lorenzo63
Age quod Agis
Canadà in difficoltà causa della discesa dell' oil
La discesa delle quotazione, ovviamente, ha colpito, ed in modo duro i giacimenti in scisti sabbioso/bituminosi in Canadà - per i quali se la memoria nn mi tradisce erano a profit se e solo se la quotazione dell' oil => 70 barile..
FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta -- Last summer, when the price of oil neared $150 a barrel, Terrance Coles's family earth-removal business in this energy boomtown was pulling in revenue of more than $200,000 a month. These days, Mr. Coles, who abandoned a failing seafood business in Newfoundland to join the oil rush here, is out of work, sleeping at the home of a cousin.
The Canadian economy, like Mr. Coles, has been blindsided by plummeting oil prices. The nation has ratcheted up its dependence on oil revenue, more than doubling its crude-oil exports over the past four years. Now, the oil bust is pushing it into a deeper recession than many economists had expected.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will visit Ottawa in his first trip abroad as president. Because Canada has become the biggest supplier of crude oil to the U.S., energy policy is expected to be high on the agenda in his meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Economic problems in the U.S. have always been keenly felt in Canada. But until last fall, Canada looked positioned to weather the storm better than its southern neighbor. Low corporate and consumer debt levels, no subprime-mortgage crisis, and surpluses in the federal budget and trade balance placed it on sounder footing. Economists expected slower growth but no recession.
The ills infecting this northeastern Alberta town, which sits atop the world's second-largest oil reserve behind Saudi Arabia, are now spreading across broad swaths of the Canadian economy. In recent months, oil companies have shelved investment plans worth close to 50 billion Canadian dollars (US$39.8 billion), according to the Oil Sands Developers Group, an industry association. "This is going to have a big impact right across Canada," says Ryan Kubik, the chief financial officer of Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., the largest investor in a consortium of oil companies called Syncrude Canada Ltd. "These are huge dollars not being spent."
Oil-patch spending has a big multiplier effect, and boosted sectors such as construction and heavy equipment at a time when the nation's manufacturing industry was steadily shedding jobs. "Most of Canada doesn't identify itself with oil," says Jacques Marcil, an economist with the Canada West Foundation, a Calgary think tank. "But without really realizing it, it now relies on it."
President Obama has been under pressure from environmentalists not to veer from campaign pledges to reduce U.S. oil consumption and to tackle the problem of climate change. The oil patch here in Alberta, known as oil sands, produces crude oil from a tarlike substance called bitumen in a process that emits more greenhouse gases than conventional drilling.
To be sure, oil prices aren't Canada's only economic problem. Deep troubles in the U.S. auto industry have crippled manufacturing in southern Ontario, home to many auto plants and parts makers. The U.S. housing bust has hit the timber industry, once one of Canada's biggest businesses. Canadian forestry exports have fallen by a quarter from two years ago, and now amount to about one-fifth of energy exports.
The weaker demand for all Canadian exports, particularly from the U.S., tipped Canada's trade balance into deficit in December for the first time since the mid-1970s.
In January, unemployment rose by 129,000, the biggest one-month increase in years, pushing the jobless rate to 7.2%. Economists now expect the Canadian economy to contract by about 1.1% this year, a downward revision of earlier forecasts of 1.8% growth.
To confront the downturn, the Canadian government last month unveiled a stimulus plan expected to cost C$39 billion over two years, producing a federal budget deficit for the first time in more than a decade.
The oil patch around Fort McMurray and two other patches nearby cover an area of boreal forest about the size of Florida. The fields account for 1.3 million barrels of crude oil a day, more than half of Canada's total production. Canada's crude-oil exports, in dollar terms, now rival those of its automotive sector, centered in Ontario, the traditional backbone of its manufacturing sector.
The existence of bitumen around Fort McMurray has been known since at least the 19th century. Early last century, prospectors tried to market it for paving roads. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian oil companies, led by those now called Suncor Energy Inc. and Syncrude, began developing open-pit mines to extract it.
Yet despite the huge scale of the reserve, the global energy sector paid relatively little notice due to the high cost of producing petroleum from the sands. With the price of oil dropping to as low as $10.72 a barrel in 1998, the investment wasn't worthwhile.
