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The 2012 class of Oilweek's Rising Stars may be the smallest, but its members are standing tall in the Canadian energy industry

Back in 2007/2008, when we first introduced our Rising Stars feature to the Canadian energy industry, we decided that the inaugural class should be big and brash to catch the attention of readers.

In that regard, I think we pretty much hit a home run. Members of that first class of Rising Stars included Leah Lawrence, who will assume the presidency of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA, formerly the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta) at the group's annual meeting in April (just about the time you are first reading this); George Gosbee, who founded investment bank Tristone Capital in 2000, sold it in 2009 and in 2010 launched another, AltaCorp Capital Inc., with partner ATB Financial; Scott Saxberg, who, as president of Crescent Point Energy Corp., has built the company into the leading producer in the prolific Bakken light oil play; Kris Smith, at the time Suncor Energy's vice-president, planning and strategy and now that company's senior vice-president, supply, trading and corporate development; and Peter Knapp, who founded his own investor relations firm, Iradesso Communications, in 2001, merged it with Toronto-based communications group The Bryan Mills Group Ltd. in 2007 to form Bryan Mills Iradesso, and left Calgary last September for the more sublime climate of Victoria, B.C., where he co-founded Upanup Studios, which provides digital communication solutions and services to business clients around the world.

Subsequent classes have been somewhat smaller than the 20 inducted that first year, but the quality of those selected has not diminished: Richard Campbell (2009) is the managing principal, general manager and chief operating officer of Vista Projects, a privately-held, full service engineering and procurement company; Ron Lewko (2009) is heading up Syncrude Canada's land reclamation research efforts at Fort McMurray; Janet Annesley (2010), vice-president, communications for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, is one of the industry's leading spokeswomen; Jonathan Moser (2011), who was previously manager of government affairs and public policy with Dow Chemical Canada, now runs his own communications and external relations consultancy; Todd Hirsch (2011), who is senior economist for ATB Financial, is one of the most sought-after commentators on all things economic that impact the Canadian oil and gas industry or the Alberta economy in general; Susannah Pierce (2011) is now based in The Hague as vice-president, upstream international communications for Royal Dutch Shell.

In terms of size, Oilweek's Rising Stars, Class of 2012, is a bit smaller (nine in number, compared to 13 last year and in 2010, and 12 in 2009), but no less impressive. With more women than men (for the first time), this class includes self-made entrepreneurs, a roughneck who worked his way up from the field to the front office, an oilfield services worker who is now manager of engineering for a Calgary-based junior producer and a 34-year-old mother of three who rides herd over more than 1,500 engineers for one of Canada's leading engineering, procurement and construction services organizations and teaches disabled kids how to ski in her spare time.

This class of Rising Stars proves the adage that good things come in small packages. You'll see why in our 2012 Rising Stars issue!

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Nearly 160 years ago, in 1853, what was probably the longest pipeline in the world at the time was built to carry natural gas about 25 kilometres into Trois Rivières to light street lamps. A decade later, one of the world's first crude oil pipelines was built right here in Canada, connecting the Petrolia oilfield in southwestern Ontario with the emerging refining hub at Sarnia.

Over the next 80 years or so, however, pipeline construction slowed in Canada, and by 1947, when Alberta emerged on the world oil stage with the Leduc No. 1 discovery, only three Canadian oil pipelines were active: one moved oil from Turner Valley to Calgary; another brought imported crude from Maine to Montreal; a third supplied the Sarnia refining hub with oil produced in the United States mid-continent region. Gas pipelines were even more scarce: Canadian Western Natural Gas built its Bow Island pipeline to Calgary in 1912, and 10 years later, a line was laid from fields around Viking in northern Alberta to Edmonton.

But the discovery of oil at Leduc by Imperial Oil--and a host of other finds around central Alberta in the following years--brought new demands for infrastructure to move all this Black Gold to market. In 1950, Interprovincial Pipeline Limited (which many of you now know as Enbridge Inc.) got the oil moving with its first line from Edmonton to Superior, Wisconsin. Three years later, the Trans Mountain Pipeline (it's now owned and operated by Kinder Morgan) began delivering Alberta crude to Vancouver, where it fed a small refinery market in the Lower Mainland and across the border in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. The same year, IPL extended its line from Superior to Sarnia.

In the 60 years since, various projects have come along, to bolster what was already there or to provide access to new supply basins, like the Norman Wells field in the Northwest Territories. Today, about 825,000 kilometres of pipelines criss-cross Canada, moving three million barrels a day of crude oil and liquids and 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day.

And you know what? Until recently, we never even thought about pipelines. They've always been there, they will always be there, and they remain the safest and most efficient way of moving oil and gas to market. High-profile exceptions (Enbridge's Michigan leak two summers ago, for example) not withstanding, pipelines hardly ever leak (two litres were spilled for every million litres transported through pipes between 2002 and 2009, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association says) and so we hardly ever talk about them. Until now.

