Repsol may sell New Brunswick LNG port #nlpoli

Spanish oil and gas company Repsol may be  looking to sell its  interest in the Saint John New Brunswick liquefied natural gas facility.  The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal reported the news on July 21:

On Thursday, the Spanish oil and gas giant told shareholders it was considering the idea of getting rid of some of its liquefied natural gas business to help shore up its finances.

This includes the potential sale of the Canaport terminal in east Saint John, in which it has a 75 per cent stake. Irving Oil, Limited, owns the other 25 per cent.

The move comes on the heels of the expropriation of Repsol’s majority interest in Argentinian oil and gas company YPF by the Argentinian government.  The government did not pay Repsol compensation for the seized assets.

Repsol is reportedly taking legal action and is looking at options to raise cash in the meantime.  One of those options includes divesting of North American natural gas assets.

-srbp-

The tone at the top - federal version #nlpoli

Marni Soupcoff has got it right about the campaign finance scandal currently swirling around federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue (pronounced Pen-ah-shoe-ay).  People should be concerned about the money Peter Penashue used to get elected:

The part that stands out is the involvement of a federal member of parliament who seems to have, in the absence of an ability to balance his own campaign books, used money that was meant for the Innu community to get himself elected. Not only has he has not been taken to task for this by his Conservative government. He remains a cabinet minister. Now that the media has discovered the loan and Mr. Penashue’s questionable campaign spending, he is finally being asked the sort of questions for which Innu residents surely would like some answers.

As Chief Justice Derek Green reminded us in his report on the the House of Assembly patronage scandal, the way officials and politicians respond to issues such as accountability is set by the tone at the top.

Soupcoff said:

If the Conservatives truly believed in maintaining a government of principle, they would be demanding answers from Mr. Penashue about why money that was meant for a deprived First Nations community ended up in his campaign coffers.

Let’s see what happens.

-srbp-

There’s reality and … #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale decided to talk about reality on Monday.

A reality check she called it:

“Everybody sees what’s happening with the price of oil, and I see every day what that’s doing to our budget,” the premier said.  [CBC online story]

Dunderdale warned that the provincial government’s deficit this year might reach $700 million. her forecast in the spring was $250 million.  Next year it could be a billion, she ventured.

Now that is on an accrual basis, of course.  On a cash basis, the current provincial government will face a deficit of more than $1.06 billion if oil actually manages to average US$124 a barrel.

Reality Check: drops and buckets version #nlpoli

Via labradore, a chart that plots Conservative unsustainable public spending since 2003 with recently announced controls on discretionary spending.

-srbp-

Magical Thinking and the Muskrat Falls Tax #nlpoli

Muskrat Falls seems to be intimately connected to magic, at least in some people’s minds.

For a while there, the gang at Nalcor sounded like they had found a way to make electricity and then ship it back upstream to Churchill Falls where it would be converted back to water. Sort of a water to wine to water miracle.

Not surprisingly, it turned out to be crap.

More Muskrat Falls Sunk Cost #nlpoli

That $350 million in sunk costs from Monday morning’s post wasn’t the whole story, of course. 

You’ll find more detail – and lots more cash – documented in the public utilities board’s final report on Muskrat Falls.

Rae backs Muskrat…sort of #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Big screaming CBC headline:

Federal Liberals support Muskrat Falls project:  Rae

Then you read the story.

Sunk Cost – Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

The chart below is taken from a Nalcor information hand-out describing the project’s capital expenditures to the end of March 2011.

What that covers are the various costs for engineering, staff, advertising and communications and anything else that the Labrador project office has spent getting ready to build the project.

The pre-2003 figures include $57 million spent between 1998 and the end of September 2004, the details of which the provincial government released in 2004.

-srbp-

Ya wanna know what stupid is? #nlpoli #cdnpoli

According to information supplied to the news media – and widely reported already – the helicopter from 444 Squadron used for a training flight than ended with a bit of fishing for the crew six weeks ago was available for search and rescue missions.

