Faced with a crisis moving oil out of the country, the provincial government in Alberta is stepping in to purchase trains in order to ease the midstream bottleneck. Western Canada Select (WCS), the benchmark for heavy oil in Alberta, continues to trade below $15 per barrel, or roughly $40-per-barrel lower than WTI. That is a hefty discount, although slightly narrower than the $50 per barrel discount WCS traded for a few weeks ago. “It’s worth more in the ground than it is to produce it right now,” Athabasca Oil Corp. CEO Rob Broen said in an interview Wednesday with BNN Bloomberg Television. “These differentials are so extreme.” The problem for Alberta – and for Canada – is that after a decade of trying, the region is still no closer to building a major oil pipeline to move product to either the United States or to the Pacific Ocean. As […]