After the boom: Canada’s oil capital faces an uncertain future
The Mayor of Calgary is driving north. Naheed Nenshi is making the three-hour trip to a meeting of the provincial legislature in Edmonton, and I’m along for the ride via speakerphone. As he heads down a flat stretch of highway, the GPS bleating instructions in the background, Nenshi begins laying out the challenges that his city is facing. A prolonged slump in oil prices, made worse by the pandemic, has severely strained Calgary’s finances. And the dramatic downturn has put a new spotlight on a problem that Nenshi has been talking about for years: the region’s unhealthy overdependence on the oil and gas industry.
A onetime McKinsey consultant, Nenshi, 48, is famously cheerful and friendly; he is, after all, Canadian. So he comes across as pretty upbeat. But it’s possible to detect just a touch of frustration in his voice as he offers a blunt assessment of his city’s economic situation: “Uh, not great.”
Suddenly, Nenshi interrupts himself to read a billboard he’s driving past with a message from the government of Alberta: “Diversify Our Economy.” “That’s it,” he says drily. Then he adds, chuckling: “That’s all it says.”
The language is striking for more than its simplicity. Nenshi points out that it represents a sudden shift in messaging from the government of the Canadian province. “I would not have seen that billboard six months ago,” he says. The trauma of the COVID-19 crisis, however, has quickly reshaped a long-running debate in one of the world’s biggest strongholds for the oil and gas business.
Calgary, a city of 1.3 million people, is the corporate and financial headquarters of Canada’s energy industry. When Nenshi was elected in 2010, he became the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city. He rode to victory on a “purple wave” coalition of red and blue centrist voters and took office near the end of a two-decade boom. Nenshi touted plans to build on Calgary’s economic strength by investing in industries outside of oil and gas. But as oil prices have tumbled from above $100 per barrel over the past decade to the current level below $40—falling even lower along the way—the instinct of many of his fellow Albertans has been to hunker down and wait for the slide to reverse. And a loud and growing chorus of criticism from environmentalists has caused some of Nenshi’s constituents to grow even more defiant.
Alberta’s energy wealth is derived primarily from the so-called oil sands located in the region’s north. The area’s vast unconventional petroleum deposits add up to proven reserves of 165.4 billion barrels—the third-largest total in the world after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The sands are the source of more than 60% of Canada’s oil production. They have also made Alberta a global target for activists.
Crude from the oil sands must be extracted and processed from a sandy sludge, in a costly and emissions-intensive process that often more closely resembles open-pit mining than conventional drilling. Aerial photos of the vast ponds of tailings—a thick, oily by-product of the extraction process—have long sparked pushback by environmentalists. Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring additional oil-sands crude to the U.S., has been a major priority of environmental campaigners in recent years. A legal effort has successfully stopped construction in the U.S. for the time being, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to push the pipeline ahead.
For years, tax revenues from the oil sands helped fund robust and balanced budgets in Alberta. And the province still makes a net contribution to the federal government that is redistributed across the country.
Today, however, the province’s accountants are looking at a gaping hole. In August, the Alberta government released a revised budget forecast for the current year with a deficit that was $12.8 billion larger than projected back in February. Resource revenues, mainly from the oil and gas sector, are expected to be $3 billion below the original projection. The unemployment rate in Alberta, meanwhile, stood at nearly 12% in August, the second-highest of any province in the country. And the province’s economy is expected to contract 8.8% this year. Last year, oil and gas, along with mining, accounted for 26% of Alberta’s GDP, and its indirect impact was even bigger. So the slowdown stings.
In many ways, Alberta is emblematic of the struggle going on in oil-rich areas around the world, from West Texas to the Middle East. The pandemic has merely laid bare and made even starker the economic challenges Alberta was already facing—the essential conundrums of boom and bust at the heart of any oil region. When times are good, there’s little motivation to shift attention away from a lucrative sector. When times are bad, there’s no money. But while breaking the “resource curse” is always hard, the problem is especially vexing in Alberta, which is landlocked and dependent on its trading partner to the south—the U.S. is the destination for 96% of its exports. Meanwhile, green-energy advocates—increasingly with the heft of governments and institutional investors behind them—are gaining new traction globally in the push to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Alberta must adapt, or it could be left behind in the new energy economy.
That’s why Nenshi believes that the region has no choice but to change how it sees its future, and quickly. Calgary must embrace a nascent movement to develop clean-energy jobs, and up the pace of its investment in other areas.
