CER provides narrow view of Canada’s oil production future

The worst possible future for the country’s oil producers goes underexplored in scenario planning

The Canada Energy Regulator (CER) released Canada’s Energy Future 2021, its latest round of long-term energy scenarios, in early December. It introduced three scenarios—Current Policies, Evolving Policies and Towards Net-Zero—early in the report (see Fig.1). But, perhaps tellingly, it provided fully modeled results for only the two lower-carbon scenarios that are relatively benign for the future of Canadian output. By failing to do so for its Towards Net-Zero scenario, the CER has provided a much narrower of view of Canada’s potential oil production going forward. Ironically, the regulator implicitly acknowledges this point when it writes that production levels could be “significantly lower”