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Halifax’s Corridor Resources Ltd. has announced that Apache Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Houston’s Apache Corporation, is giving up on unconventional gas exploration southwest of Moncton, in New Brunswick. This is a major setback for the drillers using hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking) on Canada’s east coast, since the $25 million Apache has already invested in dangerous unconventional gas drilling was expected to be supplemented by an extra $100 million.

Last year, Corridor, a smaller player in the gas industry, partnered with Apache in order to test the profitability of two horizontal trial wells into the Frederick Brook shale deposit located in the Elgin region of the province. While Corridor considers Elgin and the surrounding area to contain North America’s largest gas concentrations per square kilometer [pdf], the Will DeMille G-59 and Green Road B-41 test wells were not proving commercially viable.

When their partnership was announced, the companies were hoping to drill up to 480 wells, but with meager results from the two wells in phase 1, and a June 1st deadline to decide whether to invest additional millions or to opt out entirely, Apache balked and walked away from phase 2.

UPDATE: The 1,600 figure we reported yesterday was an early and apparently erroneous estimate. The most recent figure, from The National Response Center, is closer to 8,000 litres. According to the Montreal Gazette, over 110,000 litres of oil have spilled along TransCanada's Keystone line in the last year alone.

Today, TransCanada shut down its Keystone oil pipeline following its second pump station leak in less than a month. The most recent spill dumped nearly 1,600 litres of oil at a pumping station in Kansas over the weekend. With two spills in the last month, and ten more over the course of the last year, how can TransCanada convince U.S. authorities to trust the safety of its controversial expansion plans?  

As DeSmogBlog recently reported, spills are far more common than industry would have us realize. A 2007 report by the Alberta Energy Utilities Board recorded a whopping 5,000 pipeline spills between 1990 and 2005 in Alberta alone. 

The string of spills over the past year have only heightened public worries about the safety of North America’s vast pipeline network, and provide evidence that the proposed Keystone XL and Northern Gateway lines should be blocked.

The Montreal Gazette reports that over 110,000 litres of oil have spilled along TransCanada's Keystone line in the last year.

To top it all off, TransCanada has somehow managed to spin its treacherous spill record and suggest - and you're not going to believe this - that it's doing a great job.

A recent survey from Public Policy Polling (PPP), commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund (NRDC), finds that a majority of voters in House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton’s (R-MI) home district do not support his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and its use of the Clean Air Act to reduce global warming pollution.

In February, the American Lung Association released the results of a bipartisan national survey showing that 68% of Americans think that “Congress should not stop the EPA from updating Clean Air Act standards,” while 69% “think the EPA should update Clean Air Act standards with stricter limits on air pollution.”

In Rep. Fred Upton’s 6th District, where he easily won 62% of the vote in 2010, 59% of his constituents feel that Congress should “let EPA do its job,” and 53% favor the EPA setting tougher controls for air pollution.

I must confess, I’m less and less motivated these days to write posts debunking climate change skeptics and deniers. Their minds don’t change, and fighting over climate science may just make us polarized—especially since mounting evidence suggests the climate divide is really more about values than science to begin with, and science is simply the preferred weapon in a clash over different views of how society (and especially the relationship between the government and the market) should be structured.

Sometimes, though, you just can’t resist blasting away. This is one of those times.

The Heartland Institute is having yet another conference to undermine climate science, and this time, they are flying it under this banner: “Restoring the Scientific Method.” It's like they think they are now Francis Bacon (at left) or something.