Canada’s oil sands giant Suncor slashes spending

CALGARY, Alberta – Suncor Energy Inc., Canada’s second-largest oil sands operator, slashed its planned 2009 spending in half Tuesday and shelved major expansion projects with crude prices in free fall.

The Calgary-based company said it plans to spend $3 billion Canadian ($2.4 billion), with just a third of that going toward growth projects.


It was the second time Suncor has scaled back projects in recent months. In October, the company slashed its planned capital expenditures from between $9 billion Canadian ($7.1 billion) and $10 billion ($7.9 billion) to $6 billion Canadian ($4.8 billion).

Alberta’s once booming oil sands sector has cooled as major producers from Europe to North American pull back spending. It is extraordinarily expensive to extract crude from sand, making it less profitable to do so with even benchmark crude beginning to fill storage facilities.

AP