Tag Archives: Oil

A Century of Petroleum Extraction at Norman Wells

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[Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the original text because our website does not yet support Dene orthographies. For a .pdf version of this post in which Dene words and place names are displayed correctly, click here.] Petroleum Histories Project Team Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories is the site of the first oil and gas operation in the Canadian… Read more »

Half Oil and Half Green: The Southern Roots of the Prairie West’s Anti-Environmental Rhetoric

Louis Reed-Wood This past autumn, Aatash Amir, a Vancouver man concerned about emissions caused by gas-powered leaf blowers, circulated an online petition to have them banned in his hometown of Saskatoon. Upon posting the petition to a local Facebook group, he quickly received a flood of hateful comments, ranging from racist remarks, threats of violence, and calls for Amir to… Read more »

A Big Fracking Deal

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By Daniel Macfarlane The recent showdown between Native protestors and police over “fracking” in New Brunswick brought together several contentious issues that have simmering, and periodically boiling over, in Canadian society as of late (an interactive map of New Brunswick fracking can be found here). Obviously one of them, and probably the most prominent, is the Canadian state’s past and… Read more »

The History of Oil Pipeline Spills in Alberta, 2006-2012

By Sean Kheraj Late Thursday evening on June 7, 2012, the Sundre Petroleum Operators Group, a not-for-profit society, notified Plains Midstream Canada of a major oil pipeline failure near Sundre, Alberta that spilled an early estimate of between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels of light sour crude oil (~159-477 cubic metres) into Jackson Creek, a tributary of the Red Deer River…. Read more »

Funneling Controversy: The Keystone XL Pipeline

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Transborder pipelines are nothing new. There is a long history, forgive the pun, of such enterprises in North America. In fact, Canada has historically been a pipeline pioneer. Yet the Keystone XL project has attracted what is likely unprecedented environmental opposition for a transnational pipeline, including protests featuring celebrities and arrests outside of the White House. Perhaps this pipeline has become a potent symbol of wider dissatisfaction with our current petro-regimes and environmental approaches?

Alberta’s Oil Spill History

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By Sean Kheraj On Friday, 29 April 2011, Plains Midstream Canada quietly issued a press release, informing the public of a crude oil spill from the Rainbow Pipeline east of the Peace River in northern Alberta near Little Buffalo, AB. Four days later, following the Canadian federal election, Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) announced that 28,000 barrels of crude… Read more »