“There is a very famous bumper sticker. And it says, ‘God, grant me another boom, I promise not to piss it away this time,’ ” says Nenshi as his car rolls through the prairie.
He continues: “What I’ve been saying for some time is, ‘We can’t piss away the downturn, either.’ We’re exceptionally good at pissing away booms. We’re world-class at it. But we cannot actually afford to piss away a downturn.”
If Calgary can’t change now, can it ever?
My arrival in this world coincided with an oil bust. I was born in Calgary in November 1989, on the same day that Saudi Arabia announced the discovery of a major new oilfield. The world was seemingly awash in crude. And it was trading at just $20 a barrel. All of which meant that the industry that had drawn my parents—who met at a Calgary bar called the Silver Slipper Saloon—to the city earlier that decade was in decline. (Both of my parents have spent their careers in the energy sector.)
By the time I was starting school, a new boom had begun, driven by the expansion of the oil sands. It would be the longest, biggest boom of all. Before long, coffee chains were struggling to find staff; the suburbs were blooming in every direction; and teenage boys knew they could get big money, fast, by dropping out to work on the rigs.
The current reckoning really began in 2014, when oil prices dropped by more than 50% in a matter of months. Despite periodic rallies, oil has remained persistently lower since then. The biggest reason has been the astonishing, fracking-enabled surge in U.S. oil production. In 2010, the U.S. produced some 5.5 million barrels per day of oil. Last year, the average was over 12.2 million barrels per day. Now the coronavirus-driven economic slowdown has only increased the downward pressure on prices. The most recent estimate from the International Energy Agency is that global oil demand is expected to average 91.9 million barrels per day this year—that’s 8.1 million barrels per day less than in 2019.
While it’s possible oil prices could climb again post-pandemic, there are signs that another boom like the last one may never come back. Automation threatens 50% of upstream energy jobs in the province, according to an August report by EY. And Calgary Economic Development, an economic council, says that retraining for jobs in a more digital energy sector—largely for the kinds of jobs that can repurpose Calgary’s surplus of petroleum engineers and geophysicists—must happen on a massive scale. The city of Calgary, led by Nenshi, has been trying to stoke new economic development. In 2018, the city created a $100 million fund to give grants to tech startups and other local businesses outside the oil and gas industry that pledge to create jobs. But the pairing of the pandemic and the oil slump has also hit some alternative sources of job creation—like what was an exploding restaurant and brewery scene, and tourism around the Rockies.
Unlike some oil-rich economies—notably Norway, which socked away its petroleum riches over the years to amass what is now a $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund—Alberta hasn’t saved much for a rainy day. The province’s own Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, with some $13 billion in assets, is simply not large enough to plug the gap. While government revenue has soared since 1976, when the fund was created, its value has essentially remained flat: Alberta’s riches, instead, went to its world-class public health care and education—and toward the lowest taxes in the country.
Of course, the oil and gas sector is not expected to disappear any time soon, even if prices don’t rise dramatically. Even under aggressive forecasts for transitioning to a green economy, some oil production is still expected to be in place by 2050—it’s simply a matter of where it will come from. The Norwegian energy consultancy Rystad Energy still expects oil production across western Canada to grow by close to 2% annually for the next decade, with demand for Alberta’s heavier-style crude bolstered by declining output from Mexico and crisis-wracked Venezuela. But new investment in the oil sands in particular is nonexistent right now, according to a range of analysts. Some international oil companies, such as French giant Total, have pulled out of the region completely.
What I’ve been saying for some time is, ‘We can’t piss away the downturn.’
Naheed Nenshi, Mayor of Calgary
The industry’s pullback from Alberta can be chalked up in part to political uncertainty over whether or not Keystone and other pipelines to bring more oil out of the region will be approved. But the biggest issue is the cost of producing crude in the oil sands. Both Rystad Energy and Wood Mackenzie, the Edinburgh-based energy consultancy, put the break-even price for existing oil-sands production at around $45 per barrel, with some projects able to keep the lights on in the $20 to $30 range. For some projects, though, the price is much higher.
Oil-sands projects are vast pieces of infrastructure and typically require 40- to 50-year commitments to get off the ground. And even the most efficient developments are hugely capital intensive. The Alberta government estimated in 2019 that the most expensive mining-style projects’ initial break-even price is as steep as $75 or $85 per barrel. That’s a very high bar to meet, especially when banks and other investment groups are under pressure to tighten financing for fossil-fuel projects.
