With the current price
of synthetic crude oil sometimes dipping as low as $ 30 per barrel, a company that has paid off its infrastructure can still make a profit.
Upgrading The process of heating, distillation, and hydrogenation that turns bitumen
into synthetic crude oil for refining.
If we look at CNRL's operations at Horizon, we can get a good sense of the value of a pure play in this space — through the third quarter of 2014, before the oil price crash really took hold, the operating costs
for synthetic crude oil production at Horizon were $ 38.31 per barrel.
This has called upon Devoe's suite of business skills, acquired over several years as senior counsel
at synthetic crude oil producer Suncor, to leverage relationships with partner firms and extract the maximum value from the resources available to the team.
Murphy has a 5 percent stake in Syncrude Canada Ltd, one of Canada's largest oil sands plants with the capacity to produce 350,000 barrels of
synthetic crude oil per day.
Their move to rail comes as the Obama administration continues to weigh an application for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would
deliver synthetic crude oil and bitumen, an oil - containing substance, from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
The Oil Sands segment includes mining, extracts and transports bitumen from oil sands deposits in Alberta, Canada, and upgrades the bitumen to produce and
market synthetic crude oil and vacuum gas oil.
The Keystone Pipeline System is a pipeline system to
transport synthetic crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and further to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Alberta government could see to it that the energy producers refined the stuff into
synthetic crude oil on site but this is a high - cost, high - carbon asset already at some risk of becoming «stranded.»
At the site, there are facilities for heating and compressing the bitumen while adding hydrogen to the naturally carbon - rich mix to
produce synthetic crude oil.
The break - even for mining projects, though, had climbed to $ 85 - 95 / bbl if the project included an upgrader, a facility that turns bitumen
into synthetic crude oil.
Annual production of non-upgraded bitumen and
synthetic crude oil from Alberta's oil sands will increase almost 2.5 times by 2017 from 2007 levels, according to the just - published report... Read more →
Today,
synthetic crude oil is trading, in Canadian dollar terms, at well over $ 60 per barrel — a healthy operating profit margin.
As such, it's not at all clear that the Province has the right to enact the powers it is attempting to here over refined products, although it clearly does have the broad power to restrict exports in the case of crude oil,
synthetic crude oil, and bitumen and other resources.
Source: RAND A new report from RAND concludes that in 2025,
synthetic crude oil (SCO) produced from oil... Read more →
Energy economist Andrew Leach has looked at the economics of refining in Canada (here, here and here) and claims that producers can make more money by selling raw bitumen than they could by upgrading it to
synthetic crude oil or by refining it into fuel products.