Milton Financials: Royal Dutch Shell dumps ugrader plan for Canadian oil sands.

Oct. 11, 2010 - PRLog -- Shell, in a recent announcement has told Milton Financials that it has withdrawn its regulatory application for its proposed multi-billion dollar oil sands upgrader which was to be built at the firms Scotford oil sands processing plant near Edmonton, Alberta.

Shell, prior to the global economic crisis which saw a number of oil sands developers scrap plans for similar projects, announced plans for an upgrader to be built in four 100,000 barrel-per-day stages, at a cost of more than $25 billion.

Upgraders convert the heavy bitumen crude recovered from oil sands into refinery-ready light crude oil.

The company indicated that it is rather to proceed with a number of “debottlenecking” projects which will increase the current plants capacity by around 85,000 barrels a day over the next ten years.

"Effectively it will be the volume equivalent of a new expansion with the potential to pace incremental steps with affordability, so it's a business decision," Shell’s spokesman, Phil Vircoe told Milton Financials. "We need to make sure that we look at all the business implications as we go forward."

In September Royal Dutch Shell began operations at its new mine called Jackpine at its Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta which together with the expansion of its Scotford operation will see output increase by 100,000 barrels a day to 255,000 barrels per day by early 2011.

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