sdWhen the newly minted Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall arrived in Washington last week on his first official foreign trip, his first order of business was to clear up a small matter of geography. "We are not North Korea. We are not Iran," the energetic 42-year-old told anyone who would listen, including U.S. cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, energy executives and assorted government officials. Clarifying Saskatchewan's location outside the Axis of Evil was important, because Wall came to lobby for a waiver to exempt Canada from international rules on nuclear non-proliferation. It's not that "humble and unassuming Saskatchewan"--as Wall calls his province-wants nuclear weapons. It just happens to produce more than one-quarter of the world's uranium--and sits on some 750 million pounds of the stuff. "We are the Saudi Arabia of uranium," he says. And he would like to do something more lucrative than simply mining it: have private companies enrich it.
But that is an activity restricted to a few select countries, and Canada is not on the list. Wall wants Washington to back his quest at the next meeting of the G8 nations. "We want to look at the value chain--that includes nuclear medicine, research and development, and enrichment," Wall told Maclean's in an interview. "The market is very significant around the world. There are a number of new reactors planned in the U.S. and even more in China. The technology they are using is the kind that requires enriched uranium."
Uranium is just one part of Wall's grand vision for turning his traditionally struggling province, whose population has stagnated since 1929, into a high-tech "North American energy centre." Wall's centre-right Saskatchewan Party, which took over from the provincial NDP in November after a landslide election victory, foresees a financial bonanza in following Alberta's energy development lead. The premier informed his startled American audiences that Saskatchewan is the ninth biggest supplier of oil to the U.S.--already sending them more than Kuwait. And Saskatchewan is sitting on 1.2 billion barrels of recoverable conventional oil and an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of potential oil sands reserves. "The dinosaurs didn't stop dying at the Alberta border," he quips. Calgary-based company Oil-sands Quest has invested $160 million in exploring the province's oil sands. Wall's energy minister, Bill Boyd, says he hopes to see oil from the sands flowing in two years' time.
But Wall's visit and his energy-development agenda come at a particularly tense moment for Canadian oil interests in Washington. As Americans begin to become aware of the energy riches next door, they are also waking up to the environmental problems caused by strip mining, water consumption and carbon emissions related to their extraction. In December, President George W. Bush signed new energy legislation passed by Congress called the Energy Independence and Security Act, which includes a ban on the U.S. government purchasing alternative fuels that produce more carbon emissions than conventional petroleum. Depending on how the portion of the law known as Section 526 is interpreted, it could cover oil sands, which cause more carbon emissions than conventional oil. Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ottawa are concerned that a broad interpretation of the law could affect not only purchases by the U.S. government and the U.S. military, but also the private oil trade. Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson recently wrote a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman warning about "unintended consequences for both countries" if the energy bill is interpreted to apply to oil sands oil.
Wall's visit was part of an ongoing effort by Canada to rebrand the sands. Speaking to a luncheon organized by the Canadian American Business Council, the premier read out a letter to the editor of the Washington Post written by one Brian Granahan, a lawyer with the Environment Illinois Research & Education Center, talking about dirty Canadian oil. The letter referred to "tar sands oil produced through a destructive process that has deplorable consequences." Wall almost spit out the words: "Dirty Canadian oil? How about safe oil. Conflict-free oil... energy traded between economies inextricably linked--not only by commerce, but by history. By friendship. By family. By values. By freedom." Freedom oil. It has a marketable ring to it. Kind of like "conflict-free diamonds." Or "freedom fries."
Wall argues that he is committed to reducing the carbon footprint of the oil sands, a goal his government plans to invest in as part of its first budget, to be tabled next week. He also boasts that, compared to Alberta, the development of the Saskatchewan oil sands will be less environmentally destructive because they are buried much deeper under the earth. Too deep, in fact, to be strip-mined. Instead, the oil is extracted by a process of injecting steam underground and "sweating" out the oil. The water that is used does not come from drinkable surface water sources, but from groundwater.
Likewise, Wall and Boyd are promoting Saskatchewan as a world leader in so-called "carbon capture" technology, which takes CO2 emissions from large emitters and pumps them into geological formations underground. The largest carbon sequestration project in the world is in operation near Weyburn, Sask. CO2 emissions from a synthetic fuel plant in North Dakota--6,000 tonnes a day--are piped across the border and pumped underground. Not only is the CO2 safely stored, but the pressure forces Saskatchewan underground oil toward the surface, allowing oil company EnCana to extract 18,000 barrels per day. "We need to do a lot better job of telling this story," says Wall, noting that the international project gets some funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. He wants the U.S. to see Saskatchewan as part of its solution to energy independence. The governor of Montana is already musing about piping CO2 from Saskatchewan into caverns in his state. (Wall is also lobbying the U.S. government to help fund a new project to develop "clean coal" technologies in his coal-rich province.)
If Wall sounds optimistic, it's because things are looking heady for Saskatchewan these days. "We're not getting above our raisin' but we're feeling pretty self-assured," he says of the province's resources riches--including 80 per cent of Canada's durum wheat crop at a time of a looming world wheat shortage. Saskatchewan is also leading the nation in retail sales growth, wholesale trade growth, growth in average weekly earnings, in new car sales, in commercial construction, and in residential construction, and is predicted to have the strongest economic growth in Canada this year--3.5 per cent. Asked whether he plans to open up a Saskatchewan office within the Canadian Embassy to press his case year-round, Wall says it's "crystal clear" to him that Alberta's already established and controversial office "has made an impact." But he's still crunching the numbers. "There's a cost factor there. It's something we're looking at."
Meanwhile, Wall and Boyd had fun. They hobnobbed at a gala dinner at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, meeting the likes of John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia. They met with Bodman, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, and several members of Congress. By the end of his trip, Wall declares it a success. The energy bill? "We raised it on Capitol Hill and with the secretary of energy and I believe they are going to take another look at this," he says. On the uranium question, "There was a pretty positive reaction." Maybe so. But Bodman gave no concrete indication that anything was going to change on the energy bill, nor did he say that the U.S. would back Canada at the G8. Nonetheless, Wall plans to keep turning up the volume from Regina. "Right now we're a tree falling in the forest," he says. "We have to change that."Maclean's
