GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Monday, November 10, 2008

Oilsands wealth hugely underestimated....

More than $1.5 trillion in wealth....
The wealth in Canada's oilsands, even taking into account the recent plunge in world oil prices, is nearly $1.5 trillion, more than four times the $342 billion officially estimated by Statistics Canada, a Canadian think-tank argues in a report released today.

That works out to a $34,591 increase in the wealth of Canadians to $243,950 for every man, woman and child, according to the analysis by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.

Last year, Statistics Canada valued the oilsands at $342.1 billion, or five per cent of Canada's total tangible wealth of $6.9 trillion, the centre said.

However, the federal agency's method of evaluating that wealth underestimates the quantity of oil the oilsands contain and the speed at which that wealth will be extracted, it said.

The reasons the agency underestimates the wealth in the oilsands is that it takes a restricted view of reserves, including only those that can be exploited now, Andrew Sharpe, chief economist at the centre and one of the authors of the report, said.

The official Statistics Canada estimate of the reserves, at 22 billion barrels, is "very small compared to those obtained using more appropriate definitions" resulting in an underestimation of their true value, it said. Further, the failure to take into account the projected growth of the industry significantly magnifies this underestimation.

More reasonable measures of the total oilsands reserves put them at 173 billion barrels, or eight times the StatsCan estimate, the centre said. And the rate at which that oil is projected to be extracted -- from 482 million barrels per year in 2007 to a peak of 1,350 million barrels in 2015, and at the 2007 price of $70 Cdn per barrel -- boosts the estimated present value of the oilsands to about $1.483 trillion, more than four times the official estimate of $342.1 billion.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Harper has any easy win here. Work a deal with Alberta & Saskatchewan to build a mega nuclear power plant up there. LOtsa work for Ontario & Quebec based nuke plant builders, the uranium comes from Saskatchewan . . . everyone wins.

The electricity generated replaces the coal fired plants currently used, (we can sell the coal to China because the can put as much CO2 into the air as they want - no penalty !) the hot water "by product" is used to get the oil out of the dirt.

Big win all the way around, he can play the green fairy game, the pan Canadian unity game.

12:08 PM  
Blogger Robert G. Harvie, Q.C. said...

..though setting up nuclear plants is hardly a guaranteed win for the NIMBY crowd.. many of which have less concern over global warming than they do about meltdowns or disposal of waste..

Oilsands are a two edged sword that Eddie Stelmach is dancing on right now - great wealth, but a difficult-to-manage environmental impact (I'm more concerned with water issues myself).

12:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nuclear power is not worshipped in Alberta as the fake green power source that is touted in Ontario. You can play the green card but Albertans will still see red.

Until nuclear plants are able to recycle the nuclear waste to eliminate the nuclear residue, we will need to wait until 2020 or so until fast nuclear reactors become more mainstream. Also, nuclear reactors tend to have an increasing annual maintenance cost so financial considerations cause them to become prohibitive.

Exactly, water is the real environmental issue in Alberta!

11:38 PM  

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