Hey, sorry, I tried looking up a case study of this for myself, but couldn’t find anything substantial. Do you guys have anything like this?
I’m wondering about the new pipeline purely from an economic sense.
Essentially stuff like:
- Projected taxpayer funded dollars to build the entire thing (a projected bell curve of expenditure).
- Projected oil demand, and price for the time that the pipeline remains operational.
- Finally, a bell curve of ROI for us.
I know I know, the environmental damage this would do is horrible, blah blah blah. I agree. I just want to know if this is at the very least a good financial decision or not.
Again, I’m looking for actual quantitative projections. Not stuff like, “but Asia is moving toward renewables”.
ROI is basically non-existent. The numbers are closely held trade secrets, you won’t find the projections published anywhere, but most sources agree, the prospects for demand are bad, which is why no private investors can be found. Industry insiders agree that basically the whole industry is sun-setting, so the majors are just going to ride it into the ground, claim capital losses and declare bankruptcy after the equity is safely transferred elsewhere. Optimistically we’re looking at maybe 40-60 years before we even recoup the initial principle.
What it does do, however, is make it basically impossible for Alberta to separate. It catches their nuts in an economic vise. Their debt to Canada because of those two pipes would bankrupt them 100x over if they ever tried to leave.
Bingo! Give this guy a prize, they get what’s going on.
Vaguely related thought: I’m pretty sure the AI bubble also has a lot to do with the fossil fuel industry transferring their wealth out of oil while at the same time wringing the last substantial profits they can out of their dying industry. They don’t give a shit if it all collapses, AI datacenters are just a stepping stone that’s conveniently propping up oil and gas and even coal while they evacuate their money from the collapsing building.
Yeah, its an expensive nation building project.
TIL oil pipelines can be repurposed, so maybe they can have some life when demand drops in the coming years?
World’s most badass waterslide
Once it’s been contaminated with hydrocarbon sludge, what’s it useful for next?
It’s not like it’s rail, where after we’re done with it we’d have excellent track going from YEW to YVR.
I keep hoping one day someone somewhere will adopt Carbon Engineering’s synthetic methane (syn gas) production from air capture technology. They’re a company out of BC. If we overbuilt on renewable and converted the excess power into SynGas we could easily make up the last sticky 5% of situations we still need hydrocarbon fuel for with carbon neutral fuel. You can liquefy SynGas the same way you make LNG so we could even still export it. It would take some retrofitting, but converting those DilBit pipes to SynGas pipes is actually not that hard.