EL UNIVERSAL

Giant oil firms Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips may find it quite simple: changing efforts, labor, and resources to Canadian oil sands following their move to leave Venezuela. But things are not that simple.
 
Oil sands involve risks themselves: growing costs amid a tight labor, technical complexity and dropping available attractive projects.

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips -which bid farewell to Venezuela after they failed to reach an agreement with the government on the nationalization of heavy-crude oil Orinoco belt- are actually among the major players in Canadian oil sands, Reuters said.

Both Canadian and Venezuelan heavy crude oils pose drilling technical difficulties and require costly upgrading plants to make them suitable for refineries.

However, unlike Venezuela, in Canada, oil sands offer political and tax stability. This combination has become highly attractive. The oil majors vowed to invest over USD 100 billion in projects to drill 174 billion barrels of oil in Alberta.

Some people who worked in oil deposits run by Venezuelan oil giant Pdvsa are currently working in major energy facilities in Canada, such as Fort McMurray, in Alberta.

"We have seen that some very good experts who worked for Pdvsa are available now as a consequence of what is going on there (in Venezuela), but I do not think this will have a major impact on the labor force," PetroCanada CEO Ron Brenneman.

Translated by Maryflor Suárez R.
msuarez@eluniversal.com

See the special feature on Migration of oil partnership to joint ventures