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Canada, The Unexpected Winner in the Global Oil Boom

Canada, The Unexpected Winner in the Global Oil Boom

  • The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, now finally completed and operational after years of delays, is changing the fortunes of the oil sands.
  • Canada’s oil sands producers have started ramping up production last year in anticipation of the start-up of exports through the TMX pipeline.
  • The production increases in the oil sands are the result of the expansion of operational projects with existing infrastructure.
Canada

Canada’s oil output is booming as producers ramp up projects and extraction amid expanded market access and narrowing discounts of the Canadian heavy crude to the U.S. benchmark.

The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, now finally completed and operational after years of delays, is changing the fortunes of the oil sands producers in Alberta, giving them access to markets in Asia and the U.S. West Coast.

Constrained for years due to insufficient egress, Canada’s oil now has nearly 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of additional market access. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline is tripling the capacity of the original pipeline to 890,000 bpd from 300,000 bpd to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia on the Pacific Coast.

And producers are taking advantage of this. They began ramping up production at the end of last year in anticipation of the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) start in the first half of this year. Canadian oil firms now get more bang for their buck as the discount of Western Canada Select (WCS), the benchmark for Canadian heavy crude sold at Hardisty in Alberta, has narrowed relative to the U.S. crude oil benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in recent weeks.

Moreover, the production increases in the oil sands are the result of the expansion of operational projects with existing infrastructure, so the capital expenditure – which is very high for this type of crude extraction – has been lower than for building projects from scratch.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Barclays Vows To Stop Financing Oil Sands Projects

Barclays Vows To Stop Financing Oil Sands Projects

Barclays on Wednesday said it would no longer provide financing to oil sands companies or oil sands projects and tightened conditions for thermal coal lending in an updated policy, which fell short of announcing overall pledges or targets in funding oil and gas.

In the annual report for 2022 published today, the UK-based banking giant vowed not to provide financing for any oil sands projects, compared to a previous policy which stated that it would only provide financing to oil sands exploration and production clients that had projects to materially reduce their overall emissions intensity.

In coal lending, Barclays now aims to phase out financing to clients engaged in coal-fired power generation in the EU and OECD by 2030, compared to phasing out such lending only to clients in the UK and the EU in the previously announced policy.

Commenting on Barclays’ new targets, Jeanne Martin, Head of Banking Programme at ShareAction, said in a statement, “Disappointingly, despite not having published a new oil and gas policy for the last three years, the bank’s fracking policy remains unchanged and there is no mention of new oil and gas. This means Barclays continues to be out of step with current minimum standards of ambition within the industry.”

Pressured by ESG trends and shareholders, other banks have already started to announce cuts to lending to the oil and gas industry.

At the end of last year, two prominent banks in Europe vowed to significantly cut exposure to the fossil fuels sector. Credit Agricole, the largest retail lender in France, said in early December that it targets to have no new financing granted for oil extraction projects by 2025, and to cut its oil exploration and production exposure by 25% by 2025 compared to 2020.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Deep freeze disrupts crude flows in oil sands and Bakken shale

A deep-freeze in Canada and Northern U.S. is disrupting oil flows, causing a surge in crude prices just as American stockpiles are declining.

With temperatures from North Dakota to Northern Alberta below zero Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius), TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone pipeline was shut on Tuesday before resuming later the next day. In North Dakota’s Bakken shale, production has started to succumb to the freeze, sending local crude prices to their highest since November. Canadian oil has also jumped.

The disruptions mean less supplies at a time when U.S. stockpiles have been shrinking every week since mid-November and getting closer to September’s three-year low. Drillers have been slow to restore output to pre-pandemic levels as they prioritize shareholder returns over growth. This further supports growing predictions that the oil market will return to a deficit this year, with some like Pioneer Natural Resources Co. Chief Executive Officer Scott Sheffield expecting oil to range from US$75 to US$100 a barrel.

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Even though Western Canada and North Dakota are usually cold this time of year, temperatures have been lower than usual.

Western Canadian Select crude’s discount to the U.S. benchmark has shrunk by almost US$3 dollars since Dec. 27, to US$12.10 per barrel on Wednesday.

