From BOE REPORT
Terry Etam
In 2025, China opened a breathtaking rail terminal facility called Chongqing East. The city is in mountainous terrain, and so building a large rail terminal is a compounded challenge. Nevertheless, at an estimated cost of $8 billion, a 1.2 million square meter facility over 8 levels was constructed after carving a flat space out of the side of a mountain. An estimated 2 million cubic meters of concrete went into it, along with 366,000 tonnes of steel. The terminal includes, as in, one facet, includes seven high speed rail lines that can host 400 meter long trains. Passengers can check baggage for air travel right from the facility, never touching it again until their final destination. It is no Communist-concrete bunker; it looks great inside, with a tree motif to the pillars, and an overall sense of a well-designed and functional mega-facility. You really should check out the link above; Chongqing East is an engineering tour de force.
The entire construction process, from blueprint to blasting to grand opening, took 38 months.
Once upon a time, Canada constructed an 1,100 kilometre pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, across some of the most challenging mountain terrain anywhere on earth, not to mention major waterways and wetlands. It was built in the early 1950s with 1950s-level technology (as in, virtually none). No computers, no laser-guided this or that, no GPS.
That pipeline, the original Trans Mountain line, was constructed in 30 months.
China is building things with the same fervour that we had 70 years ago.
Some sixty years after the completion of the original Trans Mountain line, it took 6 years, more than twice the time of the original, to construct a parallel pipeline in the same right of way, from 2018 to 2024. And that is for construction: the pipeline was initially proposed in 2012. It took 6 years of frustration for Kinder Morgan to throw in the towel, before the feds stepped in, and the entire process, from kick off proposal to completion, took 12 years and over $30 billion, far, far more than the Chongqing mega-facility. And the feds had it relatively easy, construction-wise;, opponents put up a fraction of the fight that they would have for Kinder Morgan.
Given the current state of the world, it is hard to find a person that doesn’t understand the imperative of getting things built, of securing supplies of critical components like energy, metals and minerals, of moving decisively to snap out of the regulatory slumber we’ve fallen into. That is why even our federal government has created a Major Projects office, or whatever it’s called; to facilitate construction of critical infrastructure.
I’ll let you decide how that is going. Here is Prime Minister Carney ‘articulating’ an answer about whether there is a proponent for a new pipeline. He fumbles around a bit then launches into an explicit set of warnings; do not be looking for anything to happen soon: “Thank you that first point in terms of the dynamic here, Alberta is the one proposing the pipeline bringing forward a private proponent for the pipeline so that’s that’s a process that’s underway with them. I will leave it more to them to be more explicit in terms of the answer but certainly their expectation and it shows in terms of the effort that’s been put into the agreement the specificity around the agreement, the timelines for the agreement, the expectation is that that will be the case and and then what follows from that is there’s a sequencing a regulatory well there’s a consultation sequencing with indigenous people they’re saying work with the problems of British Columbia moving through those and moving to that October date and I just wanna be very clear to everyone you have a – moving towards a designation if if various things are met – designation by the Major Project Office as a nation building project but then there’s a process of consultation to determine the conditions around that project as well and to answer your question through all of that a private proponent can be building out the um, the open season if you will, the backstop of the barrels associated with that..” {emphasis added]
Feeling comforted now?
Negativity sucks, and it is indeed cool to see the enthusiasm in everyone’s eyes at the very thought of infrastructure development progress. The energy sector has been dying to hear something like that for years. But there is no wisdom in evading what is in front of us, just past the wondrous enthusiasm.
First off, we have to ask: At what price progress? As baffling as it sounds, Alberta (and the rest of Canada) is about to “be fine” with a carbon tax of $130/tonne, which is being sold as good news because it is not $170/tonne. Has critical thinking gone on summer holiday already? Again, it sucks to just be critical, but come on, we have to face reality. From the desk of the Prime Minister of Canada, announcing a new National Energy Strategy: “That’s why we intend to adjust clean electricity regulations to provide the flexibility needed to keep energy costs for all Canadian families reliable and affordable, while reducing emissions and building the clean energy system of the future.” Note the messaging here: affordability for Canadian families is deemed critical; no mention of business costs. Which will, in case anyone has forgotten, add $6.55 to every gigajoule of natural gas consumed, and the long term forward price for Alberta natural gas is about $$2.60/GJ, meaning consumers can expect to pay over $9/GJ, when the comparable forward price in the US is currently about CAD $4.82GJ. Businesses don’t vote, and factories that are never built don’t get counted.
