Canada's oil capital to be shut for days after flooding

Canada's oil capital to be shut for days after flooding Sat, Jun 22 13:38 PM EDT By Nia Williams CALGARY, Alberta, June 22 (Reuters) - Southern Alberta braced for more disruption on Saturday from floods that have killed at least two people, forced about 100,000 people from their homes and blacked out the center of Canada's oil capital, Calgary. Communities to the south and east of Calgary were put on high alert as the flood waters moved across the region. But with rainfall easing up, authorities were hopeful that the worst might now be over. "It's morning in Calgary! Sunny, water levels are down, and our spirit remains strong," Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said on Twitter. "We're not out of this, but maybe have turned (the) corner." The floods followed some 36 hours of unusually heavy rainfall - some communities received six months of their normal rainfall in less than two days. Evacuations started on Thursday, both in Calgary and in smaller cities across the south of the province. Utility Enmax switched off power to central Calgary late on Friday afternoon lest water damage its downtown facilities. Calgary was unable to say how much it would cost to repair flooded homes and rebuild roads and bridges washed away by the murky brown floodwater. But the floods are already shaping up to be significantly worse than those of 2005, which caused C$400 million in damage after three big storms struck in a single week. The bulk of the evacuations were in Calgary, a city of 1.1 million that is home to Canada's biggest energy companies, with up to 100,000 people ordered to leave their homes. The city urged drivers to stay off the roads, and warned people not to get too close to the raging rivers. Canada's oil producing region, way to the north of the city, was not affected, although some agricultural regions were flooded, with likely damage to crops that include wheat and canola. "A lot of Albertans have faced disasters the likes of which the majority of us could never imagine," Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths told a news conference. The bodies of two men were found near High River, Alberta, a town of 13,000 located about 60 km (37 miles) south of Calgary. Police said two other people were missing. In Calgary authorities said the Bow and Elbow Rivers had crested and water levels were expected to drop over the next few days. But the Bow was still flowing at around five times its normal rate on Saturday. Mandatory evacuation orders remained in place in more than 20 parts of Calgary including the downtown core. Nenshi said downtown, where many of Canada's oil companies have their headquarters, could be off limits until Wednesday. MOVING HOME A spokesman for Imperial Oil, Canada's second-largest producer and refiner, said the company was working on plans to maintain essential operations, including allowing employees to work from other locations. Shorcan Energy Brokers, which provides live prices for many Canadian crude grades, operated out of Toronto on Friday rather than at its usual Calgary base, although no trades in either Western Canada Select heavy blend or light synthetic crude from the oil sands took place. Net Energy Inc, the other main Calgary crude broker, was closed on Friday and no trading took place. Bruce Burrell, director of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency, said there was still a chance of another surge in the Bow and Elbow rivers, but city authorities hoped people could move back to their communities as water levels fell. Many roads and bridges remained closed, and residents were urged to conserve drinking water because treatment plants are taking more time to process the sludgy water. The parts of Calgary under water included the grounds of the annual Calgary Stampede, which is due to start on July 5. Burrell said the city would be working hard to restore Stampede Park in time for the rodeo, but it was not a priority. ======== Flooding to close core of Canada's oil capital for days Sat, Jun 22 20:04 PM EDT 1 of 15 By Nia Williams CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Some residents began returning to damaged homes on Saturday after record-breaking floods in southern Alberta that killed at least three people, displaced more than 100,000 and will leave the core of Canada's oil capital, Calgary, without power for days. Communities to the south and east of Calgary were on high alert as flood waters washed across the region. And even as Calgary lifted some evacuation orders, officials warned people not to become complacent. "We have a situation across southern and particularly south-west Alberta of intense saturation, which means 20 millimeters (0.8 inch) of rain that would typically be absorbed could cause massive flooding and run-off," Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths told a news conference. "Please do not assume because the clouds have cleared and the streets are not flooded with water it is perfectly safe to move back into your community." The floods followed 36 hours of unusually heavy rainfall which pushed the volume of water in local rivers to record levels. Some communities received six months of their normal rainfall in under two days. Evacuations started on Thursday, and utility Enmax switched off power to central Calgary on Friday afternoon to avoid water damage to its downtown facilities. The area was still without power and closed to vehicles on Saturday. A few tourists and residents strolled in the carless streets of the city's core, but the area was eerily quiet. Officials said it was too early to say how much it would cost to repair flooded homes and rebuild roads and bridges washed away by the murky brown floodwater. But the floods already look significantly worse than those of 2005, which caused C$400 million ($383 million) in damage in the western Canadian province. "We are not through the crisis yet," Alberta Premier Alison Redford told a news conference in Medicine Hat in south-east Alberta, where the South Saskatchewan River is expected to crest at 6,000 cubic meters (1.59 million U.S. gallons) per second on Monday morning. The bulk of the evacuations were in Calgary, a city of 1.1 million that is home to Canada's biggest energy companies, although evacuations in other communities brought the total of displaced people to well above 100,000. Calgary urged drivers to stay off the roads, and warned people not to get too close to still-raging rivers. "If you want to help your city, the best thing you can do is stay home," Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, visibly tired after two days of crisis management, told a news conference. Canada's main oil-producing region in the north of the province, was not affected, although some farmland was flooded, which will likely weaken crops that include wheat and canola. THREE DEATHS Police said three bodies had been found near High River, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Calgary. In Calgary, authorities said water levels were expected to drop in the coming days. But the Bow River was still flowing at around five times its normal rate. Nenshi said downtown could be off limits until the middle of next week "at the earliest." A spokesman for Imperial Oil, Canada's second-largest producer and refiner, said the company was working on plans to maintain essential operations, including allowing employees to work from other locations. Shell Canada said its downtown Calgary offices would be closed until Wednesday and employees would work from home. It