Why can’t we just get along? This regular installment of our Canadian Podcast series with Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director, and Terry Etam, Energy Author, and Humanitarian Extraordinaire.
We have an absolute blast talking about all things energy between the US and Canada! We could solve the world’s problems if the US and Canadian governments would listen to our humorous solutions.
Enjoy the podcast on all platforms and our App in the Google Play Store and iPhone App Store. The total transcript follows the video and we are not responsible for transcription errors unless they add value or make us funnier.
Stu Turley, Sandstone Welcome to the podcast and I am Stuart Turley, President of Sandstones Group, and welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast, we have a thrilling episode with two of my favorite people. They are our Canadian International Group. And we’ve got Heidi McKilliop. She is the movie heiress of a stranded nation that she’s put out. She’s got another new movie coming out. And Heidi, welcome, and thank you for stopping by.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:00:35] Thank you. I’m so happy to be here again.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:00:38] And then we have Terry. I’m one of his fans. He is a contributor to the BOE report, and I love his straightforward. It is either my way or your politically incorrect. I’m just kidding. He is a fabulous author and he’s got a book out there and you need to stop by and get welcome, Terry. We are glad you’re here.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:01:02] I’m happy to be here also.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:01:04] And for our listeners, I have to tell you, this will be our third podcast. And I really appreciate you guys. We’ve had so much fun that we are going to go up to Canada and have a interview session with people at bars. I’m sorry. It’s just playing a lot of fun.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:01:25] You know, it’s friendly Canadians, so people will talk to you.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:01:28] Oh, yeah. And I’ll talk to Iraq. So we’re going to have some serious fun.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:01:33] After two or three hours, it gets a little different. But the first couple are great.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:01:37] That’s right.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:01:38] You bet. I’ll tell you, you know, Heidi, you’re the humanitarian Terry. You’re the cranky Brad and I. And I’m the dope. So we’ve got a Three Musketeers kind of gig going on here. But let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on. And, Terry, the IAEA just put out this really entertaining novel that I thought was pretty stupid and I thought it was more politically not so good because none of the numbers seem to match up. What are your thoughts on that new IAEA net-zero report?
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:02:19] It was either really stupid or it was really clever, and I kind of think it was more clever than I wrote an article about it, which was smart as he is. It can be. But I think what they did is they said the idea that for a long time they’ve had a really good research arm. They know their stuff. They compile global stats on petroleum and whatever. Sometimes their predictions are too optimistic or pessimistic or whatever. But they put in the effort in the past couple of years, it seems like the gun has been put to their head to go to the new way of thinking that we’re all going renewables. And so there’s been comments about that in others, political pressure applied to them as an organization saying you got to quit forecasting all of this reliance on fossil fuels because it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it sounds like they’re kind of like they started marching in line with everybody else just because we all live in North Korea now. So they’re just saying what they have to say to get by. And so I think that they commissioned to report that said, we will show you how to get to net-zero emissions by 20, 50. And it’s fantasy land. But I think I think their point maybe was that what you’re asking? This is how challenging it is to get to where you want. Yes. The technology that will be required doesn’t even exist. Yes. We can’t even we can’t have any more fossil fuel spending after this year, which is just totally insane. Right. So I think that their report was maybe a clever way of saying you’re not going to get there. And then even or equally interesting was the report that they put out a couple of weeks before, which didn’t make the news that much. It was about the global mineral requirements that will be required to meet their renewable revolution. And it’s kind of interesting that they came out in sequence like that. And the statistics in there are mind-boggling about how to provide the minerals necessary to get to this net-zero, 20, 50 by 20, 40, we will need four times the number of mines that we have now mined material. So and then they also
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:04:28] say that the precious minerals. Is that what you’re talking about?
