EDMONTON - A candidate to lead Alberta's new United Conservative Party says one way to jump-start the province's lagging oil industry may be to buy a piece of Manitoba. Jeff Callaway says the province should look at buying the port of Churchill on Hudson Bay and shipping oil there by pipeline. "This has so many benefits not just for Alberta, but for Western Canada and Canada broadly," Callaway said at the legislature Tuesday. He says tankers in Churchill could carry oil [Read more]

CALGARY - Where some see only a jumble of rusted pipes and black tanks jutting from a weed-infested yard in a prairie grain field, Tyler Visscher sees opportunity. The 31-year-old Red Deer, Alta., electrician is trying to build an oil and gas company the hard way, by scouring the Orphan Well Association's list of parentless wells in Alberta in hopes of picking out a few winners. He "adopted" his first well two years ago — bought it, actually — and is now wading through a "whack [Read more]

CALGARY - The federal-provincial panel conducting an environmental review of the proposed Frontier oilsands mine project in northern Alberta has been ordered to consider its impact on Wood Buffalo National Park as requested by the UN's World Heritage Committee. In a report in March based on a visit to the 45,000-square-kilometre park, a world heritage site since 1983, the UN agency warned of risk from industrial development and said the park could be designated "in danger" if Canada [Read more]

EDMONTON - Sluggish oil prices are forcing Alberta to dip into its reserve fund and look for more in-house savings to keep its $10.5-billion deficit from sliding further into the red. In his first-quarter fiscal update, Finance Minister Joe Ceci said the province had expected the West Texas Intermediate benchmark oil price to average out at US$55 a barrel this year. Instead, it's hovering below US$49 a barrel and isn't expected to rise much in the near term. "The forecast [Read more]

EDMONTON - As governments and regulators consider new rules for methane, a poll suggests nearly three-quarters of Albertans want tighter controls on the release of a potent greenhouse gas from oil and gas facilities. The poll, done by EKOS research and funded by Environmental Defence, says 71 per cent of those surveyed want regulations on methane release to be at least as strict as those in the U.S. "We wanted to demonstrate that people in Alberta, in particular, want to see this [Read more]