was not clear when trading in Canadian crude oil would resume after little if any trade took place on Friday. Shorcan Energy Brokers, which provides live prices for many Canadian crude grades, operated out of Toronto on Friday rather than from Calgary, although there were no trades in Western Canada Select heavy blend or light synthetic crude. Net Energy Inc, the other main Calgary crude broker, was closed on Friday and no trading took place. Many roads and bridges remained closed, and the city banned the use of tap water for car-washing or other outside activities because treatment plants take more time to process the sludgy water. But Nenshi said Calgary water was still safe to drink. RETURNING HOME And as flood waters receded, a few residents were allowed back home to flooded basements and thick layers of silt on streets and sidewalks. "We had four feet of water," said Gordon Weir, 53, standing outside his home in the city's Elbow Park community as a pump spewed water from his basement onto the street. "It was all from ground water, so coming up from the sewers and through the concrete. This is one of the higher houses on the block. Our neighbors had seven or eight feet." Canada's ruling Conservative Party scrapped plans to hold its annual party convention in Calgary next weekend. "Postponing the convention is the right thing to do for the people of Calgary," said Michelle Rempel, Chair of the convention's Host Committee. Flood water covered the grounds of the Calgary Stampede, an annual extravaganza of cows, cowboys and horses scheduled to start on July 5. But Nenshi insisted the rodeo would go ahead. "We're Calgarians. We'll make it work," he said. "It may look different, but the show will go on." (Writing by Janet Guttsman; Editing by Eric Walsh) ================= Environment The Nation / By Naomi Klein COMMENT NOW! Turning Tar into Oil: An Economic and Environmental Disaster Looms The Iraq War has set off one of the largest oil booms in history -- and the race to mine the tar sands of Alberta will result in environmental disaster. May 31, 2007 | The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history. All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely "tax holidays" and pay a laughable 1 percent in royalties to the government. This isn't the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law -- that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta. For four years now, Alberta and Iraq have been connected to each other through a kind of invisible seesaw: As Baghdad burns, destabilizing the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms. Here is how chaos in Iraq unleashed what the Financial Times recently called "north America's biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush." Albertans have always known that in the northern part of their province, there are vast deposits of bitumen -- black, tarlike goo that is mixed up with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world. It is possible to turn Alberta's crud into crude, but it's awfully hard. One method is to mine it in vast open pits: First forests are clear-cut, then topsoil scraped away. Next, huge machines dig out the black goop and load it into the largest dump trucks in the world (two stories high, a single wheel costs $100,000). The tar is diluted with water and solvents in giant vats, which spin it around until the oil rises to the top, while the massive tailings are dumped in ponds larger than the region's natural lakes. Another method is to separate the oil where it is: Large drill-pipes push steam deep underground, which melts the tar, while another pipe sucks it out and transports it through several more stages of refining, much of it powered by natural gas. Both techniques are costly: between $18 and $23 per barrel, just in expenses. Until quite recently, that made no economic sense. In the mid-1980s, oil sold for $20 a barrel; in 1998-99, it was down to $12 a barrel. The major international players had no intention of paying more to get the oil than they could sell it for, which is why, when global oil reserves were calculated, the tar sands weren't even factored in. Everyone but a few heavily subsidized Canadian companies knew that the tar was staying put. Then came the US invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, the price of oil reached $35 a barrel, raising the prospect of making a profit from the tar sands (the industry calls them "oil sands"). That year, the United States Energy Information Administration "discovered" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta -- previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil -- was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States. All this has meant that Iraq's oil boom has not been delayed; it has been relocated. All the majors, save BP, have rushed to northern Alberta: ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, which alone plans to spend $9-$14 billion. In April, Shell paid $8 billion to take full control of its Canadian subsidiary. The town of Fort McMurray, ground zero of the boom, has nowhere to house the tens of thousands of new workers, and one company has built its own airstrip so it can fly in the people it needs. Seventy-five percent of the oil from the tar sands flows directly to the United States, prompting Brian Hall, an energy consultant with Colorado-based IHS, to call the tar sands "America's energy security blanket." There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the "security" it was looking for right next door. It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an "explosion of innovation in alternatives," as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process" -- embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth. And that's the Alberta tar sands for you: The industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse gas emissions. The $100-billion in projected investments from the tar sands have also turned Canada into a global climate renegade. That money is the primary reason why, at next week's G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, my country's oil-friendly Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, will join George W. Bush in opposing all serious attempts to cap or reduce greenhouse gasses. Back at home, his government fully supports the oil industry's plans to more than triple tar sands production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sand, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta. Developing the sands is devouring trees and wildlife -- the Pembina Institute, the leading authority on the tar sands' environmental impact, warns that boreal forests covering "an area as large as the State of Florida" risk being leveled. Now it turns out that the main river feeding the industry the massive quantities of water it needs is in jeopardy. Climate scientists say that dropping water levels are the result -- fittingly enough -- of climate warming. Contemplating the collective madness in Alberta -- a scene even the Financial Times has labeled "some dystopian fantasy" -- it strikes me that Canada has ended up with more than Iraq's displaced oil boom. We have its elusive weapons of mass destruction too. They are out near Fort McMurray, in the jet-black goo beneath the earth's crust. And with the help of trucks, pipes, steam and gas, these weapons are being detonated. This column was first published in The Nation . Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" and "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate." ===========================