Modérateurs : Rod, Modérateurs
. Mais le cout extraction est passé à 60$ 
The great Alberta oil rush
Alberta is experiencing a huge and expensive oil rush, and Fort McMurray is at the centre of it.
The town is an old trapper post, with no road until the 1960s, though it had a railway. Fort McMurray's population is now a runaway 68,000, and climbing all the time.
For 30 years I've heard about the promise of the vast Alberta oil sands area, ever since the Opec oil crises of the 1970s, when oil suddenly became worth much more than two dollars a barrel.
But decade after decade, it was only a promise of oil to come in Alberta.
The oil is bound up in black bituminous sand close to the surface. But even though the reserves are so huge and so obvious the oil sands have to be steam heated to release the oil.
Potential gains
Until very recently, it's been a prohibitively expensive process - but suddenly, with the world oil price well above $30 and now routinely above $60, Alberta oil is worth winning.
A recent recalculation has revealed that the amount of oil buried underneath the ground in Northern Alberta was not millions of barrels - but trillions. Alberta's internationally recognised reserves are now put at 175 billion barrels of crude. Only Saudi Arabia has bigger reserves.
So now mighty corporations are pouring billions of dollars into the area around Fort McMurray.
In a chilly wilderness where the mercury sometimes freezes, under the brilliant illuminations of the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights, huge excavators are scraping off the topsoil and dumping the sticky sands underneath into the biggest dumper trucks in the world.
I rode on one. It was a 400-tonner on which each of the six tyres costs £25,000; it feels like driving a house.
The next stage is a towering plant to liquefy the sludgy bitumen and create crude oil that can be pumped hundreds of miles in pipelines to the refineries.
Back to the wilderness?
And these deposits are guaranteed to last for decades, if not centuries.
Flying in a helicopter over the oil sands area, you can see for fifty miles, and know that somewhere under the surface peaty, boggy "muskeg" as the Canadian call it, oil sands stretch out almost forever.
This oil belongs to the Province of Alberta. It is making it rich: a big place with a small population of three million people. Alberta has paid off its debts and has such a budget surplus already that it has just given every provincial taxpayer a rebate cheque for 400 Canadian dollars, about £200, as a sort of New Year present.
But this is wilderness: haunt of the bear and the buffalo and the caribou and the moose. The oil companies are promising to restore the land to what it looked like before, shifting back the washed sand minus oil of course, covering it with muskeg, and replanting the scraggy trees.
Environmentalists (and the native First Nation people) are not so sure that virgin wilderness can really be recreated; the jury is still out.
Old ways, new ways
And this is happening a long way from almost anywhere.
To get some perspective on all this, I drove out to see a couple who have known Fort McMurray for more than 70 years. Over a cup of tea, Bill Woodward was soon showing me how to jump aboard a moving train without losing a leg in the process.
Our conversation took place in a snug little lakeside cabin which the ex-hobos, Bill and his wife Nancy, have lived in since he came home from the Second World War.
Until the road came, they used to go shopping in the winter with a dogsleigh. It was the frontier life Canada's original settlers must have experienced: trapping, fishing, living off what you could snare or shoot.
Bob Woodward is what the Canadians call Metis, a distinct aboriginal nation descended from native (Indian) women and European incomer men.
His son Rowland listened to us discussing the past, and then he said this, with quiet pride: "Our people were not only buffalo hunters but also fishermen. There are communities here that are more than 14,000 years old.
"Three hundred years ago when the American trader Peter Pond came through here, he sat on the banks of the Athabasca and the Clearwater rivers and saw the local people (the Cree Indians) taking the bituminous sands and put them in a pot of hot water and then they'd skim off the pitch and use it to waterproof their canoes.
"Now, 300 years on, we're still using the hot water extraction method.. and we're still using it for transportation."
So much has changed in the Alberta wilderness, so much remains the same.
U.S. eyeing Alberta oilsands
Sheldon Alberts, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, February 04, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Energy is predicting crude oil from Alberta's oilsands -- not alternative energy sources such as biomass ethanol -- will help halve America's dependence on overseas oil within two decades.
The assessment, in a report to be released later this month, follows President George W. Bush's challenge this week for the U.S. to sharply reduce its oil imports from unstable nations in the Middle East.
According to data obtained by the Reuters news agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates America's oil imports from Canada will almost double by 2025, from 1.6 million barrels a day to 2.7 million barrels a day.
The vast majority of that increased production will come from Alberta's oilsands, which are expected to produce as much as three million barrels a day by 2020.
"If (the United States) receives it all, which we don't have in our forecast, it could reduce even more our dependence on the Middle East," an energy department official told Reuters.
The U.S. predicts the surge in Canadian oil will be a major factor in slashing imports of Middle East oil from the current six million barrels a day to three million.
