Word: oil
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...pales by comparison with what's just around the corner. Canada is poised to become Venezuela north--without the loopy President and the deadweight national oil company as unwanted partners--as the biggest oil boom in North American history hits terminal velocity. An estimated $124 billion will be invested from 2007 to 2012, according to the Athabasca Regional Issues Working Group, an industry association. Production in Alberta's oil sands will more than quadruple, to about 5 million bbl. daily, by 2015; Canada currently exports an average of 1.9 million bbl. daily (from all sources) to the U.S., more than...
...investors following its first-quarter earnings report. Profits were $13 billion, but production was falling. Yet in Canada, Exxon has muscled aside some of its Syncrude partners and parachuted in a new management team to meet aggressive expansion targets. "Everything up here is American, pretty much," says an oil worker earning $130,000 a year, a fairly typical salary in Fort McMurray, which has earned the nickname Fort McMoney because it has the nation's highest average income. The timing seems right for Canada too. Carpenters and truck drivers are fetching six-figure wages in Alberta--and working...
...straight to waiting U.S. upgrading plants and refineries, a majority of which are located in such Midwestern states as Minnesota, North Dakota and Ohio. Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum and Total S.A. of France, along with about 20 smaller but no less ambitious players, are also transforming Alberta's boreal oil patch into the primary supplier of feedstock for an integrated North American energy market. "Canada is extremely important to U.S. energy security," says Rob Routs, executive director of oil sands at Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the world's No. 2 oil company, with annual revenue of $355.8 billion...
...they can't even think nationally. Relations between the maverick western province and Ottawa have always been stormy. In the 1970s, at a time of skyrocketing fuel prices, leftist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau promoted a National Energy Program of self-sufficiency and Canadian ownership of oil and gas development, which ignited a turf war with Alberta. Alberta won, which means so did the U.S., because the oil could be freely traded...
...working in the oil sands complains about the big paychecks, but beyond the project a serious backlash is growing against the economic and environmental pressures that come with maxing out oil production. A shortage of housing in Fort McMurray has pushed the price of an average home to more than $600,000. Two-bedroom apartments rent for about $3,500 a month. "The tar sands are being developed in an unsustainable fashion from virtually every point of view," says Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party...