So much sounds good, like a National Energy Strategy. We really do need strategic thinking. But the “strategy” part is as much to do with staying in power as it is to do with building a maximally functioning national grid system. The PMO’s National Energy Strategy will begin with, you guessed it, consultations, with “provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples, utilities, and unions”, the eventual results of which said consultations will fed into a redesign of Canada’s entire electrical generation, transmission, distribution, storage and grid system. Consulting with…unions?!?! About what? What infrastructure builder ever consults with workers, unionized or otherwise, to see whether something should be built? Every single person reading this will be dead before there is agreement from that collection on something as grand a scale as that, particularly when the table is slanted towards that zombie-goal of Net Zero 2050…the National Energy Strategy even pencils in the ultimate flag of ignorance, the irreducible fact that they have no clue: “…we are also expanding support for energy-saving retrofits for up to one million households through financing, grants, and complementary measures. This includes making it easier for Canadians to transition from expensive propane, oil, and electric baseboard heating to more affordable electric heat pumps.” [Quick interlude to bash head on wall] Mass heat pump conversion amplifies every problem with the electrical system, by creating new demand peaks at exactly the worst time. This is Canada. It gets cold. Really freaking cold. When it does, heating systems have to work harder than ever, and more reliably than ever, which means that a million new heat pumps will, at the very worst/coldest hours of the calendar, artificially create a new load on the system and push us into a national danger zone on the coldest nights of the year.
Bah. Might as well be making whale sounds. Nothing stops that train.
But anyway, while we consult ourselves into oblivion in a contented state of Big Government food coma, consider this article from an astute group called Californians For Energy and Science, entitled: “India Can’t Cook. California Can’t Drive.” The author chronicles how “In India, families are queuing for hours to buy cooking gas. In California, drivers are paying $6.15 a gallon for gasoline. These are not separate crises. They are the same crisis – connected by a chemical called alkylate, a supply chain that runs through the Strait of Hormuz, and a war that has bene raging for three months.” It is a great article, outlining how a shortage of a single oddball product like alkylate has ramifications from Bollywood to Hollywood.
The point to take away from that article is that the world is in a precarious position, and it needs reliable sources of materials, metals, and particularly energy/energy products. Queued up Indian families and furious California motorists would rather not wait for Canada to make even more green it’s power system that is already 80 percent clean energy, as even the PMO points out in their news release.
Less consultation, more building. Less regulation, more path-clearing. Less stick, more carrots. Less self-strangulation.
Hmm. Y’all seem too comfortable at the moment, so let’s smash that in a red-hot second with a surefire remedy; let’s talk about Donald J. Trump. Not just Trump, let’s also talk about Javier Milei, an equally disruptive force in Argentinian politics. At the start of each of their political campaigns, everyone, save a few die-hard founding fans, laughed. Much scoffing. How ridiculous to think either could take their abrasive, obnoxious, ferociously independent views to the top of power.
And yet there they both are, leading two countries, blowing up institutions and mindsets and you name it.
Why is that? Why did people vote for these two controversial figures? Why did enough vote for them to comfortably be elected?
Their elections were successful because those two are not causes, they are effects. Each respective country’s systems had gone so far off the rails that the average voter was willing to take a chance not just on an outsider, but on a pugnacious, inflammatory outsider. They wanted change; they wanted it bad, and they wanted it big.
Canada feels like it is hosting similar rumblings down underground, tremors before an earthquake. But what we are getting is not change. It was a lunge at a comfort blanket, a smooth central banker – Stability! Calm! A Statesman! – and we got all that, but what we didn’t get was real change. A grand agreement that, after more than a year, permits the construction of an oil pipeline is not revolutionary, it is something that needs to happen in a few months. And they aren’t even close to actually approving it yet! The application has not even been filed with the lumbering beast, and despite the chance of a new pipeline being central to this whole whoop-de-do, it won’t even hit the Major Projects Office for another half a year. If all went perfectly well, construction would start in the fall of 2027, about two years after Alberta and the federal goverment took to the stage to announce their MOU that included public disclosure that a new oil pipeline was part of the agreement. The original Trans Mountain pipeline would have been nearly completed before this one can even start, in the best case scenario.
The world is wobbling crazily as current events threaten to dismantle decades worth of supply chain stability. There is a palpable sense among regular people that action is required. Because those regular people are voicing such thoughts, it is political instinct to reflect them back just like a parrot.
