Saskatchewan is a safe space to buy 'sustainable oil,' Scott Moe says

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is working hard to use a global climate change conference as an opportunity to market the province’s non-renewable resources.

“The world is going to need these products for a period of time, whether it be oil … whether it be some of the mined products that we have,” Moe told reporters on Sunday in a virtual press conference from the United Nations COP28 climate conference in Dubai.

If we don’t offer our “sustainable oil” to the world, he says, they’ll have to get it from someone else, “maybe from a jurisdiction that doesn’t have the highest ethical standards and certainly doesn’t have the environmental standards that we have.”

Moe pointed to Germany’s efforts to import liquefied natural gas in an attempt to end its reliance on Russian pipeline gas.

The country has begun building import terminals on the Baltic Sea after two Russian pipelines were taken offline following unexplained blasts in September, according to Reuters reports.

Germany, like many other countries, wants to keep the gas flowing, says Moe.

“It did not go unpurchased, and we must remember that.”

When asked whether he was concerned about the warming climate, Moe acknowledged he was concerned about “the amount of emission that we are putting into our atmosphere,” but he said Saskatchewan’s heavy crude is already “the cleanest that you can find.”

The Saskatchewan government has consistently resisted federal efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, most recently its attempts to limit methane leaks from oil and gas projects.

The province balked at the methane emissions regulations that it says would mean a 75 per cent reduction from Saskatchewan’s oil and gas sector.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, methane’s chemical structure traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide, making it 80 times more harmful than CO2.

A study released in July found that methane emissions from Saskatchewan’s oil and gas sector were being underreported by 30 to 40 per cent.

-With files from Reuters, Alexandra Mae Jones and Drew Postey