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:04:31] Yeah. Rare earth metal. You bet. All these sorts of like there’s this just a chemical soup and all of these things and they come from all over the world. And so you need four times the amount. They also point out in their report that the average historical timeline to get a new mine going is 16 years from the time, the time it goes into action. So that is probably much worse. That’s a historical number when things are easy. Now everything is challenging. So going forward, there is a story in the Financial Times about a lithium mine in Nevada that’s being held up, possibly shelved because there’s a 10-acre parcel of flowers. It’s a rare flower and all that.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:05:14] Yeah, so so that’s what can happen. And in the resource industry, we’ve been dealing with this for a long time. But now the renewables people are starting to realize that, wait a minute, these are this isn’t as easy disease. We thought or one guy commented on social media. It’s some renewable advocate. He said, grow flowers anywhere, go ahead and build the mine. It’s like really? Well, that’s quite the attitude.
Heidi McKillop, Actress, Director [00:05:38] It’s the bigger question is like what’s so fascinating is we’re talking about 20 fifteen. And I was like kind of makes me laugh a little bit because politicians don’t even think past two years or four years, let alone like 50 years. Yeah, that’s an excellent way to predict how we’re going to feel and how the world is. It’s kind of weird that we’re basing all of our policies around. Like, of course, you know, you want to be proactive with environmental policies and look and have goals. But to say that we’re not going to be doing something are not going to be using something in 50 years is so weird. Like where do people get that boldness from? Because it’s kind of it’s a strange concept because we don’t know. Like, I’m pretty sure in the prior industrial revolution they thought the same thing. They probably were shocked when they started using oil for the first time. You know, they only had their tangible usage of oil. Like there’s there are so many different things to change and will continue to change. And that’s just part of living. It’s yeah, it’s fascinating.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:06:36] You know, that’s part of down.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:06:40] You know, it’s kind of like Michael. He’s in the School of Mines master’s program and they’ve got some outstanding articles that they’ve had just come out with the mines. Let’s see, the school of mines talking about mines. OK, that makes sense. But they were really shown that ninety-one percent of the rare earth minerals come from China. And there are some other phenomenal data that the School of Mines is coming out with. So that’ll be something for us to all keep up with.. I did not mean to cut you off what really? I would say.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:07:17] Oh, well, I was just catching. Following on to Heidi’s point there, like we’re involved in some projects now, I work for a little natural gas company and we’re looking at all sorts of things to get greener and whatever, reduce our emissions. But the many of these projects have a payout of five or 10 years at a minimum. And. Right. And you can’t it’s very, very hard to commission a project based on the policy which might not even exist in five years, like how do you set a new government could come in and change the rules. So so how do you build a whole business case to build some piece of infrastructure? You’re going to sink a lot of money into it, but you could have a government in four years ago now where we’re going in this direction instead. You can’t run a business that way. You need certainty.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:08:03] So we’ve never seen that before. Terry, Anthony, and Heidi, are you saying that even though everybody is saying oil and gas are dead, I’m kind of getting the feeling that oil and gas is not dead. And I don’t think we’ve peaked now as far as demand goes as the demand up in Canada. And are you seeing everything just going? No oil and gas or what is your what are you seeing there?
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:08:31] Well, again, I think the no oil and gas conversation is a privilege. We always speak about this because it is something that we have been brought up in. We understand privilege just by our cultural infrastructure in North America. We’re very lucky. And I myself, you know, I’ve never had to worry about electricity. I’ve never had to worry about all these different things that go into the greater supply and demand chain. And that’s really what’s fascinating is most young people are really disconnected from that because they are so interested in their consumerism habits and they’re so interested in their cell phones. And they don’t realize like Terry said like you guys are talking about these rare minerals all around the world. It’s a chemical soup. And this and this is just part of our localization. And it’s only over the decades that we are in that situation where we’re completely dependent on other countries. So it’s kind of a fascinating conversation of ideologies that really doesn’t it’s not tangible and it’s not a really it’s not a balanced conversation at the end of the day. And again, like I remember my grandpa when I was younger before I moved out and Talbot and became part of this conversation, he told me he’s like, I can’t remember what we were doing. And he said oil’s going to be done in 20 years. And I was probably at least 15 years ago. So it’s like that was a very common belief. And my family, well, that oil and gas were going to was going to go away, but not a lot of connection to oil and gas. Again, like people think because you get a Tesla-like there are no oil products going into that. And that’s really where the funny kind of ironic conversations come. And you’re like, well, OK, you’re Tuscola a ton of energy and all the electricity and all the grid working in the manufacturing of that car. Yeah. So you got to really
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:10:25] if you want an iPhone and you have to have oil and gas to get the silicon, you got to have all the mining. Do you think those mining work on a Tesla battery theory? I think that they run on some pretty big diesel and everything else, all those kinds of things. So, Heidi, I know that you love your iPhone. You also realize that you have to have oil and gas in order to get it.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:10:49] Exactly. And not even just oil and gas. It’s all-natural resources. But this concept of people wants to live off the earth. But I’ll tell you, you try going at living in the woods for in the Canadian wilderness, whether it’s raining outside today or it’s snowing ninety-nine percent of the time in Canada here or it’s cool, like try living in that environment just by burning wood. I mean, it was our pioneering life back in the day. And we really have to respect the transition of oil and gas and what it’s done for us, the culture to help.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:11:23] Do you use Amazon delivery?