Bakken crude in the Clearbrook, Minnesota, hub rose 90 cents a barrel in the past two days to reach a US$1.25 premium to Nymex futures Wednesday, a two-month high. The same grade traded this week in Wyoming at a premium to New York futures for the first time since Nov. 18.

Keystone carries 590,000 barrels a day of Canadian oil from Alberta to the U.S. Midwest.

Prior to resuming operations, TC Energy said that its staff have been challenged by extremely cold temperatures impacting the oil flow through its Hardisty terminal. Temperatures there fell to about -24 degrees Celsius (-11 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Enbridge Inc. said it was seeking crude supplies for its main pipeline system across Canada and U.S. to keep its pipes running at scheduled rates.

The Unmistakable Impact Of The IEA’s ‘Fantasy’ Report

The Unmistakable Impact Of The IEA’s ‘Fantasy’ Report

In an effort to adapt to Trudeau’s recent green policies and owing to pressure from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Canadian oil sand producers have formed an alliance to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. This would see a huge shift from current practices as, at present, oil sands producers extract some of the most carbon-intense crude oil. However, as the cost of carbon increases to meet environmental objectives in Canada, oil companies face increasing pressure to shift practices towards achieving net-zero.

The alliance will include Canadian Natural Resources (-1.77%)Cenovus Energy (-0.10%)Imperial Oil (-1.91%), MEG Energy, and Suncor Energy (-2.58%), which together operate around 90 percent of the country’s oil sands production. They will be working alongside both the federal and Alberta governments to make operations less carbon-intensive.

The companies are expected to invest in several areas in order to reduce their carbon emissions including, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, repurposing waste into hydrogen energy, fuel switching, as well as innovative technologies such as direct air capture and small modular nuclear reactors.

The alliance aims to maintain its oil production, which will contribute an estimated $3 trillion to Canada’s GDP over the next 30 years while creating jobs and advancing clean energy practices.

Significant actions towards achieving net-zero have been taken across the oil and gas sector over the last month, as companies have felt the mounting pressure from governments, regulators, and stakeholder activists.

Last month, an activist investor managed to oust two Exxon (-2.56%) directors from its board in a push for a greater response to climate change. The small hedge fund, Engine No. 1, demonstrated its dissatisfaction with the poor financial performance of Exxon during the pandemic, as well as its limited effort to introduce climate change initiatives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Exxon Dumps Tar Sands/Oil Sands Holdings, Slashes Estimate of Recoverable Reserve

http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/Energy/tarsands/
Greenpeace / Jiri Rezac

Colossal fossil ExxonMobil has dropped virtually all its tar sands/oil sands holdings from its list of recoverable assets, and its Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil followed suit by cutting a billion barrels of bitumen from its inventory, in what Bloomberg News calls a “sweeping revision of worldwide reserves to depths never before seen in the company’s modern history”.

Exxon reduced its estimate of recoverable reserves to 15.2 billion barrels world-wide as of December 31, Bloomberg reports—still a massive quantity, but far last than the 22.44 billion barrels it reported just a year ago. In the tar sands/oil sands, “the company’s reserves of the dense, heavy crude extracted from Western Canada’s sandy bogs dropped by 98%,” the news agency adds.

On the same day, The Canadian Press writes, Imperial cut its estimate of its “proved plus probable bitumen reserves” to 4.46 billion barrels, down from 5.45 billion a year earlier.

The two companies previously announced write-offs of up to US$20 billion for Exxon and C$1.2 billion for Imperial.

“Proved” or “proven” reserves have a specific meaning in fossil industry financing—in contrast to the total resource a company has discovered, proven reserves “refer to the quantity of natural resources a company reasonably expects to extract from a given formation,” Investopedia explains. To fit the definition, the resource must have “a 90% or greater likelihood of being present and economically viable for extraction in current conditions.”

It’s largely the deteriorating economic conditions the industry faces that led to Exxon’s and Imperial’s epic write-down this week.

