Phendrana Drifts

I'm a millionaire. And if you too are an Albertan, so are you. Even when you subtract my student loan (just shy of $30,000) I still clear about $4.3 million. The largest proven reserves of oil on Earth are located a couple hundred kilometers north of me, in the Athabasca Oil Sands. The Government of Alberta puts the estimates at 176.6 billion barrels of oil (and some estimates suggest that will grow as technology gets even better at extracting oil from oil sands). At today's price of oil, around $74 a barrel, that puts the value in the stratospheric range. 13 trillion dollars. And its mine. All mine. And well, three million other Albertans, of course. Trust me, I can share.

However, it is not as easy as that. First of all, I have to extract it from the ground, a process so difficult the companies that do this sort of thing spend up to $36 a barrel to do it. That means a staggering outlay of 6.4 trillion dollars just to get the stuff out of the ground. Plus the companies that do this sort of thing also want, well, a profit. In fact, with out getting into the economics of it, it seems to work better when I (or rather the Government of Alberta) allow companies to take what they can out of the ground along with some guidance and policy, and then get my money off the top in the form of a percentage.

When oil was little more than $20 or $30 a barrel, you can imagine the companies were not lining up to plop their $6.4 trillion on the table to extract my oil. It took, well, some convincing. And by convincing, I mean reducing my share while they took the time and spent the money to lay down the infrastructure. Again, I am using I and my when I really mean the Government of Alberta. The idea worked, and lots of oil companies, venture capitalists and other people with interest (i.e. money) came to Fort McMurray and built a massive human enterprise.

Things are different. Today, as mentioned earlier, oil is at $74 a barrel. That is about $38 in net value per barrel. And we are currently pumping out (well, mining and processing out) 760,000 barrels per day. Again, at today's price that is $56.2 million worth each and every single day. And it is going to grow, by leaps and bounds.

Billions and billions of dollars a year, of my resource, are going on the world market. Somebody is getting rich. The thing is, that it really doesn't seem to be me. That is not fair though, as the Government of Alberta is doing quite well, and it is only through them and the rights to natural resources given to them by the Canadian constitution that I can claim ownership. Still, the owners of the resource are not getting nearly enough, at least from my perspective.

I spent a lot of this post talking about money, but there are another costs to oil sands development, both human and environmental. The pace of development is simply not sustainable - I do not mean fiscally, because hey, so long as oil remains above $50 or more a barrel, the operation generates cash. But I mean the infrastructure deficit of northern Alberta and the tremendous environmental impact. Each barrel of oil generates more than 80 kg of greenhouse gases and between 2 and 4 barrels of waste water. I do believe that the oil industry and the government are good environmental stewards, but as long as the environmental impact is left out the public consciousness, the discussion is far from complete.

Speaking of the public consciousness, a friend of mine, Dave Hancock, a politican running for the leadership of the Tory party here in Alberta said a lot of these things far more eloquently yesterday to the media. He emphasized the need to have a public debate on our resource, and I couldn't agree more.

The reality is that the rapid and destructive extraction of oil is not the only option for northern Alberta, and we Albertans deserve a fair share of a resource that is legally ours. The oil sands is my opinion not Alberta's future, as I will always put my faith in human capital above oil, but it is the reason we have opportunities no other human society has ever really had. Let's make sure we use that opportunity well.

3 Comments:

At 7:10 PM, Quynn said…

An excellent and well-reasoned article, which inspires me to add a few points:

Our reserves are the second-largest proven reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia's 260+ billion barrels (source, US Energy Information Agency http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html)

If all projects are completed as announced, daily production should increase to about 3 million barrels per day in the next 10-20 years. Even at that accelerated rate, it would take over 100 years to deplete our current proven reserves (i.e. excluding increases in recoverable reserves as we improve our technologies and techniques of extrraction). So that's potentially a considerable chunk of change not only for (the governments of) our generation, but for serveral generations to come.

But that brings us to my last point and one I consider vital to any discussion/debate about the oilsands. And that's how long do we think that oil will be the dominant energy source for the world? Because only if we consider that question can we come up with a sensible measured development plan for this important resource...

And that's my $0.02 on a $13 trillion issue! :-)
At 9:47 PM, Duncan said…

My bad - second largest. I knew that... but superb $0.02!
At 10:30 PM, Quynn said…

And who knows, as the reserves grow, in a few years you might be right! In which case, we read it here first! ;-)

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3 Comments: