Industry Analysis

Washington DC is seeing a renewed push to eliminate the 40-year old regulation limiting the export of crude oil from the United States. The American Petroleum Institute has listed it as one of its top lobbying priorities for this Congressional session, and Senator Lisa Murkowski has begun a legislative campaign to eliminate the ban in … Read More

The next six months offer a crucial window to phase out dirty energy subsidies as the world moves towards an agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris this December. Outcomes of three meetings in June – the G7 Leaders’ Summit, the meetings of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the UN … Read More

As Kinder Morgan and Imperial Oil together opened the third tar sands unit train loading terminal in the Edmonton/Hardisty area, the business of sending tar sands crude to market by rail hit the skids. Genscape monitors each of the three terminals and the latest figures show that two of the terminals loaded no crude whatsoever … Read More

Media reporting on oil price changes tends to focus on the ‘new normal’, and often overlooks that oil prices have always been cyclical. What might we learn from the cycle, in order to think about longer-term campaign strategy? In particular, what if the industry’s expansion frontier starts to move away from the expensive extreme oil … Read More

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) annual flagship report, the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) 2015 was published April 14 and launched with a presentation at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). The brief discussion of CO2 emissions by EIA Administrator Adam Sieminski exposed just how blind the EIA currently is toward crucial climate … Read More

Many capital-intensive project proposals have been shuffled to the back burner as the oil industry grapples with cutting costs in the current low price environment. For the most part, companies have tended to shelve projects on the high cost frontiers – with the exception of Royal Dutch Shell, which has doubled down on its efforts … Read More

The falling oil price is bound to have an impact on the most expensive forms of oil production and the tar sands is high up on the list of costly, capital-intensive sources of crude. But as the industry struggles to remain viable in a new oil price environment, each company is determined to convince its … Read More