The Market, Energy, And Political Page, Part 4, T+8 -- November 14, 2018

See link here. From Mike Fitzsimmons over at Seeking Alpha --

• Imperial Oil, which is majority owned by Exxon, has decided to move ahead with "Aspen," a 75,000 bpd, C$2.6 billion oil sands project
• this decision was a big surprise considering the lack of pipeline exit capacity that has WCS trading at a $44/bbl discount to WTI
• it looked to be worse of a decision after a federal Judge subsequently dealt the Keystone-XL pipeline another blow
• meantime, oil prices have crashed as President Trump backtracked on the Iran sanctions by giving waivers to Iran's top-eight customers
• there are very good reasons why no oil sands projects have been green-lighted since 2013. Aspen shouldn't have either

In my mind, there are only two reasons for doing this:

• Exxon sees something on the horizon that the rest of us don't; or,
• Exxon is desperate to recoup some of their investment.

With regard to the latter, perhaps they hope to "define" what they have and then sell it.

But it is amazing to see how much money the oil companies can make when times are good.

75,000 bopd x $15/bbl = $1.125 million / day.

$2.6 billion / $1.125 million = 2300 days = 6.3 years.