But we need more than that. The alternative is to wait until things are so bad that we welcome a Canuck Trump or Milei with open arms.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Photo ops are easy, turning the wheels is another matter
From BOE REPORT
Terry Etam
In 2025, China opened a breathtaking rail terminal facility called Chongqing East. The city is in mountainous terrain, and so building a large rail terminal is a compounded challenge. Nevertheless, at an estimated cost of $8 billion, a 1.2 million square meter facility over 8 levels was constructed after carving a flat space out of the side of a mountain. An estimated 2 million cubic meters of concrete went into it, along with 366,000 tonnes of steel. The terminal includes, as in, one facet, includes seven high speed rail lines that can host 400 meter long trains. Passengers can check baggage for air travel right from the facility, never touching it again until their final destination. It is no Communist-concrete bunker; it looks great inside, with a tree motif to the pillars, and an overall sense of a well-designed and functional mega-facility. You really should check out the link above; Chongqing East is an engineering tour de force.
The entire construction process, from blueprint to blasting to grand opening, took 38 months.
Once upon a time, Canada constructed an 1,100 kilometre pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, across some of the most challenging mountain terrain anywhere on earth, not to mention major waterways and wetlands. It was built in the early 1950s with 1950s-level technology (as in, virtually none). No computers, no laser-guided this or that, no GPS.
That pipeline, the original Trans Mountain line, was constructed in 30 months.
China is building things with the same fervour that we had 70 years ago.
Some sixty years after the completion of the original Trans Mountain line, it took 6 years, more than twice the time of the original, to construct a parallel pipeline in the same right of way, from 2018 to 2024. And that is for construction: the pipeline was initially proposed in 2012. It took 6 years of frustration for Kinder Morgan to throw in the towel, before the feds stepped in, and the entire process, from kick off proposal to completion, took 12 years and over $30 billion, far, far more than the Chongqing mega-facility. And the feds had it relatively easy, construction-wise;, opponents put up a fraction of the fight that they would have for Kinder Morgan.
Given the current state of the world, it is hard to find a person that doesn’t understand the imperative of getting things built, of securing supplies of critical components like energy, metals and minerals, of moving decisively to snap out of the regulatory slumber we’ve fallen into. That is why even our federal government has created a Major Projects office, or whatever it’s called; to facilitate construction of critical infrastructure.
I’ll let you decide how that is going. Here is Prime Minister Carney ‘articulating’ an answer about whether there is a proponent for a new pipeline. He fumbles around a bit then launches into an explicit set of warnings; do not be looking for anything to happen soon: “Thank you that first point in terms of the dynamic here, Alberta is the one proposing the pipeline bringing forward a private proponent for the pipeline so that’s that’s a process that’s underway with them. I will leave it more to them to be more explicit in terms of the answer but certainly their expectation and it shows in terms of the effort that’s been put into the agreement the specificity around the agreement, the timelines for the agreement, the expectation is that that will be the case and and then what follows from that is there’s a sequencing a regulatory well there’s a consultation sequencing with indigenous people they’re saying work with the problems of British Columbia moving through those and moving to that October date and I just wanna be very clear to everyone you have a – moving towards a designation if if various things are met – designation by the Major Project Office as a nation building project but then there’s a process of consultation to determine the conditions around that project as well and to answer your question through all of that a private proponent can be building out the um, the open season if you will, the backstop of the barrels associated with that..” {emphasis added]
Feeling comforted now?
Negativity sucks, and it is indeed cool to see the enthusiasm in everyone’s eyes at the very thought of infrastructure development progress. The energy sector has been dying to hear something like that for years. But there is no wisdom in evading what is in front of us, just past the wondrous enthusiasm.
First off, we have to ask: At what price progress? As baffling as it sounds, Alberta (and the rest of Canada) is about to “be fine” with a carbon tax of $130/tonne, which is being sold as good news because it is not $170/tonne. Has critical thinking gone on summer holiday already? Again, it sucks to just be critical, but come on, we have to face reality. From the desk of the Prime Minister of Canada, announcing a new National Energy Strategy: “That’s why we intend to adjust clean electricity regulations to provide the flexibility needed to keep energy costs for all Canadian families reliable and affordable, while reducing emissions and building the clean energy system of the future.” Note the messaging here: affordability for Canadian families is deemed critical; no mention of business costs. Which will, in case anyone has forgotten, add $6.55 to every gigajoule of natural gas consumed, and the long term forward price for Alberta natural gas is about $$2.60/GJ, meaning consumers can expect to pay over $9/GJ, when the comparable forward price in the US is currently about CAD $4.82GJ. Businesses don’t vote, and factories that are never built don’t get counted.