“The pandemic-driven price crash that rocked global energy markets was the main driver of Exxon’s reserve downgrade, along with internal budget cuts that took out a significant portion of its U.S. shale assets,” Bloomberg says. “The oilsands have historically been among the company’s higher-cost operations, making them more vulnerable to removal when oil prices foundered.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Has oil peaked?

Last month, the world’s 4th largest oil company—BP—predicted that the world will never again consume as much petroleum as it did last year. So, have we finally hit peak oil? And if so, what does that mean for our economy and our world?

There was fierce controversy in the first decade of this century over claims by petroleum geologists and energy commentators that peak oil was imminent (I was a figure in that debate, writing several books on the topic). Most of those early claims were based on analysis of oil depletion and consequent supply constraints. BP, however, is talking about a peak in oil demand—which, according to its forecast, could fall by more than 10 percent this decade and as much as 50 percent over the next 20 years if the world takes strong action to limit climate change.

Source: PeakOilBarrel.com; production in thousands of barrels per day.

Numbers from the US Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Review tell us that world oil production (not counting biofuels and natural gas liquids) actually hit its zenith, so far at least, in November 2018, nearly reaching 84.5 million barrels per day. After that, production rates stalled, then plummeted in response to collapsing demand during the coronavirus pandemic. The current production level stands at about 76 mb/d.

Many early peak oil analysts predicted that the maximum rate of oil production would be achieved in the 2005-to-2010 timeframe, after which supplies would decline minimally at first, then more rapidly, causing prices to skyrocket and the economy to crash.

Those forecasters were partly right and partly wrong. Conventional oil production did plateau starting in 2005, and oil prices soared in 2007, helping trigger the Great Recession.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadian Oil Sands Per Barrel At $4.47, Now Cheaper Than 12-Pack Coke, $5.08

Canadian Oil Sands Per Barrel At $4.47, Now Cheaper Than 12-Pack Coke, $5.08

The collapse of global oil demand has impacted the price of Canadian Oil Sands to such a degree, the price of a barrel is now cheaper than a 12-pack of Coke purchased at Walmart. According to oilprice.com, the current price of a barrel of Western Canadian Select (oil sands) is $4.47 versus a 12-pack of Coke at Walmart for $5.08.

What a deal… ah?  Now, let’s do a simple comparison of the ENERGY CONTENT in a barrel of Canadian Oil Sands vs. a 12-pack of Coke.  A barrel of oil equivalent contains 1.4 billion calories of energy.  A typical 12 oz Coke can contains 140 calories.  If we multiply it by 12, we have 1,680 calories in a 12-pack of Coke.

Doing some simple math:

Barrel Of Oil Equivalent (1,400,000,000 calories) / 12-Pack Coke (1,680 calories) =  833,333.

Thus, a barrel of Canadian Oil Sands, which contains 833,333 times the energy calories than a 12-pack of Coke, is now worth $4.47 compared to $5.08 for the 12-pack of Coke.  Again… what a deal, ah??

I just wanted to post this simple comparison to show how much the Global Oil Industry is being gutted.  If OPEC, Russia, and the United States do not come up with “MEANINGFUL CUTS,” then we could see Western Canadian Select trading for $1 a barrel or less.

As for RESTARTING the U.S. and Global Economy after an extended shutdown, I have my doubts, as so does Gail Tverberg at her blog, OurFiniteWorld.com.  Check out her most recent article; Economies won’t be able to recover after shutdowns.

COMING NEW VIDEO: I am finishing putting together the charts for my next video on why the GOLD & SILVER PRICES will explode due to the collapse of the Global Financial Ponzi Scheme.

TAR SANDS OPERATIONS GO FROM BAD TO WORSE: Now Losing Billions A Month

TAR SANDS OPERATIONS GO FROM BAD TO WORSE: Now Losing Billions A Month

The situation at Canada’s Alberta Tar Sands Operations has gone from bad to worse as the super-low oil price is now costing the industry billions of dollars each month.  Unbelievably, the price for the Western Canadian Select heavy oil fell to a gut-wrenching $14.65 yesterday down from a high of $58 in May.  Tar sands oil is now selling at an amazing $40 discount to U.S. West Texas Oil which is trading at $56.

