Can Canadian shale oil compete with the US?

The boom in the US shale oil industry has had a significant impact on the weakening of Canadian energy industries in recent years, which has negatively affected job creation in the country’s huge oil sands.

However, Canada is now looking to work on its own oil shale fields, as an attempt to fix the economic damage it went through. Canadian producers and international oil majors are continuously discovering formations that they believe could compete with the US’s biggest shale fields.

Apart from the United States, Canada is the first country to have a large-scale development of shale resources, which sums up to about 8% of the Canadian oil output. Other countries such as China, Russia and Argentina also have huge shale reserves, but have still not taken all the necessary steps towards trading development. Canada offers many of the same advantages that allowed oil companies to launch the oil shale hype in the United States: plenty of energy companies who don’t mind taking risks; deep capital markets; oil transport infrastructure; low population in areas with Oil shale reserves.

The National Energy Council has noted that the Duvernay and Montney formations in Canada have resources of 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 4.5 billion barrels of oil.

Shale oil production in Canada is about 335,000 barrels per day and is expected to grow to 420,000 bpd in the next 10 years. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers declared that the pace of production growth could accelerate, and that the estimated volume of resources could rise, as activity starts increasing and knowledge of the fields gets better.

Chevron announced the first Canadian shale project in Duvernay in November. The boom in oil sands dates back two decades when improved technology, along with rising crude oil prices and fears of global oil shortages encouraged the development of the world’s third-largest reserves. But in the past five years, much of this investment has moved to the south, as shale companies in the United States developed new drilling technologies that filled the world’s oil markets with cheaper crude oil.

Oil sands currently account for two-thirds of Canada’s 4.2 million barrels per day of crude oil. This will continue to heavily contribute to Canada’s energy resources, because once created, sands projects produce oil for decades.

The development of oil sands has led to economic growth in Alberta at 5.5% annually between 2010 and 2014, two times the average. However, the 2014 collapse of oil prices caused a recession, prompting producers to cancel at least $32 billion in planned projects.

Oil sands capital spending dropped for the third consecutive year in 2017, while other oil and gas investments increased by 40% from 2016 to about C $ 31 billion. Spending out of oil sands again this year is expected to grow to C $ 33 billion, almost three times the amount expected to invest in oil sands.

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