Then the game changed.
Advances in technology, including improvements in extracting bitumen using steam, made the process more efficient. The availability of easy credit fueled ever bigger investments. The Iraq war, coupled with the unpredictability of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, made reserves in a politically stable country like Canada more attractive. And as the global economy boomed, the price of oil soared, more than covering the costs of production
Major oil companies from around the world, along with big Canadian firms, poured money into the oil sands. Annual spending, including both new construction and the expenses to operate the huge sites, nearly quintupled to a planned $34.6 billion in 2008, from $7 billion in 2003, according to the Oil Sands Developers Group.
Those flows contributed to a stronger Canadian dollar, which in turn crimped manufacturing exports by making them more expensive to the U.S. and other countries.
Since 2000, the Canadian economy "has evolved from the manufacturing sector of Ontario to the oil fields of Alberta," says Jeffrey Rubin, chief economist with CIBC World Markets, in Toronto. The stronger Canadian dollar "only accelerated the de-industrialization of Canada -- it fed on itself."
The westward shift in economic power is also evident in the country's "equalization" program, which requires richer provinces to subsidize poorer ones to ensure a relative equality in public services across the country. Ontario, traditionally the economic engine of the country, for the first time in memory will soon receive more assistance from the program than it pays into it. Alberta, home to about 75% of the oil sector, now pays more into the program, on a per capita basis, than any other province.
The boom in the oil patch created tens of thousands of jobs. Unemployed workers flooded into Alberta from the economically ailing Atlantic provinces.
Mr. Coles, who is 56 years old, and his two sons gave up their family seafood business in Newfoundland six years ago and headed for Fort McMurray. Mr. Coles began driving trucks for oil companies, and eventually he and his sons started a business removing dirt for them. As the oil sector boomed, the business thrived. His two sons bought new pickup trucks and snowmobiles. One splurged on a Corvette.
Over the past decade, the population of the town, nicknamed "Fort McMoney," doubled to 66,000. Because of traffic snarls, it begin building a five-lane bridge over the Athabasca River, next to two existing bridges. Early each morning, long lines of pickup trucks would form at the two Tim Horton's doughnut shops, a popular Canadian chain. The wait could last an hour.
Blair Macnab, 44, moved with his family 400 miles from Valleyview, Alberta, to take over a tire and auto repair business. He more than doubled the staff to 21 workers, but he still needed his crew to work late into evenings.
Home prices soared, rivaling those in Toronto. Few single-family homes were available for less than about $500,000. Average wages were among the highest in the country.
Mark Plewes, 43, moved 2,200 miles from his home in Barrie, Ontario, to install phone and Internet service in new homes. Regular telecommunications work is scarce in Ontario. So he works for three weeks straight in Fort McMurray, returns to his wife and three kids for a week, then commutes back -- a pattern followed by thousands of other migrants.
Last fall, as economic problems multiplied in the U.S. and elsewhere in Canada, Alberta's oil-and-gas industry briefly remained a bright spot. Then the bottom dropped out of the oil market, as the global downturn suppressed demand. Tightening credit compounded the problem. Almost overnight, oil companies started postponing investment plans.
For Mr. Coles, the timing couldn't have been worse. After tensions with his sons forced him out of the family excavation business, he began working in October for a large construction company in town, driving a truck hauling bitumen. In November, Petro-Canada Oil Sands Inc., a Canadian oil company, announced it was delaying investment on the site where Mr. Coles was working. He was laid off, along with hundreds of others. He's had no luck finding another job
They're not hiring now," said Mr. Coles one recent evening, nursing a beer at a bar catering to Newfoundlanders. Like many others from the hard-luck province, Mr. Coles is considering moving back. "It's been rough."
Mr. Macnab says his tire shop began feeling the effects a few weeks ago. He told his staff recently they'd have to work fewer hours. Instead of buying new tools and other things needed around the shop, they're repairing what they have. In the past few months, thieves have broken in three times, on one occasion stealing 80 tires, he says.