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:11:27] Well, with the app, the pandemic or whatever it’s called, yeah. It’s like everything shows up, right? Like toothbrushes, you name it. It’s just you just if you some strokes and there’s your delivery in 20 minutes, it seems like so. Yeah.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:11:42] And so the highest point we all have broken fingers on Amazon. Right. So you know, I got a sprained thumb from using texting on my phone in order to get my toothbrush. I need to go get a toothbrush when you don’t have any fossil fuels on that.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:11:59] Yeah, and that’s part of the blindness that people it’s just getting worse. Like I’ve written about this for a couple of years, like people in your neck of the woods in the middle of summer, they don’t walk into a building and go, wow, I’m so happy that this is air-conditioned. Like it’s just there. Right. That’s life. And we don’t need it here. You just take things for granted, like the power is always on, if there’s a power outage, it’s like what is this, a third-world country? Like, we just accept that we expect all of this stuff. And that’s that just creeps up as the comfort level creeps up. It’s like a privilege. Like Heidi says, we’re the luckiest people in history. And then but every level we take, we just take more for granted and now deserve to be of Amazon where everything gets brought right to your doorstep. And if you don’t like it, you just send it back. It’s like it’s insanity, kind of. But that’s how comfortable we become. And the chain behind that is just nobody can even comprehend what’s bringing you that stuff.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:12:57] And it’s like if we say we’re going to go on to the oil, no oil trade, let’s just indulge that for like two seconds. What would that look like? OK, so all of our products are plastics. You know, I can live with that around the world would be better without our phones anyway. So let’s call a spade a spade here. And even if you were to go and which most of those products to wood products, which you need, say, like a toothbrush or I don’t know, you’re using whatever consumers and things like a disposable spoon or whatever kind of switch that’s going green. It’s like you got to think about how much devastation that would cause on it for us and how much more logging we would need and how much the course helps with CO2 emissions. And it helps with all these different types of things. It’s the economy and the ecosystem are so intricate and they need to have a balance. It’s such a delicate matter.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:13:53] Excellent, excellent points. And Terry, I keep wanting to run over you. What were you.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:13:58] Oh, no, it’s OK. Well, I never could talk. And that’s the problem. The further another branch from what Heidi is talking about is like our whole food supply. Like the only reason, there are a billion people alive now or seven and a half is because we have this miracle of modern agriculture. If everyone was growing their food by hand, we wouldn’t be here. That just doesn’t work. And if you don’t believe me, go try it. So so it’s hydrocarbons that power those huge tractors which get one farmer can farm ten thousand acres now with the equipment, whereas before I would take five hundred farmers to do that. And the fertilizer comes from hydrocarbon made from natural gas essentially. So those are the two biggest components that make the make feeding the world possible. So he says, just imagine for a second going without that, you, first of all, you stop manufacturing everything. And second, you couldn’t even feed all the people. And then as soon as winter hit, we’d all freeze to death anyway. So it’s anyway, you look at it.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:15:02] Exactly. And that’s the thing. It’s like, you know like I don’t know if I told you this before Sirota’s while Terry knows this, but my first job was I worked at a historical settlement like a pioneer historical settlement so I could spend my summers cooking over the open house and making bread by hand and gathered all of our food. And it was such a great experience. It really grounded me into this concept of understanding how hard pioneer life was for women especially. And it’s something that I deeply respect. And I think there’s a lot of really cool skill sets that come from that era that is lost. But overall, I don’t want to live in that. I would I would die.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:15:41] I would be OK to visit you. You don’t mind the visit, but you don’t want to.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:15:45] I don’t mind a visit. Yeah. And then I like to go home to my nice warm bed and that’s it,
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:15:51] you know, along that same line. And Terry, you were we were tight. I got a notice yesterday from the Bowie and it was the taxi. The Trans Canada pipeline was just officially canceled. Is that correct?
