Call them Canada’s phantom barrels. And according to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), they don’t exist..According to its most recent statistical analysis, it’s almost as if Fort McMurray was wiped right off the map..World oil reserves grew more than one per cent last year to 1.5 trillion barrels, according to OPEC’s Annual Statistical Bulletin. But apparently Canada’s oil sands don’t count..The world’s largest petroleum producing cartel pegs Canada’s proven oil reserves at just 4.7 billion barrels, barely a tenth of the 55.25 billion barrels assigned to the US and roughly equivalent to Vietnam’s 4.4 billion..This must surely come as a surprise to even Natural Resources Canada, which pegs them at 168 billion barrels, or the third-largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s 267.2 billion. .In fact, Canada barely gets a mention in the 98-page report apart from a footnote that oil sands were specifically excluded under a broader definition of “non-conventional” oil. .Never mind that OPEC member Venezuela’s 303.2 billion barrels of Orinoco ‘oremulsion’ — a slurry of bitumen and kerosene roughly equivalent to Alberta’s Western Canadian Select — is..Including those Chavez barrels, OPEC accounts for almost 80% of the world’s proven reserves while Venezuela and Saudi amount to more than half of that..It’s the 58th edition of the ASB which has been published since 1965. Haitham Al Ghais, the cartel’s secretary general said the need for reliable data accuracy to support informed policy formation related to the global energy transition to net zero has never been greater. .“Energy as a topic, so central to our daily lives, can often elicit strong opinions, which in some cases feed into policy formation. OPEC firmly holds the belief that policy needs to be grounded in fact, reality and a reading of events as they are, rather than how we may wish them to be,” he said in the forward..OPEC defines “proven” oil reserves as quantities of crude oil which can be estimated with “reasonable certainty to be commercially recoverable, from a given date forward, from known reservoirs and under defined economic conditions, operating methods, and government regulations.” .Even by that broad definition, Venezuela’s wouldn’t count..The other problem is that global stock exchanges don’t recognize OPEC’s reserve numbers or the methods used to derive them..Both Canada and the US require reserves to be independently evaluated by independent third-party engineers, something OPEC is absolutely averse to doing. .It’s also why Saudi Aramco — the world’s largest oil company — can’t list on North American stock exchanges, namely because it doesn’t meet Securities Exchange Commission rules for disclosing reserves and thus makes it virtually impossible to assess a fair market value..It was precisely those concerns that led American investment banker Matt Simmons to pen Twilight in the Desert in 2005. Although the underlying premise of that book — so-called ‘peak oil’ theory — has been debunked, the conditions that led him to write it have not..Even so, Aramco is the world’s third-largest company by market capitalization at $2 trillion, behind Apple and Microsoft.
