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Business English: Canada's oil sands a blessing and a burden

As demand for oil surges in Asia, companies are raising the stakes in their oil sands investments. von Ed Crooks

The scene of the exploitation of the developed world's biggest oil resource is like some dystopian fantasy. Vast pits are carved out of the forest, where machines toil day and night taking hundred-tonne bites out of the earth. Mist rises from sluggish lakes of polluted water and great columns of steam rise into the air. The process of turning Canada into an energy superpower is an awe-inspiring, but disturbing, sight. In recent months there has been a renewed surge of interest in the oil sands by international companies. But campaigners are raising the alarm about the environmental damage being caused. The resource potential of the oil sands is enormous; with 174bn barrels thought to be recoverable using existing technology, the known reserves are exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. The companies operating there have investment plans that imply a rapid increase in the rate at which that potential is realised. From about 1.2m barrels a day today, the industry reckons production could reach 4m b/d by 2020, potentially making Canada the world's fourth-biggest oil producer, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia, Russia and the US. As Brian Hall of IHS, a consultancy, puts it, the oil sands are "America's energy security blanket''. For international companies, too, the oil sands are powerfully attractive. Saudi Arabia is closed for oil production, Iran and Iraq are very difficult, Russia and Venezuela are tightening the screws on international companies. By comparison, Canada is a dream. The problem is cost of extraction. The oil is in the form of bitumen, which is solid at normal temperatures, and mixed with sand and clay. So it needs to be heated with hot water or steam to separate it out, either underground, or after being mined by mechanical diggers and carried to an extraction plant in the world's biggest dump trucks. After that, the heavy oil extracted needs to be processed, in an upgrader, before it can be sold on the crude oil market. Shell Canada says costs of the whole process work out at about C$25 (EUR17.34) a barrel. The costs of new developments have been soaring, largely because of shortages of labour and steel. But as demand for oil surges in Asia, and fresh sources of supply seem increasingly hard to find, expectations have increased that the price will stay high, encouraging companies to raise the stakes in their oil sands investments. Recently, Statoil of Norway agreed to pay $2bn for North American Oil Sands Corporation. And Total began the process of securing approval to build an upgrading plant near Edmonton, Alberta, to process its oil sands, as part of a C$10bn-C$15bn investment programme. "Even after all the cost increases, we have not seen any companies scrapping their investment projects," says Pauline Dingwall of Wood Mackenzie, the analysis firm.

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