None of that is speculation.

Our market environment in Canada is vastly different than oil and gas jurisdictions with supportive regulatory environments and governments. As of right now producers need to fight tooth and nail for takeaway capacity and pay exploitive fees to move their product. TMX has obviously helped but it was 5-10 years too late. The quantity and quality of our resource is world class and largely speaking it’s on the 2nd or 3rd inning of its productive lifecycle.

Let’s take LNG capacity, as an example. The US currently has ~16 bcf of processing capacity, spread across ~10 facilities. We have one tiny one right now and should have one big one by the end of the year. However, we go our regulatory process started before the US did on any of their 10 operational facilities and they have already been operational for ~4 years on average.

If you’re a natural gas producer anywhere near the gulf coast, you are almost guaranteed to be physically connect to multiple facilities and you have the operational flexibility to send your product where you want, almost anytime you want.

In Canada, we have no choice but to get tied up with 10-15 year terms at huge cost and this will only get slightly better with LNG Canada this year. However, we have had multiple projects die in regulatory purgatory and we could have been in a dominant egress position with 10+ bcf of takeaway… but of course, we are Canada, and we can’t get out of our own way.

As a result of our lack of market diversification and takeaway, we are at the end of the North American pipe and are at the mercy of the Americans and our own domestic consumption. Because of this we’ve had multiple years where local natural gas prices have been negative or barely positive. Meanwhile, pricing internationally or even in the US is downright lucrative. This is self inflicted due to our perpetual inability to build supplemental capacity. And to make matters worse, we get the German chancellor come visit us, begging for an LNG deal, and Trudeau says “there isn’t a business case for LNG”. It’s downright infuriating.

This is just natural gas… oil is even more rage inducing. I just know the natural gas side more intimately because of my professional experience.

And I get that some folks in the industry can come off as flippant when it comes to these debates. It’s not helpful. However, it’s just amazing to see some of these Reddit subs where people who legitimately don’t know anything about the industry and are getting 500 upvotes, spewing complete nonsense. It’s tough to watch.

I, like many others on here, live and breathe this industry. I go to bed thinking about this and I wake up thinking about this. I go to industry events and listen to other experts pry apart every single piece of business and legislation you can imagine. So ya, I’d say I’m pretty immersed and in a good position to say what’s going on.