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:16:11] Yes. Finally dead. It was on it was in palliative care for years. But yes, we pulled the plug.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:16:18] So. Man seven billion-dollar project. Yeah. Yeah. It’s how bad that hurt, do you think, Canada. Because that was going actually to the Pacific Coast.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:16:33] Well, actually I one go to the Gulf of Mexico. It was headed over there. That’s an interesting pipeline. And I think we’re going to see it again someday. I don’t know when, but I think we will. So foot, first of all, that pipeline was first approved in twenty-ten. So it’s been eleven years. It’s been floundering around. So so we’ve I think a lot of people up here have been known to have known that it’s been dead for a long time or because it’s hanging by a thread for at least three or four years. So I don’t think it was really a big surprise that today’s news was not news at all. It was just like the final. OK, they just yeah, they had the funeral today, even though everybody knew was dead a long time ago.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:17:16] So, unfortunately. We’re used to this kind of major cancelations, whether it’s a ring of the fire district in Ontario for mining or it’s going to be we’re talking about energy East Pipeline. In this pipeline, we’ve had the tech frontier deal go under. I mean, there are just so many billions and billions of dollars that have been diverted out of Canada and into other jurisdictions. And someday, unfortunately, the Canadians are really going to suffer for that. We already are. But it’s going to be our children and children’s children from there that are going to have this huge debt and this huge burden because of this mismanagement.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:17:58] Yeah. The other article I noticed on that, guys, was the Boeing report, May 7th. Twenty-one, they say TTK Energy says it’s taken at two point two billion. Write down on the Keystone XL. Boy, that’s a lot of financial write-offs and everything else for the Canadian market up there. Have all these pipeline things really affected? We know it’s affected the jobs up in Calgary because you go see all that empty space up there. Is there any coming back to that right now?
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:18:35] Maybe Heidi seen something I haven’t seen very much. There’s an economy that is coming back in different ways a little bit, and there’s this endless ocean of money that’s chasing green things. And so there’s some activity and a lot of areas there. And some of them will bear fruit. But it’s not efficient capital usage. It’s just this big firehose of money from governments that are saying if it’s green, it gets the green light and. Well, I don’t know where that leads exactly.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:19:05] I think there is well like this to be my positive side of things, a little spin-off as usual.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:19:11] We need that, Heidi.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:19:12] We just hear so many amazing projects that are coming through that there’s a really exciting project and kind of working on right now. And it’s just in the infant stage of addressing the abandonment issues, first of all, oil and gas companies. So there are really creative people that work in this industry and that are around here that give me so much hope. And there’s a lot of young entrepreneurs that have come into Calgary, especially in Alberta, and they’re smart people like they know what they’re talking about. They’re ready to solve the solution. They can speak the language of net-zero and it doesn’t scare them. And I think the folks that are scared of the word net-zero are just taking it full on and saying, OK, if this is going to be the case, we’re going to get there and you’re going to listen to how we’re going to get there. And the government is subsidizing a ton of these programs. It’s really about leveraging the government properly for your business and being creative and combining those two things. Right?