The main reasons for the falling price of Alberta tar sands are due to Canadian pipelines full to capacity as well as midwest U.S. refineries shut down for seasonal maintenance.  Furthermore, the announcement by a U.S. Federal Judge to block the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline on November 9th, didn’t help.

According to data from the Natural Resources Canada, the Alberta Tar Sands Operations were producing 2.7 million barrels per day (mbd) of oil in 2017.  I would imagine production this year is likely to reach close to 3 mbd.  The largest tar sands producer in Alberta is Suncor.  Suncor produced a record 476,000 barrels per day of tar sands in the third quarter of 2018.

Now, Suncor reported a handsome $1.4 billion profit in Q3 2018 on $8.3 billion in revenues.  However, that profit was based on much higher Western Canadian Select (WCS) oil price which was trading over an average of $35 for the quarter.  Unfortunately, the average price of WCS so far in the fourth quarter is $20.75.  And, if the price of WCS stays at the current low price, the tar sands operators will be receiving less than $20 a barrel.

In the article, Capacity shortages costing Canadian producers $100M/day, it stated:

“Heavy-oil producers are getting 40 percent of what they normally would be paid if we had access to markets,” said Grant Fagerheim, CEO of Calgary-based Whitecap Resources, which produces about 60,000 barrels per day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadian Oil Producers Divided On Output Cuts

Canadian Oil Producers Divided On Output Cuts

crude pipelines

Crude oil producers in Alberta appear to be split on a proposed cut in production amid record-low prices, Canadian media report.

One of the large Canadian oil producers, Cenovus Energy, is calling upon the government of Alberta to mandate temporary production cuts at all drillers in a bid to ease Canadian bottlenecks that have resulted in Canada’s heavy oil prices tumbling to a record-low discount of US$50 to WTI.

The province of Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil sands production, has the necessary legislation to have all producers agree to production cuts and it needs to use it now, Cenovus said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg yesterday.

“We’re probably producing about 200,000 or 300,000 barrels per day of oil in excess of our ability to get that oil out of the province, either by pipelines or by rail,” Cenovus’ CEO Alex Pourbaix told Global News.

However, other big players disagree that the industry needs to produce less. “Our position is that government intervention in the market would send the wrong signals to the investment community regarding doing business in Alberta and Canada. And we really do need to take a long-term view and allow the market to operate as it should,” Global News quoted a spokeswoman for Suncor as saying.

However, Suncor is in a favorable position: according to the company spokeswoman it has no exposure to the suffocating differential between Western Canadian Select and West Texas Intermediate since it processes as much as 70 percent of its crude at home.

Husky Energy is another of the large Canadian producers who oppose a government-led intervention in production rates. According to Husky, “Market intervention comes with an unacceptably high level of economic and trade risk.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada’s Crude Crisis Is Accelerating

Canada’s Crude Crisis Is Accelerating

Enbridge pipeline

Canadian oil producers are in an increasingly tough predicament. With high and increasing oil demand around the globe over the last year, Canadian oil production has increased accordingly. All of this is simple and predictable economics, but now Canadian oil has hit a massive roadblock. Producers have the supply, and they have more than enough demand, but they don’t have the means to make the connection. Canadian export pipelines simply don’t have the capacity to keep up with either the supply or the demand.

Canadian oil producers have now maxed out their storage capacity, and the Canadian glut continues to grow while they wait for a solution to the pipeline problem to materialize. As pipeline space is at a premium and storage has hit maximum capacity, oil prices have fallen dramatically, and the differentials that had previously been hitting heavy oil hard in Canada (now at below $18 a barrel for the first time since 2016) have now spread to light oil and upgraded synthetic oil sands crude as well, leaving overall Canadian oil prices at record lows.

(Click to enlarge)

Now, adding to the problem, growth in oil demand has begun to slow in the wake of skyrocketing United States production and the weakening of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iranian oil. Fist, the U.S. granted waivers to eight nations to continue buying Iranian oil despite strong rhetoric, and now the European Union has undermined the sanctions even further.

