Thursday, August 06, 2020

First It Was Total, Now Exxon. The Verdict Is In. Athabasca Bitumen Is a "Stranded Asset."


When word got out on Wednesday that energy giant Exxon was writing down 20 per cent of its fossil fuel assets - Athabasca bitumen and natural gas - the writing was on the wall. It was the culmination of a quiet retreat by the world's biggest institutional investors, global insurance giants and foreign energy companies from the Tar Sands. High carbon, low value bitumen was in trouble and it took the federal  and Alberta governments to throw billions of public dollars into bad investments to keep it from collapsing entirely.

From The Narwhal:
The news broke in the last, ostensibly lazy week of July, and it sent a shockwave through the oilpatch: French fossil fuel giant Total was designating $9.3 billion in Alberta crude investments as stranded assets
Citing high production costs and forecasting declining demand for oil, Total said it was writing off its $7.3-billion stake in the Fort Hills bitumen mine, a massive development capable of processing 14,500 tonnes of oil sand per hour. 
Total also dropped its 50 per cent share in the Surmont bitumen recovery project, a joint effort with ConocoPhillips Canada that was busy doubling its output as recently as 2016. 
For good measure, Total dropped its membership in the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
...The fallback assumption among Canada’s political class is that companies like Total, Deutsche Bank, and Zurich Insurance Group are just out to get Alberta, falling prey to the supposed foreign-funded radicals whose influence Premier Jason Kenney’s government is now apparently having trouble tracking down
“If you can picture the portfolio manager at the end of his long table in New York or London or Zurich or wherever, looking down at his juniors and saying ‘What are we doing about climate change? Well, we’re writing off investments in Canadian oil and gas,’ ” Natural Resource Minister Seamus O’Regan told The Globe and Mail last month. “And the box is checked.” 
But what if the rest of the world is reading the numbers while elected officials in Ottawa and Alberta cling desperately to their own spin? What if there’s no virtue signalling or hypocrisy in Total’s decision, just a hard-nosed business assessment? 
After all, Total is far from alone: in May, Fort Hills co-owners Suncor and Teck wrote down their own oilsands investments by $1.38 billion and $474 million, respectively, The Canadian Press reported. The facility was expected to operate for about half a century when it opened less than three years ago.
...“Total has reviewed its oil assets that can be qualified as ‘stranded’, meaning with reserves beyond 20 years and high production costs,” the release continued. “The only projects identified in this category are the Canadian oil sands projects Fort Hills and Surmont.” 
In other words: nothing political to see here, folks. Just listening to the evidence and following where it leads. 
But in Alberta, where everything fossil-related is hyper-political, that kind of analysis leaves both major parties in a serious bind. They’re caught between their own overheated support for an expanded oilsands industry and a global economic reality that is driving down the province’s fossil economy, triggering huge cuts in health and community services that depend on it, and now threatening to eviscerate rural municipalities’ tax base.
Since The Narwhal article went to print, Exxon has joined the Defector's Club. Exxon will be wiping 20 per cent of its fossil fuel reserves from the company's asset sheet. First to be written off, stranded, are Exxon's Athabasca bitumen holdings.

It's pretty obvious now that the reality of Tar Sands bitumen was foremost in Kinder Morgan's thinking when the Texas cowboys announced they were walking on the Trans Mountain pipeline. They must have thought they hit the jackpot when Bill Morneau flew down with the federal chequebook to grossly overpay them for what they knew was a pipeline to nowhere.

Will the Trudeau Liberals ignore these omens and keep pouring billions into the Trans Mountain expansion or will they realize that Canada has no end of better uses for that money?

Justin Trudeau has another scandal on his hands only this time it doesn't go to his integrity. This is a question of competence.

4 comments:

Northern PoV said...

I've debated these issues with Markham Hislop on twitter.
He is almost an oxymoron: a rational Alberta based energy analyst.

He retweeted this for example:

"Hang on.
They've now defined "anti-Alberta energy campaign" as any attempt to stop projects “by the dissemination of misleading or false information."
Given how woeful and counterproductive they are, the @CDNEnergyCentre meets this definition."

https://energi.media/author/markham-hislop/

He thinks TMX-twin should be built but then no more pipelines needed for 20 years. ??!!??

When challenged on the poor market prospects for bitumen & heavy oil, he pointed out that the gulf refineries can't get Venezuelan product so that means they need Albertas.

He did not reply to my comment on the obviously selfish and shameful Canadian support for the regime-change bs that the USA is trying to engineer (and failing at, so far).

The Disaffected Lib said...


NPoV, my guess is that companies such as Total, Exxon, Norway's Statoil, the big investors such as BlackRock, JP Morgan, etc. have weighed the Venezuelan situation before they decided to walk on Athabasca bitumen.

Look who's left holding the bag? Canadian energy companies, Canadian banks and pension funds and the federal and Alberta governments. What a coincidence.

This is frustrating. How many times did Mark Carney, while governor of the Bank of England, warn that the bubble would burst and that high carbon, low value fossil fuels such as bitumen would become stranded assets? How many warnings did Ottawa and Alberta ignore?

The US Gulf refineries may indeed be short of heavy oil/bitumen feedstock but that's not the point. Unconventional oil - such as bitumen - is costly to extract, costly to transport, costly to refine.

When Kenney has to subsidize the southern pipeline and Trudeau has to pick up the entire tab to build the western pipeline because the private sector won't touch them, doesn't that send a message? Did we really need Total to come straight out and call Athabasca bitumen a "stranded asset" when the private sector, by deeds rather than words, has been telling us that for the last year or two?

To me it's akin to the great North American gold rushes of the 19th century. In each case, long after the gold had petered out there were those who just kept exploring and digging, certain that the glory days would be back even as the shop owners and townspeople disappeared. Now tourists go down to those creeks and rivers and rent a pan to try their luck. It's great fun I suppose.

Anonymous said...

Well, there's always the arch-oligarchal wazoos known as Irving Oil, still smarting at no Energy East pipeline. They have a tanker-load of Alberta sludge in Saint John NB as we speak at their refinery, the largest one in Canada, said dilbit having transited the Panama Canal. And they say they want more.

Don't count out the loony Canuck "elite" just yet! The hack academics and blurb writers at "Institutes" across this fair land are hard at it even as we speak, making up lies for Conrad Black and PostMedia to endorse and promulgate. Probably all having a sh!t fit, because oil and mining is what provides them their daily bread in sponsorship bucks. And if that goes t!ts up, well, they'll have to tap into The Pudgy Poobah's AIMCO pension fund confiscation of Alberta's public service and teachers' funds. Way to meet our international GHG obligations, O Canada!

BM

The Disaffected Lib said...

It's dismaying, BM, how little our governments have done to prepare for a bursting of the Carbon Bubble. I'm sure this comes as no surprise given the endless warnings but, provincial and federal, they act as though they never heard a word of it.

All signs point to the bubble having now burst - the abandonment of capital, the retreat of the big fossil energy giants, the cancelation of pending new projects. French energy giant Total declaring Athabasca bitumen a "stranded asset." Exxon as much as saying the same by its massive write down. Norway's Statoil doing a di di mau. Teck bolting at the 11th hour.

Who is left holding the bag? Canada's major banks and pension funds. Our federal and provincial governments that grow more desperate by the day.

This could be an economy-wrecker, especially for money-troubled Alberta but also for the nation at large.

Justin was practically giddy when he flew to Texas to pay fealty to the oil barons by assuring them that "no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave it there."