And if that re-tasking wouldn’t have been enough, the squadron had another aircraft on stand-by anyway to meet any call for civilian search and rescue service, which, by the way, is not the squadron’s primary job.

None of that stopped CBC from turning a photo of the trip into a scandal.  But to complain about that though would be to complain about dogs barking:  that’s the shit they do especially when it comes to a potential ratings driver like a controversy spun entirely out of the imaginations of people in a newsroom. 

Dazed and Confused: Swinimer version #nlpoli

You know things are bad when even the people who back Muskrat Falls without question start challenging stuff that has long ago been proven correct.

The heir to the Moon Man’s crown got some things right.  If you consider that the cost for Emera of building the Nova Scotia line is a trade for electricity, then they will get it for about 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour.

And then everything went horribly wrong for Jack.

Emera will get the power for 35 years, not 20 like Jack claimed.  They will never see a price increase for it ever. That’s because they are getting the electricity for free, in effect.

Meanwhile, the people who own the river making the electricity will see their electricity go up regularly for those 35 years.

Around the 2:00 mark, Jack claims the line for the electricity will be more expensive than the dam itself.  Nalcor’s figures put the cost for the dam at around $2.9 billion and the line to Soldier’s Pond at around $2.1 billion.  Those figures are not correct but let’s go with them for now.

He claims it will only cost two or three cents a kilowatt hour to make the electricity.  As Nalcor explained to the public utilities board, Muskrat falls electricity would cost about seven times that if you used the conventional way of pricing it.  By spreading the cost over more than fifty years, Nalcor can get the price to consumers down to a mere two and a half times Jack’s number.

As things keep going, Jack just gets worse.  By the time he’s done he claims that electricity for export will cost less than the electricity for people in St. John’s.  He gets on with some malarkey about water otherwise spilling over the dam.  The only reason Nalcor can give power to Nova Scotia for free under the proposed deal and think about selling it anywhere outside this province for less than it costs to make it is because the people of this province are going to pay for everything at Muskrat Falls, in full, plus profit.  They will only use about 40% of the juice but they will pay for 100% of the project’s output.

Jack finishes with a flourish.  Something about Internet bloggers or other.  Seems he doesn’t like those people.

Then he adds that there are none so blind as those who will not see.

That is true.

Unfortunately for Jack, that is just another one of his “own goal” efforts.  You see, Jack is sadly misinformed but thinks everyone else is wrong.  What’s worse he fights with people like randy who try and correct him. You can’t get any more blind than that, Jack.

His best one to date, though, was at the public utilities board hearings.  Swinimer finished off his presentation by admonishing the board to ignore ex-politicians, bloggers and…you guessed it …the people who call open lines shows.

Come to think of it, that last bit turns out to be good advice.

-srbp-

New Page: The Ghost in the Turbines #nlpoli

Look up and you’ll see a new page:  The Ghost in the Turbines.

You’ll eventually find there all the major SRBP posts on Labrador hydroelectric development from the earliest days to the latest ones. 

We’ve started out with the recent series that – for want of a better title – is just going down in history as the July 2012 series. The rest will be grouped by series title (if appropriate) or by topic such as “Financial”. 

There are a lot of posts on this topic, especially since November 2010, so it will take a while to get the links in place.  Keep checking back, though because it will be done before too long. 

-srbp-

The Stuff We Don’t Know #nlpoli

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know.

We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know.

And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld will likely be best remembered for the 30 seconds or so that it took those words to come out of his mouth during a media briefing on the lack of evidence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction.

As tortured as the words seem to be, Rumsfeld actually describes the fundamental problem that bedevils all of us who are trying to do anything. 

It is called uncertainty.

Community Values, Part Deux #nlpoli

Political science grad student John Samms’ has lengthy post on the antics of local politicians on Twitter.

To complain about the asinine behaviour of local politicians these days is like complaining that monkeys in the zoo sit around their cage masturbating and flinging their poo at each other.