In an effort to correct the pricing drop, some Canadian drillers have been cutting production levels, turning to more expensive forms of transportation like railways to ship their oil, and in some cases even using trucks to move their product.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadian Oil Producer Calls For Production Cap Amid Record Low Prices

Canadian Oil Producer Calls For Production Cap Amid Record Low Prices

oil field

One of the large Canadian oil producers, Cenovus Energy, is calling upon the government of Alberta to mandate temporary production cuts at all drillers in a bid to ease Canadian bottlenecks that have resulted in Canada’s heavy oil prices tumbling to a record-low discount of US$50 to WTI.

The province of Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil sands production, has the necessary legislation to have all producers agree to production cuts and it needs to use it now, Cenovus said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.

“This is an extraordinary situation brought on by extraordinary circumstances,” Cenovus says.

“The government needs to take this immediate temporary action — which is completely within the law — to protect the interests of Albertans,” the company’s email to Bloomberg reads.

Western Canadian Select (WCS)—the benchmark price of oil from Canada’s oil sands delivered at Hardisty, Alberta—has dropped to a record low discount of US$50 to WTI in recent weeks, due to rising oil production and not enough pipeline capacity to ship the crude out of Alberta.

Due to the record low heavy oil prices, Cenovus Energy is currently operating its Foster Creek and Christina Lake projects at reduced volumes, it said in its Q3 earnings release. On the earnings call, Cenovus Energy’s President and CEO Alex Pourbaix urged the whole Canadian industry to slow down production to ease bottlenecks.

“And I want to be clear on this, the industry right now has a production problem. We’re going to do our part but we are not going to carry the industry on our back. I think this is something that has to be dealt with on an industry wide basis,” Pourbaix said.

Alberta’s Energy Department spokesman Mike McKinnon told Bloomberg in an email, responding to Cenovus’s call for province-wide production cuts:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This small branch of Trans Mountain could derail Canada’s pipeline purchase

This small branch of Trans Mountain could derail Canada’s pipeline purchase

The vast majority of oilsands crude moving to the West Coast passes through the little regarded Puget Sound Pipeline, which is now heavily entangled in troubled Canada-U.S. relations

Politicians and industry have long boasted of the ability for an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline to get oil to lucrative Asian markets from Burnaby’s Westridge terminal.

But experts in Washington State are increasingly concerned that the twinning of the Edmonton-to-Burnaby pipeline may in fact lead to an expansion of the Puget Sound Pipeline, a 111-kilometre “spur line” from Trans Mountain that branches southward at Abbotsford to carry oil to four large refineries in the Puget Sound region.

If Kinder Morgan shareholders vote to approve the deal, Canada will purchase the Puget Sound Pipeline as part of the $4.5 billion deal for the existing Trans Mountain line — meaning the decision to expand the spur line would eventually fall to Ottawa.

Trump may use Puget Sound Pipeline to punish Canada for trade conflict

According to a recent analysis from the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the presence of the Puget Sound Pipeline in the $4.5 billion sale to Canada may end up being the very thing that scuttles the deal.

That’s because the U.S. government is required to approve the purchase as it crosses the border, including review by both the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and State Department.

President Donald Trump would ultimately decide the verdict of the deal — which he may oppose given his erratic approach to addressing ever-growing trade tensions between the two countries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Politics versus the future: Canada’s Orwellian energy standoff

Politics versus the future: Canada’s Orwellian energy standoff

There is no denying the utility of fossil fuels, which meet 85% of the world’s energy needs. And consumption is rising along with emissions. Even in Canada, the second largest hydropower producer in the world, 76% of end use energy is provided by fossil fuels.

We are told by the federal government that increasing oil and gas production and meeting emissions reduction targets are mutually compatible goals. Alberta has crafted a ‘climate leadership plan’ that allows oil sands emissions to grow by 40% and places no restrictions on oil and gas production outside of the oil sands. A phase out of remaining coal plants, most of which were already due to be decommissioned under the former Harper government’s legislation, and a modest carbon tax, were also included.

