Despite a discount of more than US$20 a barrel between Canadian crude and WTI, drillers in Alberta are upbeat about the immediate future and plan to boost their drilling budgets, the Canadian Press reported recently, citing industry insiders. “A lot of us spent a fair bit of our capex for the year in the first quarter, and before spring break in the second quarter, during that four-month period,” one of these insiders, the chief executive of Bonterra Energy told the news outlet. George Fink added that more companies will up their spending further if WTI stays between US$68 and US$70 a barrel. This upbeat attitude is probably a little surprising: even though Canadian crude rises when WTI rises, it is still trading at a deep discount to the U.S. benchmark (about US$24 a barrel at the time of writing) because of the severe pipeline shortage in Canada. Since the […]