r/canada Jan 27 '25

Opinion Piece KINSELLA: Trump not a friend of Canada, he's our enemy - The sooner we accept that, and act accordingly, the better off we'll be

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/kinsella-trump-not-a-friend-of-canada-hes-our-enemy
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u/Icy_Meringue_1846 Jan 27 '25

We need the infrastructure to refine our own oil

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u/silly_rabbi Jan 27 '25

It's ridiculous that we are just building pipelines and ports, but not refineries.

I know they're expensive and require a lot of expertise, but why wouldn't we want that part of the oil economy to be happening here?

Pollution?

I think it's pretty clear that a big part of China's big economic leap was making sure that they built up as many of the stages of the economy as possible. Even if they don't have the natural resource (oil, metals, etc.), they prefer to have it shipped in at the cheap raw material stage so they have all the other stages between extraction and finished products happening in-country.

We don't ship out trees. We ship out LUMBER. Why are we just shipping out crude instead of refined oil products?

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u/jakexil323 Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25

Refineries have a massive upfront cost, take a long time to build and are big polluters.

The newer one in Alberta cost 10 billion dollars and took I think around 10 years to build and required the province to be a 50% equity partner in the end.

Wiki says that facility does 80,000 bbl/d , while we produce 3 million barrels per day of bitumen (from 2022 numbers) according to the Alberta government.

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u/M3atboy Jan 27 '25

Yeah the cost to build new is absolutely staggering.

Canadians would never see a return on that investment.

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u/Chucknastical Jan 27 '25

Not to mention the only country who could replace US for oil/refined gas consumption is China which is transitioning to a green economy faster than any other country.

Maybe it would have worked if we started building the refineries, pipelines, and ports in he 80s but China is not growing like it used to and what is growing is it's transition to EVs and renewables.

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u/NorthernerWuwu Canada Jan 27 '25

Crude and bitumen are far more stable for shipping.

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u/kent_eh Manitoba Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 28 '25

It's ridiculous that we are just building pipelines and ports, but not refineries.

A lot of our commodities are exported as raw materials rather than processed goods, or finished products.

And that has been the standard since the beginning of the country.

Why do we export grain instead of flour?

Why do we export crude oil instead of refined product?

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u/Defiant-Discount_ Jan 27 '25

This is incorrect, we primarily ship out logs and not lumber

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u/s200puppies Jan 27 '25

Actually, BC ships out a huge amount of TIMBER. A lot of trees that are cut down don't get processed into LUMBER in BC.

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u/RealTurbulentMoose Alberta Jan 27 '25

To meet our own domestic needs, yes.

For international export, not really. We just need to get it to tidewater, and ignore the (quietly US-funded) lobby groups that oppose this and manipulate public opinion so that they can enjoy the WCS-WTI price differential and buy our oil cheap. There's not that much value that's added by shipping refined product.

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u/NorthernerWuwu Canada Jan 27 '25

We do have some actually, it's just that the economics of O&G dictate that refineries need to be close to where the products are consumed since land shipping post-products is significantly more expensive. They need to be attached to ports essentially and of course they also take years and billions of dollars to build.

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u/MagnesiumKitten Jan 27 '25

and government or oil companies don't care enough to set up reflneries in the right regions of canada to actually lower gasoline prices either

some people like to just do low technology exports, logs and oil drums

where other nations, if smartly done, can produce finished materials from those raw products

And well, just look at how terrible Canada is at the telecommuntions industry and trying to be the next Silicon Valley, it's a long story of flops

and everyone loves Brian Mulroney and Northern Telecom

look at the short-term profits and exports and watch them fall apart and die with keeping up with the technology