Buy offsets or pay
Alberta's carbon offset market hits a bumpy road
Some of Alberta's regulated greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters might have to pay twice for their carbon emissions, as several low-tillage carbon credit projects have failed a government audit. The potential failures could influence how emitters choose to comply with government emissions targets in the future.
Staying green
Field maintenance technologies are getting cleaner as service providers move away from chemical solutions
Oil and gas operators looking for effective field maintenance solutions that reduce costs while optimizing production levels would be well advised to consider a couple of unique green alternatives that are both cost effective and provide a significant opportunity to reduce environmental footprints.
Capturing knowledge
Governments and industry partners are hopeful that Shell's Quest project will provide the knowledge boost needed to get other carbon capture and storage initiatives off the ground
A partnership between the governments of Alberta and Canada and Shell Canada Limited to build a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project is expected to result in knowledge that can then be transferred to other industrial processes to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta and indeed, across Canada.
Closing the tap
Resource play operators work to reduce freshwater usage in fracking
Early in the shale gas revolution, when the immensity of the resource in the United States, Canada and around the world was heralded as ushering in a new age in energy production, a few savvy pundits foresaw that water usage could become a pinch point in its development.
A half-decade later, with a dozen shale gas basins across North America on production and horizontal multi-frac technology now tapping tight oil and liquids-rich tight gas plays, the public outcry over the industry's water use is a reality.
A dog's life
A powerful new research tool helps Statoil understand caribou population declines in the oilsands
It's a dog's dream job. Tail up, nose to the ground, running through the woods, sniffing for poop. That would be three types of poop: woodland caribou, moose and wolf.
Taking aim
Flush with cash from American sympathizers, Green Grinches are focusing on plugging oilsands pipelines and ending bitumen's growth
A couple of years ago, environmental activists—and more particularly those high-rhetoric mouthpieces of the movement we have labelled Green Grinches—attacked Canada's environmental record on the most visible front possible: northern Alberta's vast oilsands developments.
Tracking the cash
A Vancouver blogger has uncovered a U.S. money trail that leads straight to Canadian green groups, and unleashed a firestorm of debate as hearings open into a key oilsands pipeline
Blasting off to a fresh new start on the eve of the environmental review process for the Northern Gateway pipeline, Joe Oliver, Canada's minister for natural resources, began 2012 by issuing an unprecedented open letter to slam environmentalists for using foreign funding to undermine national economic interests.
