Alberta, Canada oil sands production is projected to reach 3.2 MMbpd by 2020 and to further increase by 2030, to about 5.2 MMbpd.
Alberta, Canada oil sands production is projected to reach 3.2 MMbpd by 2020 and to further increase by 2030, to about 5.2 MMbpd. Clearly, there is no existing capacity to upgrade this amount of bitumen into light synthetic crude oil (syncrude) to accommodate these forecast production rates. To facilitate the processing of this new production, additional upgrader capacity of some form must be built, or the bitumen must be transported and sold as diluted bitumen (dilbit), an example of which is Western Canadian Select (WCS).
Upgraders can be justified only when the price spread between unprocessed bitumen and synthetic crude is sufficient to recover the large capital investment required. Gro
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