Quebecans Snub Noses at Alberta's Oil but Buy More Gasoline

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

"Quebec's premier is quick to reject "dirty" oil from Western Canada in favour of hydro power, but new data indicate the province's citizens are buying record amounts of gasoline and increasingly purchasing trucks and bigger homes.

Quebecers are widely seen across the country as environmentally conscious, but per capita, they are some of the highest consumers of energy on the planet, according to a report prepared by researchers at Universite de Montreal's business school." From here.

Dare I say "Hypocrisy!" or will this count as oil shilling? It's important.

[Rodent + 1,424]

4 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

"Quebec's premier is quick to reject "dirty" oil from Western Canada in favour of hydro power, but new data indicate the province's citizens are buying record amounts of gasoline and increasingly purchasing trucks and bigger homes.

Quebecers are widely seen across the country as environmentally conscious, but per capita, they are some of the highest consumers of energy on the planet, according to a report prepared by researchers at Universite de Montreal's business school." From here.

Dare I say "Hypocrisy!" or will this count as oil shilling? It's important.

it's always satisfying to have data back up what I already know to be true. 

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

You're being needlessly gracious about it, I feel.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

5 hours ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Dare I say "Hypocrisy!" or will this count as oil shilling? It's important.

Enviroilnmental Hypoilcracy.

(2 newly invented words for you to try out, Marina.)

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Quebeckers have always been big consumers of oil products, specifically gasoline and heating oil. At one time there were a whole series of refineries out on the East End of Montreal island,and one smallish one down on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence River, and another smallish one out near Quebec City, the Valero refinery  (which I think is owned by a Russian oil producer, although where the feedstock comes from is not known to me).  Montrealers had these big Ford sedans powered by the big V-8s, also the big Chevies and more big V-8s, it was very much a Quebecois thing to drive a seriously big sedan  (with lousy gas mileage, to be sure). 

Today the refining platform is dominated by the 137,000 bpd unit owned and operated by Suncor, which started out as a Montreal corporation and since moved to Calgary, where today it is probably the largest single corporation in Canada as measured by sales revenues.  Suncor dominates the oilsands fields and has a refinery up there.  Suncor also now owns the refinery in Sarnia, which is basically on the Canadian side near Detroit.  Now that refinery is fed by a pipeline from Alberta that runs through the USA, basically across Michigan, and the reason for that is that Michigan actually has soil to go dig a trench in and bury that pipe, in contrast with Northern Ontario where the land has this very thin soil cover and serious rock underneath, which you would have to go blast at enormous expense.  There have been these conflicts with the folks in Michigan about the state of that pipeline, it is rather old and potentially leaky, and the last deal I heard about was that the operator was going to dig it up and encase the pipe in a shield of concrete, to keep it from corroding further.  But governments change and where all that goes is anybody's guess. 

Now once your oil gets over to the Canadian side at Sarnia, there is this other line that runs across the farm fields of Southwestern Ontario up through Toronto and on to Montreal.  That pipe in theory is to carry Canadian crude forward to those Montreal refineries.  Now that most of the Montreal refineries are closed, and oil products brought in by ship, whose oil is actually flowing through that pipe is anybody's guess. There is also a pipeline from Portland, Maine into Montreal, and by default serves the Suncor refinery, but that oil is sourced from the Middle East.  So it does not look like Suncor demands that only their oil be the feedstock into their own refineries.  Then again, hard to tell when looking from the outside. 

Meanwhile, the other big players in the Quebec market, and remember that oils including gasoline is trucked down from Montreal into the Northern USA including New York State and Vermont,  Texaco and Esso (Imperial Oil Co), have closed their refineries.  Some of those plants still exist in mothball status, others torn down and one became a golf course.  The consensus is that it is cheaper to ship in refined product from Texas and Louisiana than to run a refinery in Montreal.  But the plant, or some of it, is still around, and I suspect in theory could be re-started.  It all depends on the politics.  

Edited December 17, 2018 by Jan van Eck