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:20:06] Oh, that is great, because the oil field workers, they are advertising all, hey, go get a job and green. And I like the way that both of you phrase that, that there are other jobs coming in. Just not go work on a solar panel.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:20:20] Exactly. Yeah, there is a Hardee’s. Right. She puts a positive spin on it. That’s true. There are all sorts of developments that are happening and they will succeed. I mean, there was just an initiative announced the other day that the largest oil sands companies are gathering together to start working on a joint carbon capture and storage project. It’s a monster project. It’s like 80 billion dollars or something. But they’re planning to sequester all the carbon out of the oil sands so that that you buy them well, the lease on life like around the world, then they should be like net-zero oil production. Right. So that’s a huge price hike. And maybe I’m just being too pessimistic because I usually am. But if the government subsidizes it correctly and gets that off the ground, then maybe they’ll get that built and then that’ll give a new lease on life to the oil sands and maybe we’ll see money coming back there again.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:21:16] So, Terry and Heidi, let me put a little different spin on that. That is outstanding news on the oil sands. We as Americans actually need that heavier oil coming out of the oil sands and with the supermajors getting out and not doing any more money into the gap in exploration and everything else, I firmly believe that our demand is still going to increase in oil and into the supermajors going out. There’s going to be a significant price increase in oil. And that now that that news that you just gave us with the oil field sands, it really could raise that price up, and that 80 bazillion dollars were a billion or bazillion.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:22:04] It’s the same thing as government money. So whatever you want to call it, that
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:22:07] 80, 80 billion is actually going to have a machine room for them to actually make money because I believe the price is going to go up. And I, again, as we talk about, I’d rather get the oil from Canada where we both can not have to have it shipped across the world.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:22:26] I think that’s you did some big themes there as we
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:22:32] right or wrong, that was a nice way for you to say
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:22:37] no, no, not at all. What you’re saying is very true. And I think we’re the big European companies, oil majors. But also we’re going to see Exxon Mobil and Chevron and they’re being kind of forced to do things differently and throttle back exploration. And but as long as demand keeps going up and demand is still going up like next year is forecast to be a record for oil consumption, global oil consumption over one hundred and two million barrels a day. So if all of these Western entities stop pursuing oil development, who’s going to do it? It’s going to be the Middle East. It’s going to be Russia and China wherever they can. China is going to step in and buy up those properties that that shell, for example, sells off in Africa or other countries like that. So I think that energy security has been very important to the United States, especially for decades. If that’s why the United States was such good buddies with Saudi Arabia through thick and thin. Right. So you need a secure supply of oil and that’s going to come around the full cycle. And that’s why I think I said I think Keystone XL might get revived one day. Somebody somewhere has to be looking at the fact that the US needs heavy oil. You’re right for those Gulf of Mexico refineries that were built to take advantage of oil from the Gulf of Mexico and from Venezuela. Well, both of those are almost dead on arrival now. So Mexico’s production in a tailspin and they need it themselves. Venezuela is Venezuela, so there’s no more oil coming from there. So we’re going to get heavy oil from you can get if you want to get it from Iran or do you want to get it from your big sleepy neighbor to the north and all you need is a pipeline connect one hundred and seventy billion barrels with your refineries. It’s a geopolitical no-brainer. At someday it’s going to happen.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:24:23] But let me keep the balance been. The conversation, too, is what I really like to see is smaller oil and gas companies to be more competitive. And that’s a really big conversation in and of itself because in Canada you have such huge liability to debt ratio with the banks that they’re not considered a viable investment because of our reclamation issues. And it’s a great idea of cleaning up a balance. We all want that. I mean, I think that we know from the sixties and even earlier, there’s a lot of issues that happened with drilling and these abandonment wells because too. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. No standards that were then aren’t the same standards now. But instead of saying, OK, it’s a government issue, let’s solve the problem, they’re just dumping it on these companies and the bigger companies will handle it and they can tiptoe around it. They can get the carbon credits, they can get whatever they need to get it. But the small companies are not a viable investment for banks. That’s a problem for them and it’s a problem for our economy. And we never want one company to own all these assets. We want diversification. And it’s really important for governments to focus on that.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:25:31] What changes, Heidi, would you recommend in order to make let me back up last year, it was last year and I can barely remember past last night’s dinner, but we talked about the ability to excuse me, having the additional investment and in trying to figure out where how investment and capital are going to go into those cycles. Again, I had about six different points and I just absolutely went bonkers on those ideas. You had a great point. Terry, what are you thinking on what Heidi just said? We may have to cut that section, if
