Saturday, September 02, 2006

Oil Sands and Oil Shale

I've been reading articles about oil sands and oil shale and companies developing technologies for extracting crude oil from them. For background see, about oil sands and about oil shale.

In North America, the largest oil sand deposits are in Alberta, Canada. A local regulatory group keeps a list of companies operating in the oil sands. For stock investment, some interesting companies are:
  • Suncor Energy (SU). In addition to producing 265,000 barrels per day of synthetic crude from oil sands, Suncor also recently announced the opening of Canada's largest ethanol plant. Suncor's fundamentals look strong, especially recent sales and EPS growth.
  • EnCana Corp (ECA) also has oil sands operations, but currently averages only 153,470 barrels per day in production. EnCana's fundamentals are still reasonably strong.
For oil shale, there are currently only 3 companies left who are still in contention for lease contracts with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management:
There is also a technological development from Raytheon Company (RTN) and CF Technologies involving a new technique for enhancing recovery of oil from shale reserves using radio frequency combined with supercritical fluids (article).

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