Canadian Oil Sands Misses Unrealistic Projection – Issues Another

[Javaman]

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50971

Canadian energy authorities have done it again. They missed their last rosy projection of future oil sands production, so they issued a new one: they merely pushed the big surge in production 5 years into the future.

On November 3 Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) released a study that shows Alberta oil sands production soaring to 4.5 million b/d by 2030 and growing toward a peak of 5.3 million b/d in 2041. Actual production in 2008 was 1.3 million b/d.

We’ve heard this song before. In 2005, the burr under ASPO-USA’s saddle, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), issued a similarly glowing projection that the productive capacity of Canadian oil sands (more descriptively, tar sands) would grow from 1.18 million b/d in 2005, to 2.3 million b/d in 2010, 2.7 million in 2012, and a phenomenal 4.8 million in 2020.

In April 2006 I wrote A ‘Sanity Check’ on Projections for Canadian Oil Sands Production as a Commentary in this newsletter. My conclusion was that the oil sands industry would do well to match the pace of growth they achieved during 1995-2005 when they added about 60,000 b/d of production each year. At that pace, product from Canadian oil sands would be about 1.5 million b/d in 2010. I anticipated that bottlenecks in the extremely resource-intensive train of processes would slow the growth of output to 1.6 million b/d in 2015.