Oilsands future bright for Alberta, Canada
Posted Oct 30, 2014 8:19 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
With 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alberta’s oilsands, the future of the province seems secure and for the first time in history, and The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine is dedicating an entire issue to the subject of the oilsands.
Like everything, there will be ups and downs, but Brian Milner, senior economics writer with The Globe and Mail, is bullish on our future being tied to the oilsands for at least the next 15 or 20 years.
“It’s become pretty clear over the last couple of years that this is the single biggest development over the last decade, not only for Alberta and the industry itself, but for Canada as a whole,” he explained.
Of course there are environmental concerns and with a weaker oil market forecast for 2015, there are a number of questions there as well, but Milner doesn’t think we’ll see the drop off we saw in the early 80’s that had cities across the province rolling up sidewalks.
“I really think that even though it’s true that right now oil prices are at the weakest level in some time, they’ve just fallen below $80 [a barrel] again, I don’t think that’s a long term situation,” he said, adding countries like China, India and Russia will continue to be buyers.
“US refineries have been designed to produce this stuff but they’re not well designed to deal with their own shale oil production and they’re not about to invest billions of dollars more to re-tool,” said Milner.
Alberta’s economy is tied to the success of the oilsands, but Milner said there are opportunities for oil to generate a more diverse economy.
“We’ve seen how Norway has used its oil money, mostly to finance social programs but in Alberta they’ve basically frittered away that opportunity and used up Peter Lougheed’s rainy day fund pretty quickly,” he explained. “But it’s still going to be responsible for a lot of the growth you see already in the service sector, in the public sector, the development of schools and hospitals, research facilities and even manufacturing.”
Environmentalists continue to target the oilsands and Milner said there’s an easy explanation for that, they’re an easy target.
“It looks polluting coming out of the ground, it’s dirty looking but in fact once it’s refined it’s exactly the same as every other kind of oil,” he said, adding a lot of undersea projects are much more suspect, but you can’t see them.
The magazine hits newsstands Friday, but is available online now.
