Report Warns Tar Sands a Risky Bet for Investors

One of the casualties of the dramatic fall in oil prices has been the slowdown in the exploitation of Canada's tar sands, the biggest and dirtiest energy project on the planet. No corner of the global oil industry, Forbes reports, has been hurt as badly: 

Most producers are struggling just to cover operating costs – forget about paying off billions of dollars invested in strip mines and bitumen refineries.

That's the short-term news. Long-term, the story is the same, if not worse, for investors. A new report released by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors says that even with a recovery in oil prices, tar sands projects will not be economically viable. It's an analysis that has left investors surprised and perplexed, according to Yulia Reuter, author of the report, who presented it last week at the annual Riskmetrics Canadian Proxy Season Briefing in Toronto. 

The report, called The Viability of Non-Conventional Oil Development (see pdf attached below), warns that the Alberta tar sands projects "place significant value at risk for investors."

Current levels of financial and environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure do not fully reveal the extent of these risks. In addition, the business plans issued by the companies to justify these projects do not take into consideration the most overarching risk to their success: the macroeconomic limits of the price of oil and the opportunity costs of natural gas.

Reuter, in the report, takes these factors and others into account, and as a result has added another dimension to the debate over tar sands development: Not only environmentally, but even financially now, the projects are looking like a bad idea, a lose-lose proposition. 

Reuter walked us through the report which highlights four areas of major risk typically ignored by conventional financial analysis:

A ceiling on oil prices. There is an observed historical price ceiling of approximately $100/bbl, beyond which prices rarely remain because demand collapses.
A failure to expect carbon pricing. Oil sands extraction is very carbon intensive, yet most oil sands projects do not anticipate regulatory constraints on CO2 emissions.
A rising price of a key input: natural gas. Natural gas is a key input for transforming oil sands into oil. Yet the price of this input will rise dramatically under the same high oil prices required for the projects to be profitable.
Additional business risks. Oil sands projects face substantial yet undefined costs relating to remediation and infrastructure development in sensitive areas.

The Effect of an Oil Price Ceiling

The first insight that the report provides is that tar sands projects will succeed only within a slender band of oil prices. If oil prices are too low, as they are now, projects stall; if they are too high – above the break point of $100 a barrel – GDP growth slows, stops and reverses, decreasing oil demand and causing prices to drop. It is therefore only in a slender band between operational costs of $65 to $90/bbl and the tolerable oil price high point of $100 a barrel that these projects would be both economically efficient and supported by the economy as a whole. It is a startling insight, since until now, the conventional wisdom was that soaring oil prices could only be good for tar sands development, the higher the better. Not so:

The inability of the global economy to support prices above $100/bbl for any lengthy period will be the limiting factor which prevents oil prices from being high enough over any period of time to support oil sands development. 

Reuter uses the figure of $65-$90/bbl as the range for operational costs based on estimates from the oil giant Total. Industry representatives are currently touting profitability at $35-50/bbl, but Reuter's analysis takes into account that most tar sands reserves will have to be mined using the costlier in situ process, since surface deposits will soon be depleted.