Alberta’s Oil Patch
My father was born and raised in Alberta on a farm. He even got a certificate in 1980 during the 75th anniversary celebration as a Pioneer as he was born before the the Province was a Province. My first real jobs after school were in Alberta. I met my wife there who was also born and raised in the Province. I consider myself at least half or a bit more an Albertan even though I moved away from there. 100% prairie though in any case.
I moved away because the economy could not get out of these Boom and Bust cycles. If the price of Oil went up the economy boomed if it did not doors closed. It has been this way for decades. Since I left there have been three more rides on the roller coaster. They are always surprised and the politicians are eager to place blame. The simple expedient of diversifying the economy just never occurred to them. When oil prices drop pump more oil dammit! When you cannot sell all the oil you pull out of the ground well then pull even more and complain the pipelines are not big enough.
If you cannot sell it fast enough or the world price drops blame everyone else and threaten to leave.
Albertan Oil is low quality. It is full of sulfur and much of it is mixed with sand and clay near the surface. That is called the oil sands or tar sands and is very easy to get at, but hard to separate from the dirt. It takes heavy equipment and lots of heat and power. It is not that economical when prices are low.
One of my peeves with rabid environmentalists and first nations is before the oil sands were commercially exploited there were hundreds of square miles of black tar oozing out of the ground. They complain about the pollution, but actually they are cleaning up a huge mess created by nature over millions of years. It is like the world’s biggest oil spill. The lakes and rivers have been full of oil traces forever. Removing the oil from near the surface is a long term clean up.
Anyway the pipelines and infrastructure to move the oil to the refiners and consumers were fine before they built more and more plants to extract the oil from the dirt. It only became a problem once the new plants came online. It was the executives and managers and bankers who decided to do this. Now they want other people to pay for their bad decisions.
There are two things they need to move this extra oil.
One is a pipeline to the sea. Actually it is already there, but they want the capacity doubled. They figure they can sell gobs of oil to China. But Indonesia is closer and already a major source of Oil. Saudi Arabia is also closer by sea. Alberta cannot sell oil cheaper than those guys. Oh and that oil is better quality.
The other is a pipeline to Texas. There are already several pipelines to there and now that is where most of the Alberta Crude goes anyway. The refineries there are equipped to work with the poor quality oil. Texas does not need it. Again it is the new extraction plants built on spec that are the problem.
Add to that Global warming and air pollution and that maybe we have reached peak oil. It is likely that we will never run out of oil as was once feared. We will just stop using it. Well not as much.
We use oil for a lot more things than fuel for cars and trucks. We make things from it. Resins to make plastics are an essential material in modern life. I do not mean plastic bags and bottles. Most of the things that we buy are plastic. It does not corrode. I work in a company that makes big tanks to store chemicals to clean up water and sewage. Those tanks cannot be made from metal. The gasses given up by sewage create acids that eat concrete and metal. Everybody poos.
It is complicated.