September content for your viewing pleasure

It's back to bitumen this month with Alberta Oil's oil sands report

By Jeff Lewis

September 01, 2010

As kids and university students head back to classrooms this week, Alberta Oil gets back to bitumen. September’s content centers on our annual oil sands report.

*Editor Gordon Jaremko visits the headquarters of Boston-based CERES, short for Coalition for Responsible Economies, to find out why oil sands firms are increasingly maligned in the public eye, and what they can do about it.

*Also on the eastern seaboard, we visit NYMEX, the world’s largest trading arena, and delve into the frenzied world of futures trading. File this under little-known fact: when oil prices peaked at US$147 a barrel in mid-2008, trading in paper barrels reached a fever pitch, climbing to 640 million barrels daily. That’s eight times the real-world consumption of wet barrels.

*Growth is back on the agenda of the mega-mine projects that started the oil sands story more than a half-century ago. While a more measured pace to development is taking hold in the formerly red-hot bitumen belt, forecast oil sands spending is nothing to sneeze at.

*Knowledge brokers from Ziff Energy Group tell Alberta Oil why gas from the Mackenzie Delta still matters.

*Vern Blinn landed his first job on a rig in 1949. The retired roughneck has been building models of iconic oilfield hardware ever since.