Another reality that Nenshi and his peers in government must accept is that economic prosperity on the scale of an oil boom is basically impossible to manufacture through policy. In fact, other parts of Canada—particularly the Atlantic provinces, which already lived through their own epic busts in the cod fishing and logging industries—arguably need help even more than Alberta, says Andrew Leach, an energy economist at the University of Alberta. And yet there have been few blockbuster solutions. One of the great ironies of the Alberta boom was that it employed so many of the people whose economic futures had been displaced by the busts in Atlantic Canada that came before. “There’s nothing that a government policy can do that’s automatically going to bring in millions of dollars of foreign direct investment every year,” Leach says.
The average oil and gas worker in Alberta is highly educated, specialized, and well-paid. Despite the sparkle of the tech economy, there is no guarantee that the new jobs that might arrive will match that standard. But there are Albertans who are determined to do their best to make it so.
Liam Hildebrand wanted to use his skills as a welder in the oil patch to assist the green-energy transition—he just couldn’t get a job. There’s an assumption that oil and gas workers don’t want to work in renewable energy, he says. But that’s not the case. The truth is that you can’t expect people to jump on a green future without a job.
Hildebrand took his first job in the oil business at age 20. In 2010, he went back to university to get a degree in geography with an eye toward a career in green energy—but no job offers materialized. So he returned to the oil sands to work as a welder for another six years. “I was nicknamed Greenpeace, like day one,” he says with a laugh. But while many of his colleagues were legitimately skeptical, others admitted that worries over climate change, or the stress of boom and bust, were wearing on them.
By 2015, with oil prices crashing, the conversations over lunch in the work camps gained new urgency. “We weren’t discussing a hypothetical situation,” he says. “We might not have a job tomorrow. What are we going to do about that?”
That year Hildebrand, now 35, and a group of his fellow oil-sector workers, formed a nonprofit called Iron & Earth to advocate for sustainable energy investment. They argue that a full energy transition will produce a vast infrastructure building boom, across not just wind and solar, but biomass, geothermal, and hydrogen plants.
The truth is, you can’t expect people to jump on a green future without a job.
Liam Hildebrand, cofounder of Iron & Earth
It’s an ambitious vision—and far from the current reality. But there are signs of progress. This year a new wind farm funded by Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s Canadian subsidiary will power the equivalent of 79,000 homes in southeast Alberta. Renewables made up less than 10% of the province’s electricity generation in 2019. But Alberta is now the country’s third-largest wind market, with 1,685 megawatts of installed capacity, according to the Canadian Wind Energy association. In 2017, Clean Energy Canada estimated that the province was home to 26,358 jobs in clean energy, with the sector representing about 1% of the province’s GDP. In June, the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental NGO, said it estimated 67,000 jobs—the equivalent of 67% of the current employees of the resources sector in the province—could be created by 2030 as part of a green-energy transition.
Hildebrand, who left his oil job to run Iron & Earth full-time, believes that Albertans are ready to embrace big changes. There is a “whole awakening among workers,” he says.
Not everyone in the province is so open to the concept of green energy. In recent years, Alberta has become more politically polarized, and that has made conversations about sustainability more difficult. A poll by the Canadian broadcaster CBC in March 2020 asked Albertans what the province needed to get its economy back on track. While nearly 40% mentioned the need to control pandemic or government support, some 30% of respondents said “economic diversification,” while 29% said “double down on oil.” Such markers were closely linked to how respondents vote, the survey noted. And since March 2018, those self-reporting that they are on either the left or the right politically have grown, while those reporting they are in the center shrunk by 9%.
Many Albertans are dubious about the arguments against fossil fuels. A 2018 effort by the Pembina Institute to gauge attitudes about sustainability, called The Alberta Narratives Project, found that about half of the people who participated either rejected the concept of climate change outright or doubted that it is caused by human behavior.
Within the corporate community, views are mixed. Multiple energy economists and experts I spoke with said climate-change doubt is unheard-of among executives at the largest oil and gas companies in the region, and support for an existing carbon tax is widespread. Both Suncor and Cenovus, Calgary-based oil and gas companies, have said they would reduce their per-barrel emissions intensity by 30% by 2030.
