The long-chronicled pipeline woes in Canada continue to bedevil the oil industry. Now, major Canadian companies are holding back on upstream production expansions because of the inability to ship oil out of the country. The lack of new pipeline capacity led to a crash in Western Canada Select (WCS) late last year, with prices briefly trading as low as $15 per barrel at a time when WTI was trading as much as $40 higher. In response, the government of Alberta did its best impression of the old Texas Railroad Commission, implementing mandatory production cuts, which took effect at the start of this year. The supply curbs have been wildly successful at rescuing WCS prices, although Canadian oil producers have also received a boost from the heavy oil outages in Venezuela. WCS is close to $50 per barrel now. Yet, the pipeline woes have not been addressed. In fact, the […]