General

Canada’s oil boom is over

“The only debate is how painful and persistent the bust will be”

This week’s issue of the Economist declares that Calgary’s oil boom is officially over. “The only debate is how painful and persistent the bust will be—not just for the biggest city in Canada’s richest province, Alberta, but for the whole country.” Inevitable comparisons are made to Alberta’s last bust in the 1980s, but the Economist seems to think that things could be even worse this time, thanks to the compounding effect of the global credit crunch. Most ominously, perhaps, the article notes that the new Obama administration in the U.S. may take exception to our “dirty” oil sands product, which requires more processing than oil from other sources. As the article notes, the new chair of the House energy committee, Henry Waxman, is a green crusader who wrote part of a bill that seemed to ban U.S. government agencies from buying oil sourced from oil sands.

Economist.com

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