The “Oil Curse” or “Curse of Oil” or “Resource Curse” is the net negative outcome that is seen with any single industry that takes over a geographic area. The central idea is that when oil is discovered in an undeveloped land, like rural Africa, the initial promise of great wealth Read more…
Below are the biggest conventional oil discoveries of 2018 grouped by the country they were found in. As you can see, these top 10 countries alone found more than 6 Billion of Barrels of Oil Equivalent. Those that want to “keep it in the ground” are just not realizing that Read more…
As you have no doubt heard, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has forced oil production cuts starting at 350,000 barrels per day in January 2019 and hopes to reduce those cuts to 95,000 barrels per day by the end of 2019. We wanted to know how much oil is that so Read more…
Most pundits say that by the end of 2019 the market would clear itself but the Alberta Government wants to clear the over supply and reduce the current massive oil inventories from about 35M barrels to somewhere near it norm of 20M barrels. So in an ideal world, both the Read more…
There is a fair amount of misinformation floating around the oil sector about the oil production cuts that Premier Rachel Notley announced on Dec 2nd 2018. Here are the facts in a simple FAQ format: 1 – Where did the number 325,000 barrels per day come from? Alberta estimates that Read more…
If you are worried about the environment you may be surprised to learn that virtually all rational energy environmentalists are pro-nuclear. This is a quite a surprise to many. The reasons are that while Nuclear Reactors have their problems… well, lets stop there. It is much more accurate to say Read more…
This short video shows that the price of oil you see on TV is far from what Canadian Oil Producers receive. As a basis for comparison we used Western Canadian Select (aka W.C.S.) which is a blend of several oils that is about 20% lower quality than the North American Read more…
When we watch the TV or read the newspaper we often see something like “OIL IS UP TODAY” but we really don’t know what that means because there are so many different types of crude oil, each with its own price. Below we briefly explore the 6 oil products that Read more…
The old DOT-111 rail cars carry about 700 barrels of oil but because of safety concerns they are being phased out for newer, safer DOT-117 oil rail cars which can carry about 675 barrels of oil. We will use 700 barrels as a round number to form a basis of Read more…
In the late 1990’s the term PEAK OIL was coined as a short form for the time when we reach the maximum amount of oil we can produce in a year. It was often misconstrued as the end of oil but was simply when production levels start to decline. By Read more…
Canada imports about 1 BILLION barrels of oil per year, nearly all into Quebec and Ontario in-spite of the fact that it exports 3.1 Billion barrels of oil per year. These are the specific numbers taken directly from the Canadian Federal Government from 2016: Canadian production: 3.9 MMb/d Imports: 0.9 MMb/d Read more…
Most Canadians think that they are getting their gasoline from Alberta and Texas, but that is just not the case. This 2016 graphic from Statistics Canada shows where Canada really gets its oil from:
