Wildfires erupt in Canada crude patch in threat to oil sands
One 7-acre fire is within about 6 miles of MEG Energy Corp.’s Christina Lake site, which produced almost 100,000 barrels a day in May.
Reuters reports that sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp (CIC) and state oil company Sinopec are among three cornerstone investors that will pledge $350 million towards Sunshine Oilsands Ltd’s Hong Kong IPO.
A third investor, Washington-based asset manager EIG Global Energy Partners, will invest $50 million, says the Reuters story, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the matter.
The three institutions will take up nearly half of the $700 million IPO planned for later this year by Canadian oilsands explorer Sunshine Oilsands.
The IPO would be the largest in the world so far in 2012. The much-anticipated Facebook IPO expected to go to market later this year is pegged at $5 billion.
Sunshine Oilsands raised $230 million last year from a group of investors including China Life Insurance, Hong Kong private equity fund Cross-Strait Common Development Fund, and a unit of the Bank of China, Reuters reported.
According to its website, Sunshine owns 467,969 hectares of oil sands leases, which is about 7% of the total oilsands leases granted in the Athabasca region of Alberta.
The Canadian oilsands have attracted some serious interest from Chinese companies wanting to lock in oil supplies to feed China’s surging economy.
Last year China Petrochemical Corp. purchased a 9% stake in the Syncrude project for US$4.65 billion. In 2009, PetroChina snapped up a stake in Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. for C$1.9 billion.
Chinese interests are also backing the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.
2 Comments
Chris Armstrong
Enbridge has proven unequivocally that they are NOT capable of building and operating oil pipelines without catastrophic spills (even in relatively flat country, let alone RUGGED BC with our TREACHEROUS MOUNTAINS and FIORDS). Their crowning glory: can you say Kalamazoo River, Michigan, July, 2010? And, 24 years ago, Exxon Mobil sure didn’t learn much from their completely ignorant, inexcusable, and incompetent Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound (where the whales still have NOT returned), because, in July, 2011, the Yellowstone River was the criminally disasterous recipient of 40,000 gallons of Exxon Mobil crude oil ! Maybe an automatic, $1.0 million penalty for every GALLON of oil spilled from pipelines in North America might make the oil companies a little more diligent and COMPETENT? (but don’t hold your breath – greed is, and always has been, their forte).
For the past 20 years there have been an astounding “140 pipeline spills per year”; and 12 spills in the “original Keystone first year of operation”. And these Big Oil guys want respect, and to be believed: get out of here! Nothing less than IRONCLAD guarantees is acceptable to the citizens of BC. So, Big Oil, put up or shut up !
Hyphens
Oh Canada ~ for sale!