The global oil price wavers around $100 a barrel as traders are split over whether Brent Crude is about to plummet due to the Eurozone disaster getting worse, or about the spike due to a renewed Middle East crisis. It is snowing in Fort McKay, in Nothern Alberta, and the temperature of -6 feels like -11 with the strong north westerly wind. The long winter of the boreal forests has settled in. Production continues at Shell’s open cast Albion tar sands mine on the lands of the Athabascan Cree around Fort McKay, for with the world price at one hundred dollars, it’s a profitable exercise. But questions are being raised over Shell’s longterm prospects in the province.

Platform, in collaboration with Greenpeace UK and Oil Change International, have just published ‘Getting to Market – Emerging Investor Risks in the Tar Sands’, written by Lorne Stockman. The industry plans to increase production by 138% from todays level in the next fifteen years. But the report shows that this growth in the extraction from Alberta is being put at risk by the inability of producers to get the resources, dug or steamed from beneath the forests, out to the world markets. With the Canadian province entirely land locked, and the market for oil products in the US Mid-West becoming saturated, projects in Alberta will increasingly depend on being able to get tar sands derived crudes out to the oceans of the world. Expanding projects along the steep growth curve that producers have planned depends on being able to transport the bitumen from the tar sands to the refineries of US coast of the Gulf of Mexico or the refineries of East Asia via the tanker terminals on the Canadian West Coast. Continue reading →