Was anything sacred with Enron?
Apparently not, given fresh disclosures that the disgraced energy giant used Alberta as a testing ground in 1999 before allegedly manipulating the California electricity market in 2000.
In the process, it cheapened the name of Lord Stanley, who was Governor General of Canada in 1892 when he presented a trophy now known as the Stanley Cup — the holy grail of the National Hockey League and the most prized trophy in all of Canadian sport.
Evidence made public by Washington state authorities claims that Enron artificially inflated electricity prices in Alberta when the provincial government was in the midst of deregulating its power sector.
The scheme was code-named Project Stanley.
Exploiting holes in what was supposed to be a competitive market, Enron pocketed C$45 million in one 22-hour period by creating a phony power shortage on Alberta’s deregulating power grid and jacking up power prices by about ten-fold.
That’s according to documents filed by the Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington state. (The utility is trying to get judges to nullify a US$122 million lawsuit Enron has filed against it.)
But not everyone is buying the notion that Enron manipulated the market, given that it did not own power plants and would not have been able to control the market.
Martin Merritt, president of the Alberta Market Surveillance Administrator, the province’s deregulation watchdog, said he did not see how Enron was “able to play the market like a fiddle with no assets.”
However, the administrator warned the Canadian Competition Bureau in July 1999 that it had suspicions of bid-rigging behavior — an allegation the bureau was unable to confirm.
On Feb. 4, Alberta Energy Minister Greg Melchin demanded facts to back the speculation before he would support a public inquiry.
Even if the claims were substantiated, he said Alberta had no recourse because Enron is “no longer alive and our options are limited.”
But, by Feb. 7, Melchin was taking a more proactive line, asking the Snohomish utility if it had additional information on which his government could act.
“You don’t discount information as it comes,” he told reporters. “But you also acknowledge that you don’t have all the facts so you can’t jump to conclusions.”
—Gary Park
Alaska drillers set record with no lost time accidents in 2004
Alaska oil and gas drilling contractors had no lost time accidents in 2004. According to the Alaska Chapter of the International Association of Drilling Contractors this was the first year without LTAs in the state.
“2004 will go into the history books as very memorable because of the fact that all the main IADC drilling contractors combined — Nordic-Calista Services, Nabors Drilling Alaska, Doyon Drilling and Schlumberger — had zero LTAs,” IADC’s Alaska Chairman Udo Cassee told Petroleum News. Cassee is a field superintendent for Nordic-Calista.
On Jan. 22 the association handed out awards to rigs operating in the state in 2004 at its annual safety banquet at the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel.
During the award ceremony BP’s Gary Christman (BP), ConocoPhillips’ Marty Lemon and Unocal’s Dale Haynes “said a few words to congratulate the crews and share their vision on safety leadership,” Cassee said.
The evening was hosted by Cassee and Steve Laporte, IADC’s local safety officer. Both were re-elected to serve another year in these positions on the board.
LTA stats, rig awards
The LTA statistics supplied by IADC were as follows:
Doyon, Nabors, Nordic and Schlumberger
Total man-hours worked:
Land 1,792,959. Increase of 589,620 over 2003
Water 13,675. Decrease of 86,717 compared to 2003
Land and water combined 1,806,634 hours
Incident rates (defined as number of incidents per 200,000 man-hours):
Lost Time Accident rates, land and water combined
2003 LTA rate 0.8
2004 LTA rate 0
In comparison, U.S. land and water LTA incident rate for 2004 = 1.10 (~ 76,000,000 man-hours)
Total recordable rate (OSHA recordable)
2003 rate 3.35
2004 rate 1.45
In comparison U.S. land and water total recordable rate for 2004 = 4.14 (~ 76,000,000 man-hours)
The rig awards handed out by IADC for 2004 were as follows:
Doyon Drilling
Rig 14 – 1,085 days (Operator BP)
Rig 15 – 1,338 days
Rig 16 – 1,073 days (Operator BP)
Rig 19 – 1,179 days (Operator ConocoPhillips)
Rig 141 – 2,104 days (Operator ConocoPhillips)
Nabors Alaska Drilling
Rig 2-ES – 2,638 days (Operator BP)
Rig 3-S – 3,116 days (Operator ConocoPhillips)
Rig 4-ES – 764 days (Operator BP)
Rig 7-ES – 1,052 days (Operator ConocoPhillips)
Rig 9-ES – 401 days (Operator BP)
Rig 14E – 773 days (Operator Total)
Rig 129 – 522 days (Unocal)
Platforms (Steelhead) – 370 days (Operator Unocal)
Nordic Calista / Schlumberger
Rig 1 – 752 days (Operator BP)
Rig 2 – 554 (Operator BP)
Nordic Calista Services
Rig 3 – 1,305 days (Operator Conoco Phillips)
IADC’s mission is to “promote commitment to safety, preservation of the environment and advances in drilling technology,” Cassee said.
Working in the Alberta ‘gulag’ — at C$100,000 a year
Alberta is headed down the road to the brutal prison labor camps, the so-called gulags of the Stalin-era Soviet Union.
Tough to imagine, but that’s the claim made by Rob Kinsey, business manager for the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488 in an open letter to Premier Ralph Klein published as an advertisement in Edmonton newspapers.
He said the “special status” granted by the Alberta government in December to Canadian Natural Resources to hire non-union workers for the C$10.5 billion Horizon oil sands project will open the door for temporary foreign workers to supplant domestic laborers.
The advertisement said that would be “akin to a Russian Stalinist government creating a ‘gulag’ within the northern Alberta oil sands regions. Shame on You!”
Local 488, with 4,800 members, is one of 23 locals of 14 international unions negotiating for jobs on the Horizon project.
In a recorded telephone message, Kinsey said Canadian Natural had rejected demands for a Horizon wage premium of 18 to 20 percent and a guarantee that union members would be used for all stages of the project.
Real Doucet, senior vice president of oil sands at Canadian Natural, laughed at any notion that “someone who’s making C$100,000 a year working up in Fort McMurray is in a gulag. Well, we have different definitions. There is no such thing as cheap labor.”
He pledged that the company will hire Albertans and Canadians first, turning to foreign sources as a last resort.
Canadian Natural has previously said it might cast its hiring net in several South American, Middle East, Asian and African countries to avoid the costly overruns that have added billions of dollars to other oil sands projects because of an inability to fill the jobs with Canadians.
Doucet said shortages are already emerging in 24 of 53 trades, with the tightest squeeze affecting plumbers, carpenters, machinists and heavy-equipment operators.
