Surging oil sands output offsets rail costs

Article Excerpt

Suncor and Imperial Oil (see box) are shipping more oil by rail while they wait for governments to approve new pipelines (see TransCanada on page 23). That’s adding to their costs. But at the same time, recently completed oil sands projects are raising their production—and these fields should last for decades. SUNCOR ENERGY INC. $36 (Toronto symbol SU; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Resources sector; Shares outstanding: 1.5 billion; Market cap: $54.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.3; Dividend yield: 2.6%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www. suncor.com) produced 558,100 barrels of oil equivalent (99% oil and 1% natural gas) a day in the three months ended December 31, 2013. That’s up 0.3% from 556,500 barrels a year earlier. Oil sands production rose 17.9%, to a record 446,500 barrels a day, because Suncor started up a new phase of its Firebag project. That helped offset lower conventional output following the company’s recent sale of a big part of its Western Canadian gas properties. The higher production…