Terry Etam

As I spent a summer avoiding energy discussions wherever possible (harder than normal; funny how 15 years of energy policy calamity was uninteresting until record utility bills scorched J. Q. Public’s eyeballs), the lazy days in the sun brought some needed clarity about the energy world, a world over which a sheer madness has descended (Trudeau/Germany/LNG-begging/hydrogen-offering - need I say more?).  Encircling the globe is an energy turmoil and upheaval of surely historical proportions (I [Read more]

If there’s any point to energy writing, it is to perhaps try to pull together disparate bits of information that the average citizen is too busy to notice, the sort of random and arcane stats and events that only genuine weirdos devote their spare hours to. Truffle pigs find the truffles. People learning about energy from the daily news hour is like learning about anatomy by watching Jackass. To get the real story, follow the nerds. If someone hears an activist and/or federal cabinet minister [Read more]

On a back table in my office is a small pile of colour-coded maps that I don’t talk about much because they make me look like a madman. They are maps of Pennsylvania, documenting a semi-pathological and dogged fascination with US shale gas production. One pile shows all of Pennsylvania’s counties; the counties are colour-coded by either the number of producing gas wells or the cumulative gas produced since the start of the Appalachia shale revolution. The second, deeper level shows the [Read more]

The other week, I visited my mom in Saskatchewan, in a little town up in what is called the province’s northeast but really isn’t. It is the parkland border between farms and forests, no farther north than Edmonton. The region is sparsely populated; if you drew a circle around Momstown with, say, a 40 mile radius, that circle would include maybe ten thousand people.  Out of that circle comes, every year, thousands of head of cattle, enough for, give or take, a million steaks and five times that [Read more]

The other day, after a weekend in the Edmonton region, I found myself driving around southwest of the city on a backroad path in a deal the navigation system worked out for me on my behalf. I was involuntarily guided past the Leduc discovery well that heralded the oil boom. A few miles later, driving past beautiful acreages on the edge of a valley, I pondered the serenity of the landscape, the beautiful views, and lives i’ll never know, for better (mansion on a hill) or worse (current citizen [Read more]