The news comes just days after Bush, in his annual State of the Union address, declared: "America is addicted to oil."
Bush said the U.S. must move "beyond a petroleum-based economy" and set a target of reducing 75 per cent of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.
His prescription for reducing oil consumption ranged from sharply increased use of bio-based fuel, solar energy, cleaner coal plants and nuclear power.
But with many alternative fuels still years away from commercial viability, the White House and other U.S. lawmakers have also been increasingly eyeing Canada's oil supplies as they search for more secure and stable energy sources.
In October, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch said Canada was poised to surpass Saudi Arabia as "the world's oil giant" in the 21st century.
Alberta's oilsands hold an estimated 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia in terms of overall reserves.
U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney had planned to visit Fort McMurray -- the hub of Alberta's oilsands production -- last September but postponed the trip because of the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Officials with the Canadian embassy in Washington say they are trying to reschedule the visit.
On Friday, Cheney stressed that Bush's call for a shift away from oil would not mean any government-imposed solution to reduce consumption.
"This notion that we have to 'impose pain' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist," Cheney told a radio interviewer.
Oil Sands Shift Economic Power in Canada
by Clifford Krauss, The New York Times International Herald Tribune Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Canada's Wild West is going corporate. In the last big energy boom here, during the 1970s, the card room at the Calgary Petroleum Club was so full of Texas oilmen that seats at the poker table rarely freed up until well into the early morning hours.
With oil prices high again, Alberta is hopping once more but with a twist. The skyline of Calgary, the business center of the province, is about to be altered by a huge real estate project; big Related Pictures
Alberta Oil Sands
(Click to Enlarge)
new jet runways to handle the influx are already in place. While poker is still popular, conspicuous consumption these days includes such things as white truffles and Mercedes-Benz convertibles.
The change is reflected in the very nature of the oil business here: Once built around conventional drilling where independents played a major role, oil is now extracted through a heavy industrial process requiring huge capital investment.
Some of the biggest international oil players plan to invest C$100 billion (US$85.66 billion) over the next decade into developing the gooey oil sands here. Alberta is at the center of a new energy-based Canadian economy that promises to be all the more crucial to the US.
As more oil flows, more economic power and population are shifting westward from the traditional manufacturing centers of Ontario and Quebec, which are trailing in comparison. The rising West is splitting the national economy, forcing the industrial monoliths back east to retool and reorient manufacturing to supply the growing oil economy.
Here in Alberta, every week seems to turn up an announcement of a new refinery, a pipeline project, or a land bid. Likewise, though to a lesser extent, with the neighboring provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
"It's a seesaw effect," said Todd Hirsch, chief economist for the Canada West Foundation, a research group based in Calgary. "What's driving Alberta, Western Canada, and resources up are what's driving Ontario and Quebec down the emerging Asian strength and the strength of the Canadian dollar."
The energy companies say their investments are only just the beginning in oil sand fields that hold estimated reserves equivalent to as much as 175 billion barrels of oil, or more potential energy content than the oil fields of Iran and Libya combined. Oil sands production has risen to just over 1 million barrels a day today from 400,000 barrels in 1995, and it is projected to rise to 2.7 million barrels in 2015.
Alberta has long been cowboy country, a cattle center in the heart of the Canadian Bible Belt. But in recent years, oil has given it the fastest growing population of any province, with people lured from elsewhere in the country and even outside Canada because salaries are growing faster than anywhere else.
"We're a big laboratory in how to absorb so much investment," said Gwyn Morgan, executive vice chairman of EnCana, the Canadian energy company based in Calgary. "None of us could have dreamed this would happen this quickly."
Here in Fort McMurray, the town closest to the oil sands, truck and bulldozer drivers come from as far away as Newfoundland and Labrador to earn six-figure salaries. They are buying up expensive pickup trucks as if they were toys.
As the town's population has increased to 61,000, from 33,000 in 1996, housing has become in such short supply that the average mobile home now sells for $277,000 and people are renting couches for $500 a month
The crowding and labor shortages pushed Canadian Natural Resources to build a jet runway long enough to accommodate Boeing 737s to allow workers to commute to their giant new Horizon project. Shell Canada has built a giant pipeline to transport diluted oil sand bitumen hundreds of miles south to a new upgrading plant outside Edmonton.
In Calgary, EnCana is about to build a corporate headquarters covering more than two blocks, the biggest real estate development project in Canada in two decades.
Restaurants, wine stores, art galleries, and luxury-car dealers are doing frenzied business. At an benefit auction this month, one bidder paid more than $13,000 to go fly fishing on a local river with Ron Brenneman, president and chief executive of Petro- Canada.
"I don't see any black clouds on the horizon," Brenneman said.
The same forecast might be said for much of Canada. Unemployment is at a 30-year low, the Toronto stock market reached an all-time high this month, and real estate is booming virtually everywhere. Meanwhile, oilmen here are now calling the Canadian dollar, which has climbed more than 35 percent since early 2002, a new petrocurrency.
