Long reliant on the vast oil reserves of its tar sands, Alberta is now facing a reckoning as its oil industry is clobbered by the coronavirus downturn. With tar sands operations shedding jobs, a movement is growing to retrain oil workers for the emerging renewables sector.
Sandmaier and Kubiski’s businesses are part of a growing renewable energy sector in Alberta — unlikely shoots of life in a province that has been described as a petrostate. For decades, Alberta’s economy was dominated by the exploitation of viscous bitumen in its vast tar sands, which hold the world’s third-largest oil reserves behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. But since oil prices crashed in 2014, about 35,000 jobs in Alberta’s tar sands have been lost, likely for good. Now, the Canadian oil industry is being hit even harder due to imploding global demand and plummeting prices for oil caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Some companies are scaling back tar sands operations, and others are even pulling away from oil sands investment in response to growing pressure to meet climate goals.
