In volunteering to help Calgary host the WPC 2013 Youth Forum, Cody Parrish gets more than he bargains for

When Robin Greschner, the chair of the Youth Committee of the Canadian Association of the World Petroleum Council (WPC), asked Cody Parrish to help out with the 2013 WPC Youth Forum held in Calgary, the 28-year-old business analyst with Encana Corporation said, "Yeah, I've done conferences in the past with Husky and others. I suppose I can do that. What's the time commitment?"

Ahmed Taha, Vice-president, Oil Sands Operations, Tervita Corporation

In the last year of university, while taking course overloads to finish early, Ahmed Taha was also working part-time at an Edmonton landfill and weighing in some of his own vehicles from a rubbish-hauling business he’d started to pay his way through university after blowing out his knee in the first four months of a hockey scholarship.

The woes of gas producers are well-known. What is uncertain is who will be around when the rebirth comes.

"If it bleeds, it leads."

That's the mantra used often to describe the news media's penchant for giving violent crime, disasters and other bad news preference over good news.

Water has become a central focus of fracking opponents, but perfecting a water-free frac has become a target for unconventional thinkers

A former executive with Calgary-based GasFrac Energy Services Inc. says oil and gas producers and the service sector must develop technologies that deal with the environmental impacts of fracking or risk losing their social licence to operate.

Access to more domestic crude could help sustain eastern refineries

When the president of the association that represents the refining sector in Canada calls plans by its two biggest pipeline companies to move more western Canadian crude oil to refineries in Ontario, Quebec and Eastern Canada a "win-win," that pretty well says it all.

That is how Peter Boag, who heads the Canadian Fuels Association (CFA, formerly the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute), views plans by TransCanada Corporation to spend about $5 billion to convert its mainline gas pipeline to carry crude from western Canada and the western United States to Montreal, as well as plans by Enbridge Inc. to reverse the flow of its existing Line 9 to carry western crude to Ontario and Quebec and vastly expand its existing system to move more western U.S. and Canadian crude.