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:26:15] that’s OK, this small company diversity. Yeah, that’s why they’ve taken the brunt of it. And probably to the same extent in the US, too. There are the bigger ones are getting by in this low price environment. And I think Canada is ahead of the curve in terms of the crackdown on activity and investment capital. We’ve been suffering through that for years now. And the like the junior oil and gas sector is pretty dead, but it’s coming. It could come back to life. As Heidi said, there are new companies, there are new industries springing up to look at abandonments. There are new ways of looking at businesses that is using technology and just rethinking different ways. Instead of just hauling products to market the company I work for, we’re looking at a whole bunch of new ideas we’re looking at. Instead of just hauling our natural gas to market, we’re talking to other companies in the region and saying, hey, maybe what do you have? What are your problems and what are our problems? And if we pool our assets together, maybe we can solve both our problems. And there’s a lot of fruitful ground there. You just have to rethink the way the old historical way of just doing business just doesn’t work anymore. And so there’s some good that’s coming out of this, too. It’s like Heidi said, and you get new young minds attacking it in a different way, different expectations. And it could be we could come up with like a really, really strong industry in another ten or twenty years. We just have to get through this storm of people trying to kill it. I think so.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:27:48] You know, Heidi, what I’m the senior moment I just had a minute ago was pretty funny. But when you take a look at our last part, our first podcast, I believe, and we had talked about Canada’s excellent use of regulations in trying to keep things going. Canada has some of the strictest regulations out there and has done a good job. And we even say that there are regulations that Canada has that we need to follow. Are there regular I mean, we need to take care of the environment while we get the cheapest, lowest kilowatt per hour to the poor people. Terry, you actually were kind of nice one time when you hinted at that party about to say,
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:28:33] yeah, you’re absolutely right. And that says, for instance, like I was out on the weekend at a local time and it took us a look at this site that is owned by a Chinese company. So they’re paying the farmer their royalties or what have you, but the rest is probably about a million dollars to fix it. So and it’s just sitting there and it’s contaminated water and his property. And you’re talking about like chemicals that are certainly going into the ground in there. And they’re streaming down probably to other local farms. And because we know with water, it doesn’t stay in one place. And these are concerns that I have. And it’s like, OK, well, if that’s the problem, we recognize we see the problem. We know this is happening all across, say, Canada with these old issues and old wells. What is the government proactively doing? How is it that they can have all this money and all this different carbon credit money and they could not get this solved? I mean, it’s to me, it’s very simple. Like, you either incentivize small companies, so give them a royalty, like a tax credit, or lower their royalties to the government for ten years so that they clean up the mess because at the end of the day, the whole industry goes under. Yes. You stuck with that 70 billion dollar plus the liability of these wells. We are the government, the taxpayers, the people it doesn’t like. If the whole industry goes under and there are no oil and gas companies, who’s going to clean up. So it’s like you’ve got to have these balanced conversations with the government. It’s like you’ve got to be thinking ten years ahead. Again, it comes down to that ten-year moment. They never think two years ahead, we’re eight years ahead and they’re trying to speed up to twenty fifty. And I’m like, let’s focus on the five years before we start going into twenty fifty.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:30:14] You’re the adult in the room because that was the best way that I’ve heard that articulated. And all of a sudden it makes sense. Terry and I are we’re scratching our heads. Why didn’t we think of that? But that was very well said.