There have been plenty of examples in recent years of the damaging natural disasters that scientists are increasingly connecting to climate change. In 2013, flooding engulfed downtown Calgary, rising up the stands at the city’s hockey stadium. And in 2016, a fire so massive it was nicknamed “The Beast” eviscerated swaths of suburban homes in Fort McMurray, the company town that serves the oil sands.
Despite these visceral examples, broaching the urgency of addressing climate change and how it intersects with Alberta’s oil sector tends to come up against stout resistance. One argument the industry likes to make is that Alberta’s oil sands have dramatically reduced their emissions per barrel, which have historically been among the highest in the world. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers says that oil-sands emissions per barrel have fallen by 32% since 1990. And energy economists say it’s true that research and development has reduced per-barrel emissions across many of the projects, in some cases dramatically. But the intense extraction process in the oil sands means that, on average, Alberta’s product is still more energy-intensive than most other barrels. Plus, higher production volumes today mean that absolute emissions from the sector have increased over that same period.
Navigating these debates can be tricky. Deanna Burgart, 45, offers herself as an example of how to bridge the gap between loyalty to the industry and concern about the climate. She has learned from her own hard-won experience. Burgart was 35 and working as an engineer in the oil sands when she developed a relationship with her birth mother—an Indigenous woman and regular protester against the oil sands. It wasn’t easy. “I learned how to have these difficult, polarized conversations from a place of love and respect,” she says.
Burgart embraced her dual identities. She had found early success in the oil business. And now she learned that she was a Dene and Cree woman on her mother’s side. She sought a way to combine these perspectives. Today, Burgart is a teaching chair focused on integrating Indigenous knowledge into the engineering curriculum at the University of Calgary, working to bring First Nations perspective into projects at the earliest stages. She is also the founder of Indigenous Engineering Inclusion, a consulting company, where she works with oil companies and First Nations groups to address everything from environmental impact to the prospects for job creation. She describes the choice to quit her job in the sector and start her own business as a choice to “converge” her identities. These days she does her best, she says, to listen to everyone, and just keep talking—a strategy she learned in those early conversations with her mom.
Alfred Ernest Cross first arrived in Alberta from Montréal in 1886, founding the historic A7 Ranche just west of Calgary one year later. He would go on to become Albertan royalty: a ranchman, a proponent of the oil and gas industry, a politician, and one of the “Big Four”—the four ranchers that financed the first Calgary Stampede, the city’s famous 10-day festival and rodeo.
Roughly 100 years after Cross founded his ranch, it passed into the hands of his grandson John. And John Cross decided to buck convention. He decided to adopt a holistic method of managing his ranch, working with the ecosystem of the natural grasslands to increase yields without fertilizer. It was a decision that, in the 1980s, was “really uncommon and quite controversial,” he admits. It wasn’t his only quirky decision. In the 1990s, he built an entirely “off-the-grid” house, powering it largely with wind and solar. (Twenty years later, he gave in and ran electric power. Relying completely on renewables “was a pain in the ass,” he admits, especially in winter.)
Today John Cross believes the land has a place to play in a new energy transition. He advocates using offsets to reinvest in Alberta’s ecosystem, and understanding nature’s role as a carbon sink. “I think that’s where oil and gas and land ownership in Alberta can benefit each other,” he says.
Back on the highway, the mayor says he is buoyed by new ideas emerging, and he’s hopeful that Albertans are ready at last to find the common ground necessary to deliver on the urgent billboard directive.
“I think you’ve seen government shift just very recently from ‘all in’ on oil and gas to a more balanced view,” says Nenshi, as he rolls along through the prairie on the road to Edmonton. “Everyone wants jobs. Everyone wants a sustainable economy. And these are the sorts of things that should transcend partisanship.” It’s time to back up the billboard with action.
An oil region by the numbers
26%
Portion of Alberta’s GDP last year connected to the oil and gas industry, including mining. The sector’s indirect impact on the province’s economy is even larger
$3 billion
Projected shortfall in resource revenues in Alberta’s revised budget this year, largely because of lower oil prices
67,000
Estimated number of jobs that could be created in Alberta by 2030 in a green-energy transition according to the nonprofit Pembina Institute
96%
Portion of Alberta’s oil exports that go to the U.S.
$45 per barrel
Price of crude at which most oil-sands production breaks even, according to industry consultants. For some projects, the break-even price can be as high as $85
A version of this article appears in the October 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “After the oil rush.”
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