My Petroleum Geology students have gotten into the spirit of the Provincial Budgeting season, and many of our EAS 364 tweets have involved comparisons with Norway. You know, that Norway $1,000,000,000,000 oil trust fund. One of the better articles that was tweeted was written by CBC’s Susan Ormiston. Therein she noted “They [the Norwegians] are lucky and Norway was smart. So smart that decisions made decades ago to bank the taxes from rich oil fields are now paying for their future at a time when oil-rich Alberta faces a multibillion-dollar deficit.”
A part of me is happy to agree with the idea that taking greater royalties and higher levels of corporate taxation. But, there are major differences between Alberta and Norway that suggest it is not as simple as Alberta doing it the Norwegian way. For example, nobody ever mentions that Norway’s level of personal (income tax) taxation is about the highest in the world. And one beer costs $20 (I am not kidding). Their non-oil cash-flow is a large part of what allows Norway to divert oil revenue straight into the bank.
There is also a great difference in profitability in Alberta versus Norway. In Alberta, the resource is commonly low yield and widely dispersed, so infrastructure is not always concentrated and the resource generally low-grade. Also, heavy oil is differentially (i.e. lower) priced. And to make matter worse, the heavy oil is quite a bit more expensive to produce. So… you can raise royalties on heavy oil, but not nearly as much as you can with light offshore crude.
Finally, some of Alberta’s producer’s are on royalty breaks aimed at encouraging start-ups and to help capitalize the infrastructure required to produce heavy oil. Really, there is far less room to move than people believe. Long-story short: if you want to live like Norwegians, you need to pay taxes like Norwegians. I don’t think there are very many Canadians keen on that idea.