The Alberta government says Premier Danielle Smith has been in talks with a multinational oil and petrochemical player about selling two million barrels per month of province-owned heavy oil.
It said in a news release that there was a meeting on Monday, but it did not identify the company or say what part of the world it is based in.
The province has announced it will collect bitumen royalties in the form of the heavy oil itself, as opposed to cash, which Alberta's commercial oil and gas agency, the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, can then sell. That means it can combine bitumen royalty barrels with conventional ones it already collects to bring significant petroleum volumes to market and spur private-sector investment.
“This program gives the province greater say in where we sell our oil," Smith said in the news release.
"Receiving bitumen royalties in-kind is another tool in our investment tool box and will give us the opportunity to maximize our resource potential, become one of the most significant players in the heavy oil market and garner more value for Albertans.”
Energy Minister Brian Jean said the move will allow Alberta to "promote increased pipeline capacity and grow our global markets, which is good for Albertans, for industry, and for global energy security.”
Adrian Begley, CEO of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, said the agency will seek deals that are commercially prudent and make sense for Alberta and its energy industry.
“The opportunity exists to find transactions that will directly and indirectly secure extra value for Albertans, and the experienced team at APMC is committed to doing just that.”
The move comes as Canada's trade relationship with the United States — the biggest buyer of Canadian oil exports — deteriorates amid a confusing flurry of tariff announcements in recent weeks from President Donald Trump.
On March 4, Trump imposed a 10 per cent tariff on energy imports and a 25 per cent tariff on all other goods. Two days later, a month-long pause was put on goods that meet the rules-of-origin requirements under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement on trade, and potash fertilizer tariffs were lowered to 10 per cent.
On Tuesday, Trump said he will double the tariff on steel and aluminum imports coming from Canada to 50 per cent in response to Ontario's surcharge on electricity exports to the United States.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025.
Comments
How does Doug Ford explain his caving in?
Dumb, and dumber.
None if this will stop the world transition to electricity, which is growing each year leading up to a significant inflection point, the peak in oil demand estimated to occur in about five years.
All the asumptions about continued growth in fossil fuels are flawed, namely by being blinkered about the phenomenal takeover of renewables by China. These faulty assumptions are made by OPEC in their annual reports which are taken as gospel by such luminaries as Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre.
All that oil production growth they say will be going to the Global South. Well, OPEC believers haven't been paying attention. That's exactly where China is now playing hard, but with big money to build ports and assembly plants to import and assemble Chinese EVs, solar power equipment and so on. Oil production has very little to do with the Chinese economic play in developing countries. It's all about electrification.
The same believers are also turning their gaze away from the rise of renewables in key OPEC countries themselves. That seems contradictory until you realize that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others are hedging their bets by backstopping their oil production with massive arrays of solar in the desert.
Danielle Smith practically banned renewables from Alberta to protect her beloved gas power cronies from competition. This gave them permission to monopolize the power grid and jack prices to the stratosphere. They are now the highest electricity rates in the nation in one of the only privatized provincial power grids. Ironically, this inspired a rise in rooftop solar in Calgary and Edmonton.
Smith hobnobs with those Americans on the Right who would takeover Canada. Well, she is their point person and has already brought her province half ways there. Yet there is silence in Canada.
If the majority of Canadians are now appalled at Trump's America and are largely agreed that we need better trading partners and friends, selling more oil is a poor way to go about it. Canada needs to embrace the transition to clean energy as one of the best ways to gain independence and to strengthen our own economy.
Alberta is often described as a bastion of free-market capitalism.
The oil industry is held forth as the shining example.
Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney: "We are the beating heart of free enterprise values in the Canadian political culture. We are the heart of Canada's enormous energy industry."
"A free market is one where voluntary exchange and the laws of supply and demand provide the sole basis for the economic system, without government intervention." (Investopedia)
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is often described as a libertarian.
Max Fawcett: "Danielle Smith may be the leader of a conservative party, but her core beliefs are libertarian through and through."
"Danielle Smith just sold out the LGBTQ community. Who’s next?" (National Observer, 2024)
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Smith's interventions on behalf of the O&G industry and repression of renewables is the opposite of free-market libertarianism. Smith is a rank neoliberal and corporate welfare queen.
Smith is a massive government interventionist — the opposite of libertarian.
Smith's pet project RStar is a $20 B giveaway to O&G companies to clean up old wells, as they are already legally obligated to do. Corporate welfare, blatant subsidies, taxpayer-funded cleanup, and propping up industries and markets when they fail — that's classic neoliberalism.
Unlike neoliberals, libertarians support the polluter-pay principle. Unlike libertarians, neoliberals support government intervention and subsidies.
Government intervention is not an aberration of neoliberalism — it's a feature.
Neoliberals believe in neither the free market nor small government. Their business model depends on externalizing costs: sticking someone else with the bill. Stealing from their grandchildren. Let future generations pay for their extravagance, pollution, waste, environmental mayhem, and climate change disaster.
Neoliberals pillage and plunder the public good for private profit.
Neoliberals support corporate welfare, except for industries they oppose, e.g., renewables. Transferring public wealth into private pockets. It's a steal.
Is any government more interventionist? Is any industry more dependent on subsidies, visible and invisible, than O&G?
The UCP has no interest in free markets. Smith's libertarianism is a myth.
The UCP likes nothing better than to put its thumb on the scales. Hence, its "moratorium" on renewables, followed by restrictions that apply only to renewables.
The Government of Alberta has been in the oil business for years. As the article describes, the UCP is intent on expanding that role.
Don't let anybody tell you Danielle Smith is a believer in small government:
"Danielle Smith, big government's unlikely fan" (Jason Markusoff, CBC, May 04, 2024)
"Alberta's premier: a conservative with a vision for more Crown agencies, spending and provincial control"
"… The NDP opposition calls her recent power-centralizing legislation an attempt to 'control everything, everywhere, all at once.'"
As for the oil industry, it milks governments for endless subsidies and uses its massive political power to rig energy markets in its own favor, externalize its costs, and protect its profits.
Free-market capitalism? A self-serving myth.
More like the oil mafia.