Oil Sand Castles

Two of Canada's largest energy corporations, Petro-Canda and Suncor Energy Inc., announced today that they will merge to increase their financial stability. TBM 's Christopher Flavelle discussed the volatile Canadian oil sands market in this story first published in December 2008. It’s hard to find news reports about Canada these days that don’t include the words constitutional crisis . But political dysfunction in Ottawa isn’t the only problem facing the country. On the other side of the vast Canadian prairies, the falling price of oil has put a question mark over the Alberta oil sands, a vast deposit of thick, sticky goo called bitumen that holds more potential energy than anywhere outside Saudi Arabia—and, until recently, held the promise of huge wealth for Alberta and the country. The trouble is that turning bitumen into crude is expensive; it needs to be injected with steam to bring it to the surface, then diluted further to ship it through pipelines. So it wasn’t until the price ... (link)