It’s what they do.

Don’t criticise them because they can’t do anything more than jerk off and toss crap. If you want more, look somewhere else.

And if you really want a change, then vote for someone else when you get the chance.

It’s that simple.

-srbp-

Felix Collins: laughingstock #nlpoli

labradore takes issue with a letter to the editor by justice minister Felix Collins.

He systematically demonstrates that Collins’ claim about the “frivolous and vexatious” provisions in Bill 29 are wrong.

labradore calls it a convenient omission on Collins’ part.

To be fair to Collins, you cannot omit what you likely did not know in the first place.

-srbp-

Going down by the front end #nlpoli

In the late 1980s, the Progressive Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador committed more than $11 million  - ultimately $22 million -  to a plan to grow cucumbers and tomatoes using hydroponic technology developed by Philip Sprung.

Sprung predicted his technology would grow almost seven million pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes in its first year of operation and upwards of nine million by the end of five years.  Sprung had little evidence to back the claim from his test facility in Alberta.

An assessment by provincial officials concluded that the Sprung’s projections were impossible to attain.  Aside from any technological miracles, the Sprung predictions would need the average daily sunlight of Cairo to stand a chance of coming true.  Mount Pearl  - the site chosen for the greenhouses – didn’t even come close to those light levels in the very best years.

Still, the government persisted.

Executive Politics and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

In this series, we are not concerned with whether or not the Muskrat Falls project is good or bad. That is a separate issue.

Nor are we presenting information you shouldn’t already have.  Very little of what you will read should come as a surprise, especially if you  read SRBP regularly.

Rather this series is an effort to develop some explanations about why the provincial government’s energy company has been working on the Lower Churchill Project continuously for 15 years and yet has produced nothing.

High Politics and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

“[M]ega-projects”, writes political scientist Will Jennings,” exhibit a ‘performance paradox’ …being prevalent and popular among planners despite suffering from extremely poor track records in terms of completion times, cost escalations and shortfalls in projected revenues and economic benefits.”

Jennings looked at several projects to see why the projects tended to take a long time to finish or experienced huge cost over-runs or generally didn’t live up to expectations.

This week SRBP is looking at Muskrat Falls using Jennings’ four categories of factors that affect project performance.  The first of these is “high politics”.

Cost Over-Runs and Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

When announced in November 2010, the Muskrat Falls dam, the line to the island the connection to Nova Scotia were supposed to cost $6.2 billion.

The dam and the line to the island were priced at $5.0 billion.  The Nova Scotia line was supposed to cost $1.2 billion.

As it turned out, those numbers were wrong. 

Here’s what we have learned since then.

The Inevitable Muskrat Falls #nlpoli

One reporter tweeted his impression of the attitude toward Muskrat Falls that seems to come from the provincial governments in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia. While the content was one thing,  he felt people should note the tone:

The attitude towards Muskrat is increasingly one of both NL and NS being locked in. A course change would be prohibitively expensive.

A similar comment turned up in his story for the Friday edition of the Telegram, illustrated by a quote from Premier Kathy Dunderdale at her scrum after meeting with Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter:

“What’s the alternative? To either ration energy or sit up in the dark. We have to pay for energy.  Where’s the least-cost alternative?” Dunderdale said.

Dunderdale’s comments are preposterous, of course.  There are plenty of alternatives, some of them considerably less costly than the one she has fixated on.  That fixation is cause for concern about the way the provincial government is barreling ahead with this project.

SRBP talked about this in May - here, here, and here  - in posts on making bad decisions. What’s more interesting these days is looking at Dunderdale and Muskrat Falls in light of a recent analysis of megaprojects and decision-making.

Hebron Dispute: No more give-aways, indeed #nlpoli

When it comes to the Hebron project, Premier Kathy Dunderdale should know exactly what went wrong with the development deal between the province and the companies.

She should know every give-away in it.  After all, she was natural resources minister at the time.