridiculously subsidized industries in the world and it shouldn't be. Shouldn't be. Not anymore. Not when you're concerned about climate change. Which takes me to the whole thing about climate change. So, I mean, I understand that we're kind of wedded to fossil fuel, at least for a while. That it's not clear that we can replace it entirely. In Hawaii, we want to replace it entirely by 2045 or earlier. We want to use solar and maybe some wind and maybe expand our geothermal capability and who knows what else. It's, you know, the idea is to have a portfolio. But by 2045, no fossil fuel left. Now we may or may not reach that. People aspire to that. They ideate to that. But, you know, I guess where I come out is if you're right, if we are still going to need fossil fuel going forward, if we really can't move it to 100% here or elsewhere on a regular consistent basis, how does that affect the climate? I know people in Canada are, you know, thinking about this. You're environmental or more environmental than we are. But how do you deal with climate change when you know there's a connection between fossil fuel and GHG, the greenhouse gas, you know, and sea level rise and all that's so connected. So how do you deal with that? Well, the first thing you need to do is say, how can you use fossil, instead of saying, let's absolutely not have any fossil fuels, how can you use fossil fuels without ruining the environment? You know, and one of the well-established procedures is sequestration. You can have a power plant that produces greenhouse gases out of the smokestack. Well, simply, you know, collect the greenhouse gases coming out of the smokestack and pump it back down into the reservoir that the oil came from, or whatever it was, let's say natural gas. And the major oil companies, again, are leading the charge on how do you do this? There's a fantastic program going on where I think it's Shell Oil that's leading the way using one of the biggest platforms, these offshore mega-platforms like the one the BP blew up in the Gulf. Well, about the biggest one that was in the North Sea, which are, you know, the most weather-resistant ones ever built. And Shell Oil is pumping CO2 through the pipelines and back into the reservoirs. Interesting. You say pipelines. Yeah, underwater. So it goes down again. Yeah, like when they did the oil in the North Sea, an awful lot of it, they had the big rigs and then they built an undersea pipeline that went either to Norway or to Northern Scotland, you know, from these huge fields, and that's the way the oil flowed. Well, now that the oil is gone from some of those fields. It does happen. Well, this is underway now in a big scale. Now, Canada has several of these CO2 sequestration projects where they, you know, are in use and being used, but if you simply increase the scale of those, if you required them legally. To do sequestration with every oil well? Well, not every oil well or every field. I mean, if the underground formation was good enough to hold the natural gas or the oil for, you know, thousands of years, you know, certainly, you know, pumping the CO2 back down, it's going to stay there and it isn't going to come up. Is there a negative side to that? I mean, is that going to have an environmental impact when you pump it on down and put it in the same cavity again? It could. If you again, it's much like the importance of regulation. Like, I think the United States is somewhere insane to be reducing regulations, especially on the oil and gas industry. At this point in time, use a simple example. You know, if you're pumping CO2 deep underground, you know, it's a liquid with enough pressure and the heat in depth. It converts into a liquid form, so it's an awful lot smaller than in gas form, but nevertheless, it has a lot of pressure. So how much are you going to pump in there? Well, you better not pump too much more than there used to be oil. So you have to do research and you have to regulate it and you have to monitor them. Well, research is kind of easy because the oil company would have stood in their head to research what was in that well in the first place and what all the pressures were and did they need fracturing. I mean, it's a fantastically sophisticated industry. Oh, yeah. Well, that's the thing and certainly through you I have come to know how sophisticated it is throughout Canada. But you know, one thing, it strikes me that it's a kind of an interesting analysis to say, look, we've got a lot of resources and Canada is kind of a, it's a learning experience for Americans to see how things work in Canada. And what I get is that we have a lot of fossil fuel left. We have a lot of technology that we have now and that will evolve. We have ways to control the amount of greenhouse gases that go up from standard fossil fuel mining. And so this does affect the view going forward. And I really wonder, with all of that, considering all of that, where do you think we're going on this? Is it that we'll never, ever get to 100% renewable energy in this world? A lot of people really want that for a lot of reasons. Or is it that we will, or is it that we will? Is it that at some point, you know, it's like the Karl Marx withering of the state. At some point, fossil fuels will wither. And we will be able to use renewables for everything in the world with appropriate storage. So my question is, will that come? Will that happen? Do you see that on the horizon? The way you define renewables leaving out nuclear. Leaving out nuclear. Not a chance, okay? So if you're using hydropower, wind, solar, and geothermal, the answer is, you won't make it. Now remember that oil and gas is used for everything else. Like the shirt I'm wearing, and the bell type air. Furniture, what have you. And your glasses, the rim, and probably the glass in it. We forget that sometimes. All kinds of things. Salad dressing. Yeah, well, I mean, if you take normal oil and you run it through a refinery, I mean, you can stick it on your green salad. It's not polluted awful stuff. It's the other crap that's in it. It's, you know, where, you know, some of the dangers, though, on global warming relate to things that people don't count. You know, for example. We only have a minute left. Okay. All the permafrost, if you're going to melt the ice in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada, and Russia, you're going to release a ton of methane. And methane is probably 15 times as much of a contributor to greenhouse gas. Like greenhouse gas simply warms the atmosphere and warms the ocean. So you're going to get all these ridiculous storms. Like hot air creates, can hold more water. And therefore. No wonder you're going to have more hurricanes and more ridiculous storms and the quantity of rain that hit Houston. So we have to be very careful about greenhouse gas and methane for that matter. Oh, you're past the point of worrying. Those storms are already there. Yeah. It's the need to move as urgent this U.S. billionaire push to have global warming deniers. Is total insanity as a society and for the world. Yeah. Well, let's leave it there. Ken Rogers, hard Canadian businessman, living the land of gas and oil in Western Canada, can tell us the perception there. Well, of course, an unbiased. An unbiased. Thank you, Ken. Great to have you on the show. Thanks, Jake.