Even with Alberta’s oil sands cap in place, National Energy Board (NEB) projections for oil and gas production growth show that upstream emissions will increase greatly, to the point that a 49% reduction in emissions from the rest of Canada’s economy would be required to meet our Paris targets.

Notwithstanding the difficulty in making such radical reductions outside of the petroleum sector in a short timeframe, the federal and Alberta governments assert that if the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX) is not built, even Alberta’s extremely modest ‘climate leadership plan’ may be cancelled.

Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau have invested a lot of political capital in TMX but are ignoring the bigger picture. Even if oil and gas production is allowed to grow per the NEB’s projections, there are two other export pipelines likely to be built that are not mentioned in the heated TMX debate.

Line 3 and Keystone XL, without TMX, would provide sufficient pipeline export capacity for foreseeable production growth under the oil sands emissions cap, and access world prices on the Gulf Coast.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Disaster Hits Canada’s Oil Sands

Disaster Hits Canada’s Oil Sands

Transmountain pipeline

Kinder Morgan said it would halt nearly all work on a pipeline project that is crucial to the entire Canadian oil sands industry, representing a huge blow to Alberta’s efforts to move oil to market.

Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion is the largest, and one of the very few, pipeline projects that has a chance of reaching completion. Alberta’s oil sands producers have been desperate for new outlets to take their oil out of the country, and the decade-plus Keystone XL saga is the perfect illustration of the industry’s woes.

Keystone XL is still facing an uncertain future, and with several other major oil pipeline projects already shelved, there has been extra emphasis on the successful outcome of the Trans Mountain Expansion. That is exactly why Canada’s federal government, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has gone to bat for the project.

But, despite federal approval, Trans Mountain still faces a variety of obstacles that have bedeviled the project for some time. It appears that opposition from First Nations, environmental groups, local communities affected by the route, and the provincial government in British Columbia have forced Kinder Morgan to throw in the towel, at least for now.

Kinder Morgan said on Sunday that it suspended most work on the $5.8 billion Trans Mountain Expansion.

Environmental groups hailed the announcement. “The writing is on the wall, and even Kinder Morgan can read it. Investors should note that the opposition to this project is strong, deep and gets bigger by the day,” said Mike Hudema, climate campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, according to Reuters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is This The Beginning Of An Oil Sands Revival?

Is This The Beginning Of An Oil Sands Revival?

pipelines

New life was breathed into the Canadian oil sands with a decision by foreign-owned Harvest Operations Corp to commission its BlackGold project south of Fort McMurray.

The Calgary-based arm of South Korean state-owned Korea National Oil Corp announced on Dec. 21 it will start the 10,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) operation, construction at which was halted in 2015 due to low oil prices.

In a press release on SEDAR, Harvest said that major work at the site has already started, with the aim of commissioning wells and starting steam injection in Q2 2018. Production is slated for the third quarter.

It cites “the stabilization of crude oil pricing and the improved operational and financial performance of Harvest’s conventional business as factors in its decision to move forward with BlackGold.”

The start-up has been helped through a refinancing of $1.36 billion of maturing debt, plus the raising last month of an additional quarter-million in financing, the company said.

Global News notes the project was built for around $900 million and was “considered mechanically complete” when it was shelved in the spring of 2015 when WTI oil prices were around $50 a barrel, half as much as a year earlier.

WTI on Thursday closed at $59.84, for a percentage gain of 0.34%. Related: 2018: The Year Of The Oil Bulls

The Canadian oil sands have seen an exodus of foreign investment since the oil price collapse of 2014 and US shale plays gathered momentum. The divestments have included Royal Dutch Shell, Marathon Oil, Statoil and ConocoPhillips.

Yesterday AXA SA, the third-largest insurer in the world, said that it will divest about $822 million from the main oil sands producers and associated pipelines, and will stop further investments in these businesses. The move could affect companies such as TransCanada, Enbridge and Kinder Morgan.

But as foreign companies have pulled out money, Canadian firms have made multi-billion-dollar deals to expand their holdings. According to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, Canadian ownership of oil sands production now sits at over 80%, reported the Calgary Herald.

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