petroleum

Thursday October 16, 2014

Thursday October 16, 2014By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 16, 2014

Gas prices at 5-year low and dropping

The pain oil producers feel with oil prices hovering just above $80 a barrel is a bonus for consumers filling up at the gas pump.

Gasoline prices are at a five-year low in Canada, leaving more money in consumers’ pockets.

Prices have dropped to the $1.11 a litre level in some parts of Ontario, as low as $1.03 in Edmonton, $1.25 in Vancouver and $1.22 in St. John`s, a sharp price drop from the early summer. The Canadian average was about $1.23, according to Roger McKnight, an analyst with En-Pro International.

The price will fall even lower in most parts of Canada over the coming weeks, said Dan McTeague, who analyzes oil and gas prices at tomorrowsgaspricetoday.com.

McKnight agrees. “I could see it [crude] going down another $6 a barrel for WTI and that would translate into another three cents per litre [at the pumps] within the next 30 days,” he said.

McTeague said years of speculation drove world oil prices to $147 US a barrel in 2008 and $115 US this June at the time when ISIS seemed to be threatening supply in Syria.

But now there is a worldwide glut of oil.

“The reality is now setting in that crude has no floor, and as any other commodity, when the supply is high and the demand is low, prices have nowhere to go but down,” he told CBC News.

The shale oil boom in the U.S. has resulted in strong supply in North America and Saudi Arabia signalled last week that it would continue to pump oil and sell it at $80 a barrel, rather than manage its supply. That’s a 30 per cent drop since June.

And waning international growth has led to a drop in demand for crude.

West Texas Intermediate, the main oil contract traded in New York, is selling at $81.78 US a barrel today, and Western Canada Select, the price paid to many Canadian producers, is at $68.98 US.

Finance Minister Joe Oliver acknowledged the hit against Canadian producers, who may soon have to cut back on investment in new production.

“There will be implications for some companies, on the other hand, Canadian consumers can benefit from lower prices,” he said in a news conference Tuesday. (Source: CBC News)

Wednesday June 1, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday June 1, 2012

Federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair tours Alberta oilsands

Thomas Mulcair came close to dropping the T word here Thursday, but on a day devoted to conciliation he saved himself at the last second.

In his first-ever visit to the Alberta oilsands as NDP leader, Mulcair was about to substitute “tar” for “oil” when he hastily corrected himself.

Mulcair smiled as he recovered from his almost slip of using the word “tarsands.”

“They’re bitumen sands because the chemicals are neither oil nor tar,” he said at a news conference hours after being taken on a tour of the mine and tailings pond reclamation process by Suncor Energy of its site in northern Alberta.

“If removing that linguistic impediment can make the conversation easier, I’m not going to keep it in place intentionally,” he said after the near slip of the tongue. “Unfortunately a linguistic cleanup doesn’t change anything about what we’re talking about in terms of the ecosystems.”

Mulcair created a furor among three Western premiers with his view that the resource-driven economies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia — most notably the massive oilsands projects — have inflated the Canadian dollar. That in turn, he said, hurts other sectors in different regions of the country, particularly manufacturing in Quebec and Ontario.

Mulcair has come under fire for using the phrase “Dutch disease,” which explains how a country’s currency rises when there is high international demand for natural resources. The three Western premiers have condemned Mulcair’s comments, saying that he is using wedge politics to divide the country. (Source: Toronto Star)