Further more a surge of light oil from North Dakota and Texas is cutting into the earnings of Canadians who turn heavy oil sands into a lighter crude that fetches more from refiners. Producers in Alberta, home of the country’s greatest reserves, upgraded 20 percent less of the region’s crude in October than four years earlier, according to the province’s energy regulator. Two of five plants under construction were canceled and the province’s upgrading and refining capacity fell in 2013 for the first time in three decades. Companies are now sending record amounts of the heavy stuff on pipelines and trains to refineries in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast, Projects including Suncor Energy Inc. (SU)’s Voyageur joint venture with France’s Total SA (FP) and Value Creation Inc.’s BA Energy Heartland were abandoned. Global oil prices, down by more than 50 percent since June, will make upgrading projects even more challenging because the price difference between heavy and light crude is narrower, U.S. output has risen 70 percent in the past five years as producers used horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to tap into previously inaccessible shale rock layers thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. Most of the increase has been in light, sweet crude, similar quality Alberta upgraders get from processing heavy, thick oil sands. The rising flows south of Canadian crude are drawing a backlash in Alberta from labor groups, who say jobs, not just oil, are being exported. Alberta’s 4.6 percent unemployment rate, second lowest in Canada after Saskatchewan, may increase after oil’s 55 percent drop in six months prompted some producers to curtail future investment. “Building upgraders in Alberta is seen by the industry as uneconomic,” Dinara Millington, a vice president at the Canadian Energy Research Institute, said in an e-mail Jan. 13. “The U.S. refining market is being flooded with the light crude and they wouldn’t necessarily want our light stuff.”
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“Canada, the oil sands’ poor image isn’t just a question of bad PR. Anti-oil sands sentiment has made it nearly impossible to build the necessary pipeline connections producers need to get all that oil to market. TransCanada Corp.’s crossborder Keystone XL pipeline is in danger of being axed by U.S. President Barack Obama. The industry’s backup plan, Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipelineto shipping terminals on the B.C. coast, has become bogged down in political and environmental controversy. Even TransCanada’s Energy East proposal, a sort of backup for the backup, has encountered unexpected political resistance in Ontario and Quebec—two provinces the diluted bitumen must transit through on its way to refineries in New Brunswick.”
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Canadian exporters now also have also been stung by Russia’s currency crisis and its retaliatory sanctions against the West over the crisis in Ukraine. Companies from farm-equipment manufacturers to pork producers are affected. The Russian market bought 563-million dollars worth of Canada’s agricultural exports in 2012 Richard Davies, a vice-president at pork and poultry processor in Caaaanada Olymel, said the fallout from the Ukraine crisis has had a significant effect. Russia has struck back by slapping a ban on meat, seafood, milk and dairy products, fruit and vegetables from Canada, the U.S., the European Union, and other countries. The Russian government has also limited subsidies, particularly to its agricultural sector.
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SEE ALSO
https://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/canadas-oil-sand-projects/
https://putin1hero.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/canadas-prime-mister-is-in-direct-conflict-with-putin/
https://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/albertas-manure-pile/
https://www.google.ca/search?q=thenonconformer+alberta&oq=thenonconformer+alberta
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