Canada's Fluid Borders: Trade, Investment, Travel, Migration by Geoffrey E. Hale & Greg Anderson

Author:Geoffrey E. Hale & Greg Anderson [Hale, Geoffrey E. & Anderson, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780776629360
Google: Zd8-zQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 50695745
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

For all of Canada’s energy-exporting history, the focus of trade has been on the Canada-US border. Recent years have seen growing efforts to export Canadian energy resources to new international markets—chiefly Asia, propelled by rapid and transformative changes in the North American energy marketplace. Since 2005, the “shale revolution” has profoundly reshaped North America’s energy landscape: the capacity to profitably develop the continent’s massive reserves of unconventional oil and gas (shale/tight oil, and shale gas) with the technologies of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling.3

This forever altered the oil- and gas-reserve and production landscapes in North America—especially in the United States. As of 2018, the United States possessed 43.8 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, an all-time high for the country, and an increase of well over one hundred percent in just ten years (US EIA 2019a). In natural gas, the increase in proved reserves of shale gas skyrocketed well over tenfold in recent years, from 23.3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in 2007 to 342.1 tcf in 2018 (US EIA 2019b). Proved reserves of all forms of natural gas in 2018 were a historic 504.5 tcf (US EIA 2019a), up over 300 tcf in just over a decade thanks to shale gas. Most of the new oil- and gas-producing regions in the United States are in the South, Midwest, and Northeast.

For Canada, the changes are less about oil, given the country’s long-standing proved reserves of 170 billion barrels, largely in Alberta’s oil sands, but include light/tight-oil resources in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. In gas, meanwhile, Canada’s potential is substantial: in 2017, its proved reserves were 69 tcf, but its marketable resources (gas accessible with additional drilling) stood at 1,220 tcf, with more than two thirds of that unconventional (Natural Resources Canada 2020). While unconventional oil and gas reserves can be found across the country, the major producing regions are British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Other jurisdictions—Quebec and New Brunswick—have placed moratoria on shale-gas development.

The shale revolution is fundamentally reshaping Canada-US energy relations. The United States has gone from being hydrocarbon scarce to hydrocarbon rich, and oil and gas production has climbed steeply along with it. Crude-oil production increased from 5.2 million barrels per day (mmbd) in 2005 to 12.2 mmbd in 2019—a level handily exceeding the American oil production peak of nine and a half million barrels per day in the early 1970s (US EIA 2020b, table 3.1). The United States has become the world’s largest oil producer, with daily production estimated at 12.3 mmbd in the first five months of 2020 (Ibid). The increase in production prompted the US Congress to do something in 2015 that would have been unthinkable a mere decade ago: lift its ban on exporting crude oil. While the United States will continue to be a net importer of petroleum products—its domestic requirements are over 20 mmbd—import volumes are predictably on the decline, by more than 4.5 mmbd between 2005 and 2019 (Ibid). Almost all of this decline comes from reduced imports from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries—down from 5.

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