Pickens Says Oil Sands Are No Panacea

Huge development costs and a tight labor supply will prevent unconventional oil supplies, like Canada’s oil sands, from making up for declines in conventional world oil output, veteran energy investor Boone Pickens said on Tuesday.

Pickens, who has stakes in the two of the largest oil sands players, pointed out at the Reuters Energy Summit that output of that resource, at more than one million barrels a day, is still a tenth of Saudi Arabia’s crude production after billions of dollars of spending on projects.

“You add about a million a day (of oil sands production) for about $40 billion per million, that’s about $360 billion dollars to add 9 million barrels a day,” Pickens said.

“Could it be done? The money could be available for that. I’m not so sure if the human resources could do it.”
Reuters