There have been a few stories in the news lately concerning the Alberta Oil Sands and the various moves toward or away from this resource. A couple of interesting stories:
Canada looks to China to exploit oil sands rejected by US
BP risks investor outrage at ‘dirty’ oil deal
Chinese, Korean and Japanese firms have been interested in the oil sands for a while now, and some other firms from outside Europe / USA have slowly been investing as well, such as TAQA of Abu Dhabi. In the BP story, apparently RIL of India may be willing to pay even more than BP for the assets of Value Creation.
Shell seems to be “slowing down” investment, and shareholder resistance to StatOil and BP investment are well documented. The question for Canadians is – are we ok with all these foreign firms investing in the oilsands?
I would say YES, and even more that we want to encourage investors who are interested in exporting the products of the oil sands outside the North American market. One of the dangers facing the oil industry in Canada is the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) movement in the US, whereby states and business want to avoid using so-called dirty oil that has a high carbon footprint (I of course find is most interesting is when California went this route they exempted the oil from the Kern River field which has some of the highest CO2 emissions per barrel in the world, simply because it is in California…) A good way to mitigate this risk to Canada’s economic growth is to develop other markets for our product. And with investment coming from Asia, this should provide more impetus for Enbridge to build the Northern Gateway Pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat, BC. This will protect producers in the oil sands from being solely dependent on the fickle US market and may cause those in Washington to question they have looked a gift horse in the mouth…
2 comments
Gary says:
16 February 2010 at 13:48 (UTC -7 )
Canada should built capacity to ship all our oil and gas off the North American continent and relieve the American consumer of that 20% of their consumption of dirty Canadian oil. I suspect that there are more than enough oil consumers in Asia to use our oil at world prices. If a consumer says they won’t buy our product then the only rational reaction is to find buyer who will purchase our products. If the US would rather buy from Iraq, Venezuela or their Arab allies then so be it. Let them be dependent on those more secure and stable sources of energy. It’s their funeral.
Blame Crash says:
16 February 2010 at 19:25 (UTC -7 )
I couldn’t agree more. And it’s not just because I’d love to rub it in the face of those hypocrite Democrats. The best reason to do this is that it just makes more sense to have as many customers as possible. They can push us around a lot easier when they know that they’re our only customer. Hat would change when our oil has world wide access.