Jamie Tronnes
Heather Exner-Pirot
Heather Exner-Pirot is a prominent energy policy analyst and senior fellow with the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, is a former Canadian political staffer born in northern Alberta now living in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what they shared with the Canadian Energy Centre.
Canadian Energy Centre: The U.S. is one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers. Why does it need imports from Canada? Heather Exner-Pirot: It’s because all oil is not the same. The United States developed its refinery industry before the shale revolution, when they were importing heavier crudes. Canada has that heavier crude. They are now exporting some of their sweet light oil and importing Canadian crude because that’s what their refinery mix requires. What’s interesting is that we have never exported more Canadian crude to the United States than we are right now. Even as they have become the world’s largest oil producer, they’ve never needed Canadian oil more than today. They also import a ton of natural gas from us. They have become the world’s biggest gas producer and the world’s biggest gas exporter, but part of that, and having their LNG capacity being able to surpass Qatar and Australia so quickly, is because Canada is backfilling some of the production.
Canadian Energy Centre: Will the incoming new administration (either Democrat or Republican) impact the Canada-U.S. energy relationship? Jamie Tronnes: I don’t see a big change happening in such a way as it did when the Biden administration came in with the axing of the Keystone XL pipeline. Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, the global energy market has changed radically. On the Republican side, Trump often repeats the phrase “drill, baby drill.” The issue is that the U.S. is already drilling about as much as demand allows. I don’t think a Harris government would move quickly to limit oil and gas production without having a strategic alternative in place. It simply would make her look very weak, and she has explicitly said that she would not ban fracking. In the post-COVID world, I believe that the Democrat side of the aisle is coming to the view that it was a geopolitical mistake in terms of securing North American energy dominance to cut the Keystone XL pipeline.
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