Unless the Canadian government steps forward to provide more infrastructure assistance, an opportunity to expand Alberta’s oil sands industry and create hundreds of high-paying jobs will almost certainly be lost foreover, a report released this week said, “Future of oil sands depends on government intervention”

The Alberta Federation of Labour commissioned the report, dubbed “Lost Down the Pipeline,”  which found that despite the global recession, energy companies are proceeding with aggressive plans to dramatically expand U.S.-based refining capacity, and American-bound pipeline capacity. 

In its report, the AFL listed U.S. refiners planning to tap into Alberta’s vast oil sands reserves, including Hyperion Refining, which proposes to build a 400,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Union County, S.D.  The Texas-based firm is in the midst of applying for an air permit from South Dakota regulators.

“What our research shows is that American refineries will have the capacity to process all of the expected increase in oil sands output from Alberta,”  AFL president Gil McGowan said. “As a result, unless the Stelmach government steps in much more aggressively than it has, the raft of upgrader postponements we’ve seen here in Alberta will almost certainly turn into permanent cancellations. We’ll be losing literally thousands of jobs down the pipeline.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.