"All of a sudden the conversation changed" from talk about big paychecks to talk about break-ins, he said one recent afternoon at his shop. "We're hearing more about these shady things now."
Mr. Plewes, the telecom worker, says he is doing about half as many installations a day as in the fall, due to the slowdown in housing construction. Two members of the nine-person team recently were laid off.
Rick George, the chief executive of Calgary-based Suncor, which in January postponed site-expansion work worth C$14 billion, estimates that 35,000 temporary workers employed around the Fort McMurray oil sands will be reduced to fewer than 10,000 by the end of the year.
Given how frenetic the boom was, he says, "we needed a correction. What we didn't need is a collapse in the banking system and the world economy to get it."
Many workers are now returning home to the four provinces on the Atlantic coast, taking their chances there. Close to 12,000 a year left that area for the oil sands in 2006 and 2007; migration shrank to 1,700 last year, and now appears shifting the other way, according to the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. For the first time in years, some vacant houses are languishing on the market in Fort McMurray.
"What's difficult to get across to Canadians is that when the economy slows enough to [result in] a $37 barrel of oil, everybody suffers," Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said last month. On Wednesday, U.S. benchmark crude closed at $34.62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
In their meeting in Ottawa on Thursday, President Obama and Prime Minister Harper will discuss energy issues. Given the size of the oil patch around Fort McMurray, it is expected to be critical to the Canadian and U.S. economies for years to come.
But environmental concerns about the oil sands are likely to complicate matters. The traditional method of extracting the bitumen from the dirt involves large open-pit mines that scar the land. Removing the bitumen and turning it into oil requires lots of energy and water, producing three times the greenhouse gas of conventional oil drilling.
Messrs. Obama and Harper are expected to search for common ground on the environmental issues, weighing the economic benefits of the oil sands against its environmental costs. Both sides have signaled interest in a so-called cap-and-trade emissions system, where companies can buy and sell permits for the greenhouse gases they emit.
Many oil executives predict prices to rebound before the end of the year, which would reignite expansion plans. But that might not be soon enough for Mr. Plewes, the telecom worker, who says the slowdown in Fort McMurray makes it less worthwhile for him to be away from his family in Ontario.
La discesa delle quotazione, ovviamente, ha colpito, ed in modo duro i giacimenti in scisti sabbioso/bituminosi in Canadà - per i quali se la memoria nn mi tradisce erano a profit se e solo se la quotazione dell' oil => 70 barile..
FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta -- Last summer, when the price of oil neared $150 a barrel, Terrance Coles's family earth-removal business in this energy boomtown was pulling in revenue of more than $200,000 a month. These days, Mr. Coles, who abandoned a failing seafood business in Newfoundland to join the oil rush here, is out of work, sleeping at the home of a cousin.
The Canadian economy, like Mr. Coles, has been blindsided by plummeting oil prices. The nation has ratcheted up its dependence on oil revenue, more than doubling its crude-oil exports over the past four years. Now, the oil bust is pushing it into a deeper recession than many economists had expected.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will visit Ottawa in his first trip abroad as president. Because Canada has become the biggest supplier of crude oil to the U.S., energy policy is expected to be high on the agenda in his meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Economic problems in the U.S. have always been keenly felt in Canada. But until last fall, Canada looked positioned to weather the storm better than its southern neighbor. Low corporate and consumer debt levels, no subprime-mortgage crisis, and surpluses in the federal budget and trade balance placed it on sounder footing. Economists expected slower growth but no recession.
The ills infecting this northeastern Alberta town, which sits atop the world's second-largest oil reserve behind Saudi Arabia, are now spreading across broad swaths of the Canadian economy. In recent months, oil companies have shelved investment plans worth close to 50 billion Canadian dollars (US$39.8 billion), according to the Oil Sands Developers Group, an industry association. "This is going to have a big impact right across Canada," says Ryan Kubik, the chief financial officer of Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., the largest investor in a consortium of oil companies called Syncrude Canada Ltd. "These are huge dollars not being spent."
Oil-patch spending has a big multiplier effect, and boosted sectors such as construction and heavy equipment at a time when the nation's manufacturing industry was steadily shedding jobs. "Most of Canada doesn't identify itself with oil," says Jacques Marcil, an economist with the Canada West Foundation, a Calgary think tank. "But without really realizing it, it now relies on it."
