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The last year and a half has seen some huge changes in prices in Alberta, but few as marked as the price per hectare in petroleum and natural gas leases.

Source: Government of Alberta (more…)

Yet more financial pressure is being added to effects of the global credit crisis on the Canadian oil and gas industry. On top of difficulty raising funds for new development, cost increases for getting established production to markets could be in store. (more…)

The Afro-Albertan connection

Western media coverage of violence in the Niger Delta has diverted attention away from Nigeria’s impressive economic progress. Paul Michael Wihbey, President of Washington-based energy consulting firm GWEST, draws on his in-depth working knowledge of West Africa to report on Nigeria’s energy-driven upswing as well as its heavy oil industry’s promising Alberta connection. (more…)

The Road Ahead

When analysts try to estimate the world’s remaining oil reserves, one of the largest variables is heavy oil. The question is not how much is in the ground, but how much of it can be recovered. For Canada’s heavy oil operators – those who could make Canada the world’s fifth-largest producer by 2015 – the answer depends on the efficiency of their recovery plans. If heavy oil is in your portfolio, here are some points to consider. (more…)

Aside from inspiring an entire cottage industry of overnight experts, one side effect of this fall’s Alberta royalty review was the practice of faultfinding – particularly of the oil & gas industry. But in accepting the overall message of the review panel that industry has been blatantly robbing past, present and future Albertans of their fair share of the economic rent from hydrocarbon production, the government may have done more than sow the seeds of its own corpulent destruction. It just might take the rest of us with it. Sebastian Gault explores the issue. (more…)

Dialing down the rhetoric on “Energy Superpower”

The phrase “energy superpower” has received a lot of press since its use in an Alberta Oil Radio interview with Energy Council of Canada president Dr. Murray Stewart last August – so much so that the moniker has been demoted to mean more realistically “a country with lots and lots of energy resources.” Yet, the phrase is still bandied about and images of a Great Canadian petro-state swaggering on the world stage might not only unsettle our trading partners but also undermine our credibility abroad as a carefully managed resource state. Alberta Oil regular contributor Sebastian Gault unpacks the notion of “energy superpower” and wonders if the whole rhetorical exercise isn’t just a waste of energy. (more…)

With crude oil imports increasing at an astonishing 13 per cent annually from 1994 to 2005, China has surpassed Japan to become the world’s number two oil consumer after the United States. An industrial lightweight just three decades ago, market liberalization policies initiated by the late Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978 have turned China into an economic juggernaut. As China’s Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong puts it: “Business is business. We try to separate politics from business.” An old China hand, Alberta Oil writer Sebastian Gault, whose China-Alberta.com website promotes Sino-Canadian business relations, provides a glimpse into China’s coming of age in the petroleum sector. (more…)