The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.
BANFF, Alta. – The oil-price crash remains painful and may be far from over, but top oil forecaster Ed Morse offered some hope Thursday to Canada’s gloomy oil industry — a recovery by 2017 as the “weeding out” of uneconomic production runs its course.
Still, Morse’s relative, medium-term optimism has its limits. The rebound won’t mean a return to the heyday of the North American energy renaissance because new technologies that enabled production from the oilsands in Canada, shale oil in the United States, and deepwater fields will continue to change the oil business and keep prices in check.
Don’t count, then, on US$100 a barrel oil making a comeback any time soon.
“The age of abundance of supply is here, even as the world is moving away from fossil fuel, and makes it highly unlikely that we will see $100 oil again,” Morse, the New York-based global head of commodities at Citi Research, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Business Forum, an annual gathering of business leaders.
“On the demand side we have to recognize that for reasons having to do with environmental consciousness and technology, the relationship between GDP growth and oil product demand growth is collapsing, and so demand won’t be there to the degree we thought it would be.
“On the other hand, the energy revolution in North America has unearthed the capacity to exploit similar rocks elsewhere in the world and they are fairly abundant and they can be exploited at under US$80 a barrel.”
Morse, who has a big following in Alberta’s oil community, said prices could fall further in the fourth quarter, even below US$30 a barrel, as the market worries about Iranian supplies re-entering the market.
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