Canada 'most important energy partner,' U.S. envoy says

Canada’s oil is the environmentally responsible choice for the United States, Canada’s natural resources minister said in Chicago Tuesday. Joe Oliver said Canada is and wants to remain the U.S.’s most important energy partner, building on a long and multi-layered partnership between the two countries. “Our countries share the same GHG-emission-reduction targets,” he said in a noon speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “We are both committed to environmental protection and to continually improving technology.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is seeking to counter opposition to TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline, a project crucial for boosting Canada’s economy and Harper’s plans to make the country an energy superpower to rival Saudi Arabia. Harper, at an event Thursday moderated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said there is a strong case for the U.S. government to approve the pipeline, citing the prospects for job creation and North American energy independence.

Americans are more supportive of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline than Canadians are, according to a poll by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

WASHINGTON — Canada has taken action to protect the climate during the more than four years it has waited for U.S. approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and there’s little more it can do in the short term, the country’s ambassador to the United States said. As the U.S. State Department delays approval of TransCanada Corp’s Keystone pipeline, which would link Alberta’s oil sands to refineries and ports in Texas, speculation has emerged that Canada could take further action on the climate to help make it easier for the United States to approve the project.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada is pressing the U.S. on every diplomatic level to approve TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline. “We are doing that at every level of the government and in coordination with the province of Alberta and others,” Harper said at an even in Calgary. “We really do have a Team Canada approach to this.”

OTTAWA — A new report estimates Canada is losing billions of dollars in unrealized revenues because of its inability to efficiently get its oil to foreign markets. CIBC economists project that the country will continue to lose on average $15-billion a year from the price differential between world oil prices and what its producers get for shipments mostly to the United States. That represents about 5% of gross domestic economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

THE CANADIAN PRESSThe Alberta government is continuing to press its case for the Keystone XL pipeline by taking out an ad, shown in this h

On the eve of U.S. president Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall is leading a campaign to score swift approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, along with ten other American state governors. Mr. Wall sent a letter to the president on Thursday, noting the line is crucial to U.S. energy security. “With the Keystone XL Pipeline, U.S. Imports from Canada, a democratic friend and ally, could reach 4 million barrels a day by 2020, twice what is currently imported from the Persian Gulf,” the letter reads.