Suncor Energy CEO Steve Williams rocked the oil industry boat Thursday when he announced a plan to leave some of the company’s oilsands reserves unrecovered during a conference call with investors.
Williams said the company is working to develop a plan with Alberta to “strand” its least economical reserves, a proposal that appears to align with the call of environmentalists to leave the high-cost and high-carbon fossil fuels in the ground to prevent catastrophic global warming.
“We are advocating in a modest way to work with government so that we can strand some of the oil in the oilsands,” Williams said, as reported by The Canadian Press.
“Our regulation is written so that we take to a very high percentage the last piece of oil out. That tends to be the most expensive both economically and environmentally. What we would like to do is leave that last piece in (the ground),” he said.
“I’m very optimistic we are making some breakthroughs with government to do that.”
The proposal is about more than leaving some oil deposits undeveloped, according to Simon Dyer, director of the Pembina Institute.
“We’re talking about Alberta moving philosophically from maximizing production to optimizing value,” Dyer told DeSmog Canada.