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CBC News. New Brunswick Premier David Alward is in Alberta to work out the logistics of building a pipeline from the oilsands to the largest refinery in Canada. The Irving pipeline would connect the oilsands of Alberta to the Irving Refinery in Saint John, N.B., which currently processes 300,000 barrels of oil a day and could move up to a million per day.

Note: Your author is attending the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) winter meeting at the Renaissance Washington Hotel (999 9^th Street NW) in Washington, DC from Monday, February 4^th through Thursday, February 7^th.

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (NGP Photo) will provide the Keynote speech at the opening session of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) in Washington, hosted by Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA) Chairman T.W. Patch and Commissioner Bob Pickett.

Also participating in the meetings are outgoing U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff and Canadian National Energy Board Chairman Gaetan Caron. -dh

This morning on CNBC, former Shell President John Hofmeister (NGP Photo) said that the way to bring down gasoline prices in the U.S. is to foster competition by increasing U.S. transportation fuel reliance on forms of natural gas. -dh

Alaskan Deepwater Port Study: The Army Corps of Engineers and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities released a study last week identifying the Nome-Port Clarence region as the preferred site for a deepwater port serving the maritime and oil and gas industries.

Fairbanks News Miner by Matt Buxton. Energy will get plenty of attention in Juneau as the Legislature begins its fourth week of the 28th session. Meetings on the Interior natural gas trucking plan and the Alaska Standalone Gas Pipeline will be held today in House Resources and Energy committees as the start of a week of work on energy relief. *** Rep. Tammie Wilson, will have a bill up for a vote. Wilson’s bill conforms state environmental regulations regarding military firing ranges with federal law.

(Please note: in retrospect, we should not have included this story and reminds us how careful we must be in posting links. A reader sent us this link this morning. We normally check every detail carefully. Had we been as careful as usual this morning, we would have noted that this story is nearly a year old. While the concept of a tanker returning part of its load to Valdez could still be a harbinger of things to come — as in the case of flooding, rail transported North Dakota oil to Pacific Northwest refineries … or in other cases of force majure — we fear we gave the impression to some readers that the event was newly occuring. For the possibility we may have mislead readers, therefore, we apologize. -dh) Houston Chronicle by Eric Nalder. At midnight on April 11, a 940-foot tanker maneuvered into the dock at the oil terminal in Valdez, Alaska, carrying an unusual cargo for a returning ship.

Sloshing in its tanks were more than 12 million gallons of Alaskan crude, at least a quarter of the cargo the ship had carried away from Valdez two weeks earlier.

The Alaskan Explorer had sailed to a Washington refinery but was forced to return to Alaska with 300,000 barrels because the onshore storage tanks were too full to accept it, confirmed Anil Mathur, CEO of the Alaska Tanker Co., which owns the ship.

"Not the normal course of business," said John Kotula, one of the few outsiders privy to the incident because of his position as manager of the state of Alaska’s environmental office in Valdez.

The tanker’s inability to offload its oil underlines a startling reality: Stocks of crude oil in the U.S. have been for the last two years at historic highs, while Americans are using decreasing amounts of its most important product – gasoline.

But federal statistics show another recent development: West Coast refineries are decreasing their production as the domestic demand for gasoline shrinks.

* * *

The storage tanks in Valdez were more than 90 percent full the day the Alaskan Explorer arrived with its odd load, said Michelle Egan, spokeswoman for terminal operator Alyeska. She downplayed the significance of those full tanks, noting that they were not so full a few weeks earlier.

But Egan also acknowledged that Alyeska officials begin worrying when the storage tanks at the terminal are over 90 percent full. Such a glut could force a slowdown of oil production on the North Slope. That would reduce flow in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, she said, which can result in increased maintenance problems. (More)

Personal note:

As former commissioner and NARUC Member, we had the pleasure of arranging for similar presentations by former Governor Frank Murkowski and Former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens before the same group of federal and state regulators. -dh