By : Franyi Sarmiento, Ph.D., Inspenet, May 19, 2022
Canada’s oil production could increase by 900,000 barrels a day to offset supply losses from Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to the premier of the Alberta province.
Prime Minister Jason Kenney gave the estimate in his remarks before a US Senate committee on Tuesday. That’s roughly triple the estimate given weeks ago by Canadian Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.
There is about 300,000 barrels a day of unused capacity in the North American pipeline system, which should be filled this year through increased production, Kenney said. Another 200,000 barrels of crude oil could be shipped by rail and “if downstream companies get serious and if regulators approve,” another 400,000 barrels could be added through pipeline reversals and technical improvements.
Boosting Canada’s oil production by that amount would not happen quickly. Canada exported about 3.9 million barrels a day of crude oil to the US in the first two months of the year, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, the largest share of the country’s output. .
By 2024, the completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project to British Columbia will give Canada even more capacity to ship oil to the US, Kenney said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “My point is, let’s be visionary about this. Let’s have a North American energy alliance and let’s do another major pipeline because we have the third largest reservoir on Earth in Alberta,” he said.
Energy producers can boost crude oil shipments by 200,000 barrels a day and natural gas shipments by the equivalent of 100,000 barrels by the end of the year by accelerating planned projects to expand output and help offset lost Russian supply, Wilkinson said in a statement. a press conference on March 24 in Paris.
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