Southern Quebec hydrocarbon resources — Access to strategic energy supply limited by political issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starting in 2008, several discoveries of unconventional and conventional hydrocarbon resources were made in sedimentary basins located in southern Quebec. Most of these resources are stored in the Utica Shales in the form of natural gas and condensates at depth in the Saint Lawrence Lowlands basin. Another interesting portion of these resources comes in the form of light oil and gas in the Anticosti basin’s Macasty Shale. Finally, a large accumulation of light petroleum with associated-gas is found in the Forillon Limestones of the Gaspé peninsula. These three deposits were discovered in sub-basins of the Great American Carbonate Bank and the Appalachians. Since 2011, the Government of Quebec has implemented several legislative measures aimed at blocking the development of these resources. First supported by a perception of risks associated with unconventional resources, Quebec’s anti-hydrocarbon discourse is now based simply on achieving provincial GHG emission targets. This political vision of energy development and the underlying measures ultimately led in 2022 to a total ban on all drilling, development or production of hydrocarbons throughout the province. The legality of this expropriation is currently being challenged in court by the license and authorization holders. The following paragraphs show that the use of incorrect premises casting doubt on the volumes of resources in place, the security of sites and the social acceptability of projects can have negative socio-economic repercussions without promoting the energy transition. While more and more States will seek to use environmental issues to justify certain questionable decisions, it is important that all citizens have access to a fair vision of the situation, and that they are well informed of the real impacts as well as the benefits of energy development. The information presented in this paper demonstrates the technical and economic feasibility of bringing the resources of several dozen TCFs into production in the Utica Shale of Quebec. Regionally, the development of this new field would create a profitable industry, providing both a commodity consumed daily and an important source of financing for the energy transition. Limiting access to these strategic resources does not really contribute to reducing global GHG emissions, while increasing the risk for the energy security of natural gas consuming regions such as Western Europe or Eastern Canada. From a global perspective, it has been shown that limiting access to natural gas favors the use of energy sources that emit more GHGs or have a larger environmental footprint.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".