President Obama has been under pressure from environmentalists not to veer from campaign pledges to reduce U.S. oil consumption and to tackle the problem of climate change. The oil patch here in Alberta, known as oil sands, produces crude oil from a tarlike substance called bitumen in a process that emits more greenhouse gases than conventional drilling.
To be sure, oil prices aren't Canada's only economic problem. Deep troubles in the U.S. auto industry have crippled manufacturing in southern Ontario, home to many auto plants and parts makers. The U.S. housing bust has hit the timber industry, once one of Canada's biggest businesses. Canadian forestry exports have fallen by a quarter from two years ago, and now amount to about one-fifth of energy exports.
The weaker demand for all Canadian exports, particularly from the U.S., tipped Canada's trade balance into deficit in December for the first time since the mid-1970s.
In January, unemployment rose by 129,000, the biggest one-month increase in years, pushing the jobless rate to 7.2%. Economists now expect the Canadian economy to contract by about 1.1% this year, a downward revision of earlier forecasts of 1.8% growth.
To confront the downturn, the Canadian government last month unveiled a stimulus plan expected to cost C$39 billion over two years, producing a federal budget deficit for the first time in more than a decade.
The oil patch around Fort McMurray and two other patches nearby cover an area of boreal forest about the size of Florida. The fields account for 1.3 million barrels of crude oil a day, more than half of Canada's total production. Canada's crude-oil exports, in dollar terms, now rival those of its automotive sector, centered in Ontario, the traditional backbone of its manufacturing sector.
The existence of bitumen around Fort McMurray has been known since at least the 19th century. Early last century, prospectors tried to market it for paving roads. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian oil companies, led by those now called Suncor Energy Inc. and Syncrude, began developing open-pit mines to extract it.
Yet despite the huge scale of the reserve, the global energy sector paid relatively little notice due to the high cost of producing petroleum from the sands. With the price of oil dropping to as low as $10.72 a barrel in 1998, the investment wasn't worthwhile.
Then the game changed.
Advances in technology, including improvements in extracting bitumen using steam, made the process more efficient. The availability of easy credit fueled ever bigger investments. The Iraq war, coupled with the unpredictability of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, made reserves in a politically stable country like Canada more attractive. And as the global economy boomed, the price of oil soared, more than covering the costs of production
Major oil companies from around the world, along with big Canadian firms, poured money into the oil sands. Annual spending, including both new construction and the expenses to operate the huge sites, nearly quintupled to a planned $34.6 billion in 2008, from $7 billion in 2003, according to the Oil Sands Developers Group.
Those flows contributed to a stronger Canadian dollar, which in turn crimped manufacturing exports by making them more expensive to the U.S. and other countries.
Since 2000, the Canadian economy "has evolved from the manufacturing sector of Ontario to the oil fields of Alberta," says Jeffrey Rubin, chief economist with CIBC World Markets, in Toronto. The stronger Canadian dollar "only accelerated the de-industrialization of Canada -- it fed on itself."
The westward shift in economic power is also evident in the country's "equalization" program, which requires richer provinces to subsidize poorer ones to ensure a relative equality in public services across the country. Ontario, traditionally the economic engine of the country, for the first time in memory will soon receive more assistance from the program than it pays into it. Alberta, home to about 75% of the oil sector, now pays more into the program, on a per capita basis, than any other province.
The boom in the oil patch created tens of thousands of jobs. Unemployed workers flooded into Alberta from the economically ailing Atlantic provinces.
Mr. Coles, who is 56 years old, and his two sons gave up their family seafood business in Newfoundland six years ago and headed for Fort McMurray. Mr. Coles began driving trucks for oil companies, and eventually he and his sons started a business removing dirt for them. As the oil sector boomed, the business thrived. His two sons bought new pickup trucks and snowmobiles. One splurged on a Corvette.
Over the past decade, the population of the town, nicknamed "Fort McMoney," doubled to 66,000. Because of traffic snarls, it begin building a five-lane bridge over the Athabasca River, next to two existing bridges. Early each morning, long lines of pickup trucks would form at the two Tim Horton's doughnut shops, a popular Canadian chain. The wait could last an hour.