So much sounds good, like a National Energy Strategy. We really do need strategic thinking. But the “strategy” part is as much to do with staying in power as it is to do with building a maximally functioning national grid system. The PMO’s National Energy Strategy will begin with, you guessed it, consultations, with “provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples, utilities, and unions”, the eventual results of which said consultations will fed into a redesign of Canada’s entire electrical generation, transmission, distribution, storage and grid system. Consulting with…unions?!?! About what? What infrastructure builder ever consults with workers, unionized or otherwise, to see whether something should be built? Every single person reading this will be dead before there is agreement from that collection on something as grand a scale as that, particularly when the table is slanted towards that zombie-goal of Net Zero 2050…the National Energy Strategy even pencils in the ultimate flag of ignorance, the irreducible fact that they have no clue: “…we are also expanding support for energy-saving retrofits for up to one million households through financing, grants, and complementary measures. This includes making it easier for Canadians to transition from expensive propane, oil, and electric baseboard heating to more affordable electric heat pumps.” [Quick interlude to bash head on wall] Mass heat pump conversion amplifies every problem with the electrical system, by creating new demand peaks at exactly the worst time. This is Canada. It gets cold. Really freaking cold. When it does, heating systems have to work harder than ever, and more reliably than ever, which means that a million new heat pumps will, at the very worst/coldest hours of the calendar, artificially create a new load on the system and push us into a national danger zone on the coldest nights of the year.
Bah. Might as well be making whale sounds. Nothing stops that train.
But anyway, while we consult ourselves into oblivion in a contented state of Big Government food coma, consider this article from an astute group called Californians For Energy and Science, entitled: “India Can’t Cook. California Can’t Drive.” The author chronicles how “In India, families are queuing for hours to buy cooking gas. In California, drivers are paying $6.15 a gallon for gasoline. These are not separate crises. They are the same crisis – connected by a chemical called alkylate, a supply chain that runs through the Strait of Hormuz, and a war that has bene raging for three months.” It is a great article, outlining how a shortage of a single oddball product like alkylate has ramifications from Bollywood to Hollywood.
The point to take away from that article is that the world is in a precarious position, and it needs reliable sources of materials, metals, and particularly energy/energy products. Queued up Indian families and furious California motorists would rather not wait for Canada to make even more green it’s power system that is already 80 percent clean energy, as even the PMO points out in their news release.
Less consultation, more building. Less regulation, more path-clearing. Less stick, more carrots. Less self-strangulation.
Hmm. Y’all seem too comfortable at the moment, so let’s smash that in a red-hot second with a surefire remedy; let’s talk about Donald J. Trump. Not just Trump, let’s also talk about Javier Milei, an equally disruptive force in Argentinian politics. At the start of each of their political campaigns, everyone, save a few die-hard founding fans, laughed. Much scoffing. How ridiculous to think either could take their abrasive, obnoxious, ferociously independent views to the top of power.
And yet there they both are, leading two countries, blowing up institutions and mindsets and you name it.
Why is that? Why did people vote for these two controversial figures? Why did enough vote for them to comfortably be elected?
Their elections were successful because those two are not causes, they are effects. Each respective country’s systems had gone so far off the rails that the average voter was willing to take a chance not just on an outsider, but on a pugnacious, inflammatory outsider. They wanted change; they wanted it bad, and they wanted it big.
Canada feels like it is hosting similar rumblings down underground, tremors before an earthquake. But what we are getting is not change. It was a lunge at a comfort blanket, a smooth central banker – Stability! Calm! A Statesman! – and we got all that, but what we didn’t get was real change. A grand agreement that, after more than a year, permits the construction of an oil pipeline is not revolutionary, it is something that needs to happen in a few months. And they aren’t even close to actually approving it yet! The application has not even been filed with the lumbering beast, and despite the chance of a new pipeline being central to this whole whoop-de-do, it won’t even hit the Major Projects Office for another half a year. If all went perfectly well, construction would start in the fall of 2027, about two years after Alberta and the federal goverment took to the stage to announce their MOU that included public disclosure that a new oil pipeline was part of the agreement. The original Trans Mountain pipeline would have been nearly completed before this one can even start, in the best case scenario.
The world is wobbling crazily as current events threaten to dismantle decades worth of supply chain stability. There is a palpable sense among regular people that action is required. Because those regular people are voicing such thoughts, it is political instinct to reflect them back just like a parrot.
But we need more than that. The alternative is to wait until things are so bad that we welcome a Canuck Trump or Milei with open arms.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
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