Editor, The Times:
At last, some good news on the oil-patch front.
Forget all that nonsense about the Transmountain, Keystone Kops pipeline approvals. Those are all money losers – about $25 a barrel at present bitumen prices.
True, things would change. The price of bitumen could go over $100 a barrel and they’d all be rolling in dough.
Well, not quite. The cost of production, according to Jeffrey Rubin, is “north of $60” but $100 a barrel would leave some cash to spare.
“New refinery in Alberta comes to rescue of battered oil producers” – the headline in the Financial Post, Dec 22, 2017. That is good news indeed.
This refinery, north of Edmonton in Sturgeon County, currently produces 20,000 barrels of “refined” a day. It’s expected to go as high as 80,000 barrels by summer, 2018.
This project has had its share of scorn and derision from Ted Morton, former PC finance minister (don’t forget this is the same gang who, despite more than $100/barrel for Alberta “tar,” managed to run that province $6 billion into the red).
Even the NDP, under whose watch this refinery was completed, were less than enthusiastic while they were in Opposition: “Good money after bad.”
Now those very Calgary petro-thugs who once scorned the Northwest’s new refinery are proclaiming it to be a saviour coming to the rescue.
The Sturgeon Refinery has, I’ve been told, been in the works since the 1980s but stalled many times – too expensive according to the Canadian Petroleum Producers.
Indeed their mouthpiece, the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, suggests that all products from Canada, not just “Alberta tar,” should be shipped raw – no refining anywhere.
Too many environmental rules? No problem, just ship the sludge off to China where it’s all cheaper – but is it? First of all, there would have been the loss of thousands of well-paying construction jobs and then many permanent jobs.
That leftover tar from refining, once just a nuisance, is now worth a lot of money for the vast road building projects in India and China.
This would be all lost if the refining is done in China.
As my son-in-law, who keeps a close eye on such things told me, they are building special tankers for this.
One last word here – if there is a list of Canadian heroes then Ian MacGregor, chair of Northwest Refining, should be on it. Boondoggle, eh?
Dennis Peacock
Clearwater, B.C.