Imperial Oil, Canada’s largest oil company, has lost a legal bid to overturn a federal regulatory decision that could delay the planned C$8 billion oil-sands project in Alberta.
The Federal Court ruled that the government acted properly to cancel a water permit because another court found flaws in an environmental report on the Kearl tar sands […]

EnCana Corp, Canada’s biggest energy company, is going to buck the trend in the oil industry of mergers, and split into two separate oil and natural gas firms in an effort to wring out more value with crude prices at record highs.
The new oil firm, worth about a third of the enterprise value, will operate […]

Another day, another court room battle concerning big oil. This time its oil sands in the dock. Imperial Oil’s (majority owned by Exxon) fight to win the right to drain muskeg at an oil sands project begins today in an Alberta courtroom.
At a time of intense public scrutiny of the region and the way the […]

Pity poor Ron Stevens, Alberta’s deputy premier, who is in Washington to spin the oil sands story and tell Congress that the province represents an “environmentally responsible source of energy supply to the United States”.
The timing could not have been worse for Ron but the dirty and polluting legacy of oil sands was […]

An Alberta government report has dismissed the notion that the Canadian state had failed to collect billions of dollars in royalties in previous years.
Former Auditor General Peter Valentine, who authored the report also said the system for collecting economic rent from the oil and gas industry was “generally well-designed, if not always well-executed.”