Last week’s federal-Alberta MOU on regulatory reform, an oil pipeline corridor through B.C., and carbon-capture development was met with predictable skepticism—and in some corners, outright anger and cynicism.
Opponents argue that encouraging an oil pipeline isn’t just environmental betrayal, it’s also enabling economic obsolescence. On the latter point, the view is that electrification is accelerating and renewables are surging. Therefore, oil antagonists claim Canada is doubling down on a commodity destined to become a stranded asset before the first barrel even ships to the Pacific coast.
But that argument about oil’s demise focuses almost entirely on road transportation, the simplest sector to electrify. There’s rarely any acknowledgement of the vast, persistent demand embedded in aviation, shipping, petrochemicals, fertilizers, synthetic materials, heavy industry, and the infrastructure of modern life. Even as passenger vehicles electrify, global need for plastics, solvents, lubricants, medical products, and long-haul fuels continues to rise.
If you look past the narrow misconceptions about oil, demand isn’t declining at all. It’s growing into new markets beyond transportation, as the global economy pulls hydrocarbons into fresh uses faster than it abandons the old ones.
Canada’s heavy crude—rich in complex hydrocarbons—is well suited for this transformation. It feeds the advanced refining-and-chemical complexes now being built across Asia and the Middle East, the very facilities underpinning today’s growth in global oil demand.
Yet, leaders, think tanks and institutions continue to write oil’s obituary faster than the world can consume the stuff. That kind of eulogizing has a century-long history of hubris.
Overconfidence isn’t a quality you usually associate with a dictionary. But in October 1914, the Standard Oil Company of California managed to find it—and proudly wrote about it in their monthly Standard Oil Bulletin.
One of its editors—I call him Richard—had just opened the recently published Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. Under “Fuel,” he found the definition: “Combustible matter used to kindle or sustain fire or produce heat—as oil, wood, etc.”
He stopped cold. Coal, the unquestioned king of energy at the time, wasn’t mentioned.
“Ha!” he must have said. “It’s the end of coal. Oil is definitively the fuel of the future!”
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