That's a very interesting question, because within two weeks of when I wrote that op-ed, Suncor said it was walking away from the Voyageur upgrader project and taking the $130-million writedown.
I used Suncor because Suncor was an example of the most integrated oil company, as opposed to, say, Canadian Natural Resources, which was just shipping the raw bitumen. If you're an integrated company, you can get Western Canadian Select, because you capture the margin in the refinery spread. As it turns out, because of developments in the Bakken and the Williston Basin, that no longer made economic sense for Suncor, and as I said, within two weeks of my writing that op-ed, they walked away from probably the biggest refinery project that was on the books there.
Let me point out that there has been a lot of discussion about building refineries and capturing that huge crack spread in Canada because of the huge discount we get on our raw resource, bitumen. If, in fact, Western Canadian Select got what Mexican Maya, another heavy oil, does, believe me nobody would be talking about building refineries here. Generally speaking, refining is a very thin-margin business with huge capital requirements.
Now, if you can buy your feedstock at a 50% discount to world oil prices, it's very attractive. But outside of the midwestern refineries in the U.S., no one can do that. I think you're going to find that if we could get something close to Brent, this argument about building refinery capacity and capturing those crack spreads would quickly dissipate.