Canadian and global climate change ambitions are generally associated with a goal of reducing reliance on fossil fuels as a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions. Within this context, the Canadian oil sands have been characterized as “too expensive” to maintain production if global crude oil...

Biophysical Economics is a school of heterodox economics built on the premise of the primacy of energy in the economic process. Despite significant progress made in the methodology of net-energy analysis, the literature on the relationships between the biophysical properties of energy sources,...

The development of the oil sands in Alberta has become a focal point in Canada’s response to global climate change. Before an oil sands project can proceed, it must first undergo environmental assessment. This process frequently engages both provincial and federal environmental assessment...

We study the behaviour of Canadian total factor productivity growth over the past 60 years. We find that the observed stagnation during the last 20 years is entirely accounted for by the Oil sector. Higher oil prices made capital-intensive sources of oil like the oil sands viable to extract on a...

Canada’s oil sands accounted for 63 percent of oil production in Canada in 2019.Royalties from oil sands production have been the source of 7.7 percent of Alberta’s revenues since 2008 (Alberta 2020). Alberta regularly reviews the royalty regimes in place for oil and natural gas extraction,...

As the most potential supplementary resource of conventional fossil energy, oil shale has attracted unprecedented attention. However, it has not been large-scale industrialization applied due to poor efficiency and high costs. This study develops autothermic pyrolysis in-situ conversion process...