With Barack Obama's (temporary) trashing of Keystone XL earlier this year, the storm of controversy that has erupted over Enbridge's Northern Gateway project and even the stirring of discontent that is emerging in the wake of Kinder Morgan's announcement this week that it had more than enough shipper support to justify doubling the capacity of the Trans Mountain line from Edmonton to Vancouver, pipelines are suddenly the topic du jour on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, where environmentalists, economists, political junkies and erstwhile social commentators are all adding their two cents to a debate that seems to go on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The goal of most who are tweeting or facebooking about pipelines is to get the pipelines shut down--they think that if they do that, the coastal waterways will remain pristine, the inland rainforests of British Columbia will remain untouched, and, oh yes, the massively ugly and evil oilsands will finally have to shut down. After all, with no way to get the dirty oil to market, there will be no incentive to continue developing the oilsands.

But here's the rub: there's a better chance that a snowball will survive five minutes in hell than the oilsands will shut down if Northern Gateway, or Trans Mountain or Keystone XL are blocked. In the meantime, rail companies are quickly ramping up their capacity to carry crude oil--whether from Alberta's oilsands or Idaho's Bakken--to thirsty refiners from Chicago to the Gulf Coast.

These plans seem to be flying completely under the radar of the Greens, whose main complaint about pipelines is the environmental damage that might result from a leaky pipeline. But I shudder to think of the mess that will be left behind the first time one of these 100-car crude unit trains runs off the tracks. And to borrow an oft-used phrase from the Green Grinches: it's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

-- Dale Lunan, Editor

What do Afsaneh Akmali, Jeffrey Borchert, Rob Watt, Brittany Smolders and Gerald Ford all have in common? They were all selected as featured photographers in Oilweek's 2011 Patch in Pictures contest, and had their photographic work featured in an issue of Oilweek last year.

Now, next question. What does Jamie Angus have in common with Don Gunn, Trevor Rubak, Peter Davis and Matthew Goffinet? Well, they too were also selected as feature photographers in Patch in Pictures 2011.

And question three? What sets Jamie apart from all those others I mentioned? Well, Jamie was the only photographer to be featured three separate times as a monthly Patch in Pictures winner, nailing the trifecta in May, November and December. And his November shot of lightning arcing over a Savanna rig drilling for Crescent Point near Dollard, Sask. earned Jamie bragging rights as Oilweek's inaugural Patch in Pictures contest winner - and a brand new iPad!

And the point of all this? Patch in Pictures, Season 2 is now underway, with another chance for photo bugs - amateur, semi-pro or pro - to get their work featured in the pages of Oilweek and earn a chance to win an iPad at the end of the year. Harlen Mackey of Viking and Gordon Shand of the Edmonton area have already caught the bug and been rewarded: their work was featured in the January and February editions, respectively, of Oilweek. Now we're looking for submissions for our March edition, and for every edition coming up this year.

For more information, and for a link to our submissions page, visit our Patch in Pictures page at Oilweek.com. Or if you want to skip all the rules and regs, you can jump straight to our submission page. Just remember, maximum file size is four megabytes, and the deadline for the March edition is coming up fast: Jan. 20 is when we've set the deadline, but we'll take submissions right up until Jan. 27.

So get snapping, and get your best efforts in to Patch in Pictures, Season 2!

-- Dale Lunan, Editor

{jacomment on}I've never been a big fan - or even a little fan - of David Suzuki, even though many consider him an icon of the Canadian environmental movement. Like many others in my generation, I watched the Nature of Things on CBC growing up, but mostly because it always had really neat animals in their natural habitat. I stopped watching it quite a while ago, when Suzuki started slagging the oil and gas industry using stale or, even worse, inaccurate "scientific" data. In recent years, The Nature of Things has become little more than a vehicle for Suzuki to raise funds for his foundation - it's no longer about science, or the environment, it's about money.

Suzuki's fund-raising activities have always been a little suspicious to me. Over the years, he's attracted around $10 million from various special interest groups south of the border - some of them legitimate environmental organizations anxious to use Suzuki's cachet here to target the oilsands, others are commercial entities with a vested interest in having a legitimate "front man" attack their competitors over perceived environmental wrongdoing.

But this Christmas season, Suzuki has reached a new low - even for him. His latest "Where Will Santa Live" campaign - you can check it out here http://bit.ly/uOmV4M - wraps the warrm fuzziness of the Christmas season in the cold scarf of climate change and insinuates that, without help, Santa's workshop will melt away, presumably coming to rest on the Lamonsonov Ridge, 1,000 metres deep in the Arctic Ocean. For donations ranging from about 20 bucks to 50 bucks, supporters can get one (1) e-card to send to their friend or a family member. Given that many of us send out upwards of 100 Christmas cards each year, this can get pretty expensive - even with a 100% tax receipt - but also very very lucrative for Mr. Suzuki and his band of enviro-elves.

This whole campaign smacks of opportunism at its worst - co-opting our warm feelings of Christmas and our kids' desire to ensure the preservation of Santa and his workshop and using them instead in shameless hucksterism, the proceeds of which will do virtually nothing to save Santa's workshop but will most certainly help Suzuki's enviro-elves spread even more of their environmental effluent, most of it based on half truths and, in some instances, outright lies.

In Oilweek's inaugural Green Grinch issue last March,  Suzuki caught from me a Grinch rating of 4 out of 5. I held back a little mostly because of his iconic status in Canada. The second Green Grinch edition is in preparation now, and I can tell you this much: Suzuki's rating will rise to the 5-Grinch maximum, and we'll be taking a closer look at exactly where his foundation's funding comes from - and how it's spent.

-- Dale Lunan, Editor