Oil producers in Alberta have embraced the holy rail, shipping out by train car an estimated 120,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) to refiners on the east coast and the U.S. Gulf. Despite rail costs doubling pipeline tariffs, producers were able to get such a better price railing it...

What's the best-performing commodity over the last 12 months? Natural gas. I asked natural gas bull Bill Powers, whose new book is Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth, to give OGIB readers his thoughts on the gas market ahead. Bill's book is something very different than...

The energy sector is such a typical American-Canadian contrast.  It's like the Americans love to shoot guns, and the Canadians love to dodge bullets.
 In the USA, the Shale Revolution has turned the American energy industry upside down with huge new supplies of natural gas and light oil. 
 
 They have reversed...

  The diplomatic war of independence between Iraq and its northern region Kurdistan is escalating rapidly, with the flashpoint for armed conflict being the Kirkuk oilfield on the boundary between the two sides. While both sides have pulled back some of their troops poised for conflict recently, 2014 could be decisive...

Dear OGIB Reader, There are two trends in the Canadian energy patch in the last three weeks that have been making money for investors – but the question is, do they have legs? Can the uptrends continue? The first and most obvious is natural gas. After doubling in price between April...

Last week I described how tax pools are a near-unknown—but increasingly critical—metric for junior oil and gas investors. Tax pools shelter cash flow. E&Ps need them in order to retain cash for expansion—or to keep the coffers fat for paying dividends to investors, the way more and more companies are...

  In Part 1 of my series on tax pools, I explained how the new dividend-paying junior producers will use up their tax shelters by drilling less—crimping cash flow much sooner than expected. In this article, I create a “tax pool universe” to help investors discover: 1. which companies have big tax...

  One question investors should be asking about new dividend-focused E&P companies in the Canadian oil patch is: How will they pay their taxes? Deferring income tax payments is a major part of the business strategy for most junior E&Ps—one that investors don’t realize. Investors have become so used to junior producers (almost) never...