Oilsands should be heartened by dire prediction

One energetic fellow over in China built an actual ark, so sure was he the world was going to end back on Dec. 21, 2012.

That was the due date for the culmination of the Mayan-calendar Apocalypse. A prediction in which, depending on interpretation, we were going to be hammered to smithereens by a giant meteor, get roasted like peanuts through massive solar flares, or be suitably submerged and sunk under a tidal monsoon of biblical proportions (hence, the need for that Chinese ark).

It didn’t happen (yes, well, I admit that’s kind of obvious). But there’s staying power in these doom and gloom predictions — just ask Jeff Rubin, who’s done well for himself predicting all sorts of dreadful economic happenings down the years.

Rubin was once a top economist with CIBC, where he figured out that to really stand apart from the usual “on one hand it may go up, but then, on the other …” crowd, you needed to go big or go home.

He was right: “on the other hand” never nestled in any headline I ever read or wrote.

Nope, to be a rock star in that crowded field you need boldness — wearing a flashy tie, letting your hair grow past your collar and donning colourful socks helps.

Come on, you can’t blame a man for displaying some pizzazz to get ahead.

We need more of it, otherwise those with some sap in their veins will whither, dry up and take a dreadful government job in something akin to media relations, a dismal but growing branch of the Big Brother cohort that even George Orwell never imagined.

So, if you predict oil is going to more than $200 a barrel — as Rubin famously did in 2008 — and the price crashes soon after, it doesn’t matter. You got the headlines and people forget details, but remember the name.

Anyhow, you can always blame the worldwide bust for your prediction failing — a bizarre argument to be sure, but he came up with that explanation anyway. Then, once in a while, you guess right, and that’s what you slap on the front cover of that endless line of books stretching off into the future.

Most of the times, though, you’re dead wrong — a bit like me buying those gold mining stocks, figuring all that central bank money printing would make the return of hyper inflation a certainty. Oh well, my time will come (I predict).

So, as far as Alberta goes these days, Rubin’s latest prediction is the best news we’ve had in nearly three tough years. Because he reckons the oilsands are doomed, so new pipelines are pointless. Why would anyone invest in such a high-cost regime, so therefore, there’s no need for extra capacity to carry future production, because there’ll be no such thing.

The whole enterprise is essentially as dead as a duck in a tailings pond — “hemorrhaging red ink,” according to Rubin. Really? Suncor might disagree. We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of the first commercial oil being shipped from the Fort McMurray region, the culmination of decades of research and ingenuity. During the half century since, there have been busts and the occasional boom — though never to the $200-a-barrel mark Rubin predicted.

Yet, it has never looked backward. Sure, some multinationals recently picked up sticks and nipped off to where the going is easier, but production grinds upwards nevertheless. So much so, that in a couple of years, we’ll be producing 3.3 million barrels a day, an increase of about 700,000 barrels on today’s output.

That’s because there are people in the industry who know how to sharpen a pencil — upping production and driving down costs.

That is business. When oil is $120, then you want full-out production and to hell with costs, but when it slips to $40, you look at why you’re paying $100 an hour overtime.

So the prediction of the oilsands’ demise should be music to our ears. Maybe Alberta’s finally on its way back.

Jeff Rubin predicted it. Well, sort of.

There are people ... who know how to sharpen a pencil — upping production and driving down costs.