We have too much oil in Alberta.
“The province’s landlocked oil is selling for a massive discount. The world price is hovering around $55 US per barrel. The price Alberta gets is called the Western Canada Select price — and that’s worth about $12 per barrel. The gap is called the price differential.
It’s just one bit of bad news after another for Alberta’s NDP government.
As if inheriting an economy heading into a recession in 2015 wasn’t bad enough, the NDP has watched the world price of oil stabilize while the price our landlocked energy industry receives has dwindled to a record low.”
We just can’t sell enough of the damn stuff to make it profitable, and the current status quo is making other people rich so it appears we’re kinda stuck at the moment.
What an incentive to actually put the dollars into diversifying our economy and weaning the oil industry off of the huge public subsides it receives. I would also like to see our domestic gas prices reflect the current glut of oil in Alberta.
Of course, to even question the primacy of Oil and Gas in our province is akin to heresy, but it doesn’t mean questioning the priorities of our government should not be done.
bleatmop
The Intransigent One
Mystro
The Arbourist
4 comments
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November 28, 2018 at 7:13 am
john zande
Nasty, dirty stuff.
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November 28, 2018 at 8:55 am
MoS
You could begin by recognizing that bitumen isn’t oil. The Athabasca Oil Sands are the Athabasca bitumen pits. With climate change closing in and the nations of the world mobilizing to try to fend off as much of the impacts as they can, bitumen, like coal, will have to go the way of the dodo bird. Too bad Notley didn’t change course to embrace Peter Lougheed’s wisdom, the very advice by which Norway amassed the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Instead she chose to soldier on in the Ralph Klein model. She and her government are the authors of their own misfortune.
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November 28, 2018 at 2:04 pm
Winston Smith
Just think, if AB hadn’t gone all-in on piping and shipping its bitumen directly to China, and had built refineries in Canada, they would’ve gotten full price for their oil!
But now the courts are killing their pipelines and Trump is killing free-trade with China.
I wonder who Albertans will scapegoat this time around? When the price of oil collapsed in the 1980s, they blamed PET and the NEP.
They put “Let them Eastern basterds freeze in the dark!” bumperstickers on their pickup trucks.
They might as well blame Junior this time around. Call his purchase of the Kinder Morgan pipe, the “NEP2”. It’s not as if it has to make any sense. It didn’t make any sense the first time, either.
(Albertans have always coasted along on their oil revenues. They never needed to make any sense. I like to think of AB as the ‘bimbo province.’)
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November 29, 2018 at 12:08 am
tnt666
It’s good Alberta’s decided to transform it locally instead of shipping the shit all over the damned place. Canada needs to stop being a banana republic.
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