The high cost of producing oil sands was once a major impediment, but no longer now that oil prices are at $60 a barrel or more and most experts expect prices to remain relatively high for years on end. There were only a dozen oil sands projects in Alberta a decade ago. Today there are about 60, and 55 more have been announced.
But Canada is also grappling with some losers amid the boom. Eastern manufacturers have been forced to retool, consolidate, and shed 180,000 jobs in the last two years as cheaper products enabled China to replace Canada as the top exporter of nonenergy products to the American market. Capital investment among manufacturers has decreased since 2000.
Particularly hurt have been companies manufacturing household appliances, electrical equipment, plastic and rubber products, textiles, and pulp and paper mills. At Edson Packaging Machinery, based in Hamilton, Ontario, one-third of the 85 workers were laid off in 2003. By switching to American suppliers, changing its product mix and putting more emphasis on service, Edson has rebounded somewhat and increased its payroll again.
"It's a tale of two economies," said Edson's president, Robert Hattin. "The resource-based economy is hot, and manufacturing right now is facing challenges we haven't seen before." Alberta has 10 percent of the population but directly produces 15 percent of Canada's gross domestic product. Both numbers are likely to rise in the coming years, economists say. "The fishing is gone in Newfoundland, and this is pretty close to the hub of Canada right now," Kevin Ellsworth, a 42-year-old Shell truck operator, said in explaining why he and so many other easterners were coming here. "Every time you turn around there's another plant project coming to town."
Ellsworth's enthusiasm is typical of many workers here and fits neatly with the dimensions of his job. His dump truck carries 400 tons of oil sands and reaches seven stories high when its box is lifted on its hydraulic cylinder. The mine pit he drives through all day has a depth of 240 feet, or 73 meters, and a length of more than a mile, or 1.6 kilometers. He can make more than $100,000 a year including overtime
Shell's oil sands venture contains enough pipe to stretch from Calgary to San Francisco and its mile-long conveyor belt has the largest capacity in the world. But the venture is only going to get bigger.
After several stalled oil sands efforts, Shell was faced in 1996 with the prospect of losing a lease over land north of Fort McMurray that it now believes holds more than five billion barrels of oil. With a barrel of oil worth under $20 a barrel at the time, development of the oil sands did not seem worth the investment.
But Shell brought in Chevron and another partner and went ahead with a project three years later, just as the price of oil was poised to climb. In less than four years and with an investment of 5.7 billion dollars, its project is already producing 155,000 barrels a day.
That was only the beginning. New land acquisitions and at least two more mines are planned over the next decade. An expansion costing $7.3 billion will add 100,000 barrels a day by 2009. Shell hopes to reach 500,000 barrels a day by 2015, equivalent to half the current daily production in all of Texas.
"It's the 'holy cow,'" said Craig Simpson, a Shell mine engineer. "What people don't realize is how big this is."
source : http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory ... /story.htmCanadian Oil Production Seen Doubling by 2020
CALGARY, Alberta - Canada's oil production could double by 2020 as new projects in the country's oil sands more than replace declining conventional output, the Canadian oil industry's biggest lobby group said Wednesday.
Oil production in Canada, the biggest supplier to the US market, is expected to grow to 4.9 million barrels a day by 2020 from last year's daily average of 2.5 million barrels, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) said in its annual production forecast.
The group also increased its forecast for Canada's oil output in 2015, boosting it by 750,000 barrels a day to 4.6 million as billions of dollars in new projects aimed at exploiting the oil sands, one of the world's greatest reserves of petroleum, are completed.
Canada's oil sands contain an estimated 174 million barrels of petroleum, a resource second in size only to that of Saudi Arabia. With oil prices remaining at lofty levels, removing the tar-like bitumen from sand and refining it into synthetic oil yields enough profit that about C$100 billion (US$91 billion) is expected to be invested in the region over the next decade.
"This is not an area that's reserve constrained, technologically constrained or economically constrained," said Greg Stringham, vice-president, markets and fiscal policy at CAPP.
The forecast was raised after some companies announced increased spending on their oils sands reserves. EnCana Corp and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd both said last year that they plan to boost output from the region by a half-million barrels a day over the next decade and more. The two firms expect to spend a combined C$25 billion on their oil sands projects.
Yet as oil sands output grows, conventional oil reserves are becoming scarce, the association said. In decline since the late 1990s, current production of 1.1 million barrels a day, equal to the output of the oil sands, may fall half by 2020.
CAPP said its production forecast could be 800,000 barrels a day lower if refiners in Canada and the United States don't expand capacity to handle the new crude oil, or if adequate supplies of skilled labor aren't available to build the projects.
(US$1=$1.11 Canadian)