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:30:27] Thank you. It is very well said. And there’s the there’s there is one. A program that hints at what he’s talking about. I think it’s just a necessity is the mother of the invention maybe, but there’s this huge liability program that’s across western Canada, essentially, and I know it exists in the states, too. I’ve heard about millions of wells that are that that have been abandoned or just sitting there leaking or something of a program that the government put in place. And it’s not it’s not even really so much of a subsidy thing so far. Like, I like Cody’s idea, but the idea was instead of if you got like 500 companies responsible for abandoning wells in a given region or state, if you tell those 500 companies, go abandon all your wells, everybody has to go up the same learning curve. They have to spend money. They have to figure out what works, what does the trouble spots simply our regulator up here a couple of years ago, just literally in the past couple of years, came up with this idea. They call it area-based closure then. And they target activity in a specific area and they say we want companies to focus there, like the reclamation companies or the abandonment companies. And we want you to share best practices and we want you to do things sequentially instead of having one abandonment rate drive back and forth across the state because that’s what one company might do to say we want to work here and make it efficient. And it really pushes the cost down and it pushes accelerates everyone’s learning curve. We had some wells that were abandoned by a bit. We just had a small interest in them and the firm came through to abandon them and they did an unbelievable job and they did like two of them in half a day. And the other pictorial that they sent us, it was when we saw this, it was like, this is incredible. They took pictures of everything before they started. They took pictures of it while they were doing it, the pictures took pictures. When they were done, they sent us the file and they were gone. And it’s like, how did that happen before? What if we did that on our own? There would have been a week-long process, but because it’s part of a program. So so these are the kind of things that governments didn’t help make happen. And they don’t always have to shovel money at it. But it’s like, let’s think about this. Let’s get people working together and then you can get a lot done with the same amount of money. You can get as much done.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:32:45] So that’s pretty darn cool. That was positive from, you
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:32:52] know, what’s up?
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:32:54] You know, I like
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:32:56] to rainy days. I’m happy.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:32:58] Oh, man, you’re kind of off. You know, I don’t know how to take you when your nice dynamics are.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:33:07] I went through all this positivity
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:33:10] and so it’s kind of, you know, to be negative. You’ve already given us some great ideas. We’ve got about three or four minutes. Let’s have your life, OK?
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:33:21] I will say something that actually did make my destiny. Do you want to hear it?
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:33:28] Absolutely.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:33:30] OK, I was reading the article and I was scrolling through on the news and they’re like, maybe we should cancel the Canada Day like today of Asian. And I was like, What? You’ve got to be kidding me. It actually made me really bad. I was like, this is the kind of article I don’t want to see is that like I was really, really put off by that because there’s nothing you can criticize all you want. And I know that there’s a lot of issues that have happened in that. And it’s you know, I do respect that and respect people voicing concerns and anger towards the government. But at the end of the day, I mean, we are so fortunate to be Canadians and to live in this beautiful country and have the natural resources and the lifestyle that we’re able to indulge in and have all the technology we have. And if you travel outside of Canada or outside of the United States and you see poverty firsthand and you see how exactly you have a very different outlook of yourself afterward Heidi.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:34:33] Again, well said. And you have your movie coming up here. But I think the United States is just as fortunate to have can Canada as its neighbors. So we’re very fortunate. Yeah, we’re very sure that we’re very fortunate. Terry, you got the last words to use today.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:34:54] Oh, I don’t know what to do with that. Now, we should think well, to say I appreciate the podcast. It’s a great conversation. And it’s I like international perspective. It’s just good to I mean, you get what you get out of the news. But when you talk to people, it’s just much better. So I love it. So thank you.
Stu Turley, Sandstone [00:35:17] Sounds great, guys. Terry and Heidi, thank you again. I treasure the time that we have. And I cannot wait for our podcast next week for everybody. You can hear the audio on our app. In all of the different areas to get the audio podcast, you can also get it on YouTube, rumble on all the social channels and can reach out to Heidi or Terry on their LinkedIn addresses. And we will have all that in the show notes in Download the app, the Energy Newsbeat app. Thank you, guys. We’ll see you at the next one.
Heidi McKilliop, Actress, Director [00:35:54] Thanks for having us.
Terry Etam, Energy Author [00:35:55] Thank you.
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