Canada’s Suncor Energy plans to abandon some of its oil sands assets

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Canada’s largest oil producer, Suncor Energy, is planning to abandon a number of its high-cost and greenhouse gas intensive oil sands assets, Oilprice.com reports citing the company’s CEO Steve Williams.

Williams mentioned the move at the Barclays convention in New York, stating: “We’ve begun to have conversations with the government of Alberta and the current regulators about the design of their policy, which actually requires the maximum amount of resource to be extracted regardless of the economic or environmental value.”

Suncor explains that the plan to abandon some of the deposits aims at easing the effect of rules that were created to maximize the output from oil sands on land leased from the government. There are a number of other oil producing companies in Canada, besides Suncor Energy, who are introducing the same plan of abandoning their sites as a money-saving measure in the current market situation of declining global crude prices. Oil sands operations emit about a quarter of the emissions for Alberta.