Canada’s oil sands under siege

A scarcity of investment options is compounding the rapid exodus of international firms

The Canadian oil sands industry has been hit repeatedly since the middle of the last decade. International crude prices collapsed between 2014-16 and again this year, while Western Canadian oil prices slumped in the second half of 2018. The latter was due to a lack of takeaway capacity from the region, courtesy of an anti-oil sands campaign to slow development of new pipelines from Western Canada. The global environmental movement has successfully painted oil sands as being ‘black as coal’ over the past decade. This, along with lower oil prices, has contributed to an exodus of IOCs and major financial institutions from the resource. On 29 July, France’s Total, one of the few remaining IOCs i