With war in the Middle East keeping the critical Strait of Hormuz fuel route closed, the international community is reaching into its oil reserves to fill the supply gap.
On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) agreed to release 400 million barrels from its emergency reserves — its largest-ever release — in order to help ease a disruption of “unprecedented” scale, the IEA said.
That’s drawing scrutiny of Canada’s oil reserves — or, rather, its lack of them, as Canada is the only nation in the G7 that doesn’t maintain a strategic reserve.
While Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said on Wednesday that Canada would “do its part” to help contribute to the global oil supply, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre criticized the Liberal government for not having any reserves.
As far as I understand Canada has shit lot of oil, but decided to sell it to the USA, and import/buy from Africa/Middle East/Word. It does not make sense.
We have a lot of crude oil, but not enough refineries to handle our complete yearly production. So some of it inevitably gets exported (25%? I forget.)
There’s also the fact that not all oil is created equal. Crude oil from the Alberta tar sands is heavy and sulfurous and contaminated with heavy metals. Some products are much more easily made from imported light oil, or from a mixture of types.
Build more upgraders? Doesn’t that upgrade heavy crude to light.
Canada has heavy crude oil > that must be mixed with light crude oil from other sources > which can then be refined into usable oil.
We ship our heavy crude to the US through pipelines, rail and soon-to-be ocean tankers.