Why would you buy an oilsands lease, or if you had one, why might you chose to invest billions of dollars of your money, up front, to produce oil for the next 40-50 years? The answer is pretty simple – given your view of future oil prices, the costs of building and operating the plant, and the share of your revenues that the government will take in royalties and taxes, you’d have to be confident that you could make a rate of return on your capital equal to or greater than what you could earn on it in a similarly risky investment somewhere else. If not, why do it?
The same is true for the decision to invest in an upgrader or refinery. Upgraders and refineries make money when the value of the output is high enough, relative to the value of the inputs, to earn a competitive rate of return on capital – they are spread bets. For an upgrader, what you’re really interested in is the expected future spread between heavy oil or bitumen and light or synthetic crude oil. If you look at the figure below, bitumen had an implied average price of $65.50/bbl in 2011, whereas a barrel of lighter, higher value synthetic crude sold for an average of just over $102/bbl – a premium of $36.50/bbl – let’s call that the coke spread, since most upgraders or integrated refineries will employ a coker to strip out the heavier ends of a barrel of bitumen. Looking forward, according to Sproule Associates, the average spread is expected to be a little lower than that, at about $32.20/bbl over the next 10 years.
So, can you make money on an upgrader in Alberta with a $32.20/bbl spread? As with anything in economics, the answer is it depends. It depends on how much it costs you to build and operate the upgrader, what tax incentives you might receive, as well as whether you can profit from any synergies between extraction and upgrading. Without tax incentives or significant co-benefits, the short answer is likely no.