When Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced obligatory production cuts of 325,000 bpd in December in a bid to tackle a deep discount between Western Canadian Select and West Texas Intermediate, the market’s reaction was promising. The price of Canadian crude jumped up immediately and has been trending higher ever since, now that the cuts actually came into effect. But local oil producers are not relaxing: they are looking for ways to cut their costs further by reducing transportation expenses and they are employing new technology to do that. Bloomberg’s Kevin Orland reported earlier this week that MEG Energy was working on commercializing a proprietary method of partial upgrading that eliminates the need to add diluent to the Alberta bitumen so it can be transported by pipeline. The HI-Q technology, as described by Orland, involves “a process that entails removing and recycling some diluent used in its initial processing, separating […]