The NDP put forth a motion in the House last week which states that, “the Keystone XL pipeline would intensify the export of unprocessed raw bitumen and would export more than 40,000 well-paying Canadian jobs, and is therefore not in Canada’s best interest.”
This motion provided me with the motivation to dig into a question – if you had a given amount of capital to spend in the oil sands, would an oil sands mine alone or an integrated project with an upgrader generate the largest value-added return on investment, including total wages, royalties, taxes, and profits, and how would these be distributed?
To tackle this question, I ran two iterations of an oil sands project model based loosely on Suncor’s Fort Hills project combined with upgrader assumptions based on Suncor’s now-cancelled Voyageur project.