Much to my relief I heard that The CEO of Teck Mining had come to his senses and decided not to invest any more money in a huge proposed mine in Northern Alberta.

Never mind the environmental impact of such a mine two questions I have to ask of Jason Kenney if he would listen, but he will not as he is too angry with the Federal Government to be coherent.

1. How long would it take for this mine to make a profit when the current price for bitumen is less than $20 per barrel and that does not take into consideration the cost of shipping to the USA.

“Condensate, a type of light oil often used to dilute bitumen, was selling for about US$63 per barrel in Edmonton on Thursday, which means the bitumen part of a WCS barrel composed of 30 to 40 per cent diluent was actually fetching between negative 11 cents US and negative 28 cents US per barrel”  .Jason Franson/The Canadian Press2

2 How will Teck get that DILBIT to market if the current and future pipelines will be plugged with the existing production? 

The upshot to me is that bitumen is already overpriced because of the cost of transportation and refining into a product that could loosely be called oil, and thus any company investing in such production really must be desparate to find tax write-offs or for federal and provincial handouts in order to profit.

In today’s climate of concern about the environment one has to wonder what goes on in the mind of anyone seriously considering such a venture and more importantly the mind of a political leader who banks on that craziness for his own success. Kenney has clearly shown that the laws do not apply to him as open blackmail of BC is in his pocket ready to be used, and it is everyone else’s fault that Alberta finds itself in the current financial predicament. It was not the NDP as much as the conservative governments since Peter Lougheed that have failed the people of Alberta, and blustering as Kenney does will not solve the problem.  Look at the people of Alberta; a resilient bunch of people who have been conned into thinking that oil and bitumen is all they have. 

 Really?

Not the Alberta I lived and worked in in the 70s And 80s.

Scheer’s statements in the House of Commons on the radical activists shutting down investment in Canada is of course typical Conservative smoke screen to hide the fact that Harper hamstrung Alberta and probably Saskatchewan as well with his “all eggs in one basket” approach to the economy for Canada. The fall in real oil prices did not help bitumen either and now there is so much interchange in our media calling bitumen oil (such a fictitious an untrue thing to do)

Jeremy