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Alberta’s plan to boost crude prices through mandatory production cuts is working a little too well. Just over a week after Premier Rachel Notley announced that oil producers will be required to curtail output by 8.7 per cent, the price of heavy Canadian crude has more than doubled, in some cases rendering Western Canadian Select too expensive to ship south to U.S. Gulf Coast refiners. Alberta’s heavy oil trades at about US$41 a barrel, about US$9 less than on the U.S. Gulf Coast, according to traders and data compiled by Bloomberg. For a shipper without committed volumes, that price difference is so small that it wouldn’t cover the costs of shipping it down either TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone pipeline to Houston or Enbridge Inc.’s pipeline system. Gulf Coast imported about 500,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude in September. “Everyone is bidding up those barrels to make sure they can cover their pipe space,” Mike Walls, a Genscape analyst, said by phone. “People are really just hyper-focused on January and that’s why you are seeing these dramatic price moves.” For companies without commitments to ship regular volumes, a barrel of crude sent down the Keystone system from Hardisty, Alberta, to […]
