Digging deep

Conventional wisdom suggests Canada's oil sands producers should be in full retreat in the face of falling world oil prices. That hasn’t happened—yet

While there is certainly cause for alarm-the oil sands is the marginal barrel in the global market-Canada's oil sands production is expected to grow 65,000 barrels a day in 2016 and another 0.85m b/d by 2021, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (Capp), an industry group. Oil sands producers are expected to spend C$30bn ($23.11bn) this and next year to complete mines that began construction be-fore 2014 when the oil-price rout began. In that sense, it's business as usual for the time being. With so much sunk capital tied up in new developments and previously planned expansion projects, it's too late to stop now, no matter what happens with oil prices over the next 18