Blair Macnab, 44, moved with his family 400 miles from Valleyview, Alberta, to take over a tire and auto repair business. He more than doubled the staff to 21 workers, but he still needed his crew to work late into evenings.
Home prices soared, rivaling those in Toronto. Few single-family homes were available for less than about $500,000. Average wages were among the highest in the country.
Mark Plewes, 43, moved 2,200 miles from his home in Barrie, Ontario, to install phone and Internet service in new homes. Regular telecommunications work is scarce in Ontario. So he works for three weeks straight in Fort McMurray, returns to his wife and three kids for a week, then commutes back -- a pattern followed by thousands of other migrants.
Last fall, as economic problems multiplied in the U.S. and elsewhere in Canada, Alberta's oil-and-gas industry briefly remained a bright spot. Then the bottom dropped out of the oil market, as the global downturn suppressed demand. Tightening credit compounded the problem. Almost overnight, oil companies started postponing investment plans.
For Mr. Coles, the timing couldn't have been worse. After tensions with his sons forced him out of the family excavation business, he began working in October for a large construction company in town, driving a truck hauling bitumen. In November, Petro-Canada Oil Sands Inc., a Canadian oil company, announced it was delaying investment on the site where Mr. Coles was working. He was laid off, along with hundreds of others. He's had no luck finding another job
They're not hiring now," said Mr. Coles one recent evening, nursing a beer at a bar catering to Newfoundlanders. Like many others from the hard-luck province, Mr. Coles is considering moving back. "It's been rough."
Mr. Macnab says his tire shop began feeling the effects a few weeks ago. He told his staff recently they'd have to work fewer hours. Instead of buying new tools and other things needed around the shop, they're repairing what they have. In the past few months, thieves have broken in three times, on one occasion stealing 80 tires, he says.
"All of a sudden the conversation changed" from talk about big paychecks to talk about break-ins, he said one recent afternoon at his shop. "We're hearing more about these shady things now."
Mr. Plewes, the telecom worker, says he is doing about half as many installations a day as in the fall, due to the slowdown in housing construction. Two members of the nine-person team recently were laid off.
Rick George, the chief executive of Calgary-based Suncor, which in January postponed site-expansion work worth C$14 billion, estimates that 35,000 temporary workers employed around the Fort McMurray oil sands will be reduced to fewer than 10,000 by the end of the year.
Given how frenetic the boom was, he says, "we needed a correction. What we didn't need is a collapse in the banking system and the world economy to get it."
Many workers are now returning home to the four provinces on the Atlantic coast, taking their chances there. Close to 12,000 a year left that area for the oil sands in 2006 and 2007; migration shrank to 1,700 last year, and now appears shifting the other way, according to the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. For the first time in years, some vacant houses are languishing on the market in Fort McMurray.
"What's difficult to get across to Canadians is that when the economy slows enough to [result in] a $37 barrel of oil, everybody suffers," Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said last month. On Wednesday, U.S. benchmark crude closed at $34.62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
In their meeting in Ottawa on Thursday, President Obama and Prime Minister Harper will discuss energy issues. Given the size of the oil patch around Fort McMurray, it is expected to be critical to the Canadian and U.S. economies for years to come.
But environmental concerns about the oil sands are likely to complicate matters. The traditional method of extracting the bitumen from the dirt involves large open-pit mines that scar the land. Removing the bitumen and turning it into oil requires lots of energy and water, producing three times the greenhouse gas of conventional oil drilling.
Messrs. Obama and Harper are expected to search for common ground on the environmental issues, weighing the economic benefits of the oil sands against its environmental costs. Both sides have signaled interest in a so-called cap-and-trade emissions system, where companies can buy and sell permits for the greenhouse gases they emit.
Many oil executives predict prices to rebound before the end of the year, which would reignite expansion plans. But that might not be soon enough for Mr. Plewes, the telecom worker, who says the slowdown in Fort McMurray makes it less worthwhile for him to be away from his family in Ontario.
