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'Be bold, aim high' — Dinning's vision Frontrunner to succeed Klein as Alberta premier wants to stop shipping province’s unprocessed resources to U.S., China Gary Park Petroleum News Canadian Correspondent
Beyond pledging that he will not seek re-election, Ralph Klein won’t put a firm date on his departure from politics, although the betting is later this year.
That hasn’t prevented Jim Dinning from building what many view as an insurmountable lead in the unofficial race to succeed Klein as Alberta’s premier.
It has been a carefully crafted process of image-building and grooming for the top post.
For 11 years he was a provincial cabinet minister, half of that time as Klein’s finance minister charged with overhauling the Alberta economy.
Since 1997, Dinning, 53, has been in the private sector, as a vice president of TransAlta and lately as chairman of the Western Financial Group.
He has taken great care to keep his overt political ambitions under wraps and avoid any suggestion that he is criticizing the government or Klein. Alberta’s energy future But that ended June 22 when Dinning laid out his vision for Alberta’s energy future.
“We need to be bold. We need to aim high,” he told the American Association of Petroleum Geologists conference in Calgary.
Dinning said Alberta’s vast natural resources storehouse provides a unique opportunity to upgrade and refine the assets in the province rather than just shipping raw materials to the United States and China.
He said Alberta has only started to “tap into the potential of what could be done right here in Alberta.
“Alberta should be the leading center of innovation and active innovation in this part of the energy industry and if we are going to get the maximum value out of all the carbon we have in Canada we have to think in terms of a fully integrated energy system,” he said.
Dinning said Alberta is the “sweet spot” where geology and geography come together in a world-class opportunity to develop conventional oil, natural gas, heavy oil, synthetic crude, bitumen, coal, coalbed methane and petrochemical feedstock.
He endorsed a “hybrid of public policy tools” such as royalty relief, tax credits, capital cost allowance and technology grants to promote resource extraction.
However, he was emphatic that the Alberta government should stop short of taking an equity position in any major projects, although he endorsed hiking government’s annual allocation to the Alberta Energy Research Institute to C$40 million from C$15 million-$18 million. Alternatives needed for upgrading bitumen Dinning paid special attention to the need for finding alternatives to natural gas in upgrading raw bitumen from the oil sands and the future of clean coal in Alberta.
“Injecting natural gas into oil sands to produce oil is like turning gold into lead,” he said, arguing that coal, coke and bitumen could all lower the reliance on gas.
He referred to industry efforts to reduce gas consumption such as the Nexen-OPTI Canada partnership that will gasify all bitumen produced at the 70,000 barrel-per-day Long Lake project; Petrobank Energy and Resources’ Whitesands project to rely on in-situ combustion to heat the reservoir and melt the bitumen; and Suncor Energy’s plans to produce synthetic gas and help power the overall operation.
“These are remarkable accomplishments and what makes them even more significant is that they aren’t radical solutions,” Dinning said. “It’s simply taking … existing technologies and putting them together in a brand new way.”
An active crusader in downplaying coal’s historical stigma as a dirty fuel, he praised efforts to remove pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen during the burning process.
“Coal is predictably inexpensive,” while gas is volatile and currently high-priced, he said.
“Coal burning as clean as natural gas is a great aspiration,” Dinning said.
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