Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been thinking big — very big — as plans advance to build a new West Coast oil pipeline.
To her, growing oil production in her province to fill that million-barrel pipe isn’t a sufficient ambition.
She’s staked a target to double Alberta oil production to eight million barrels a day in as little as a decade.
“Doubling oilsands production is a big task,” Smith said at last month’s pipeline announcement, adding quickly that it would be done in an environmentally responsible manner. (Prime Minister Mark Carney was standing next to her.)
“Our oilsands partners will have the incentives they need to launch a super-cycle of production growth in Canada’s most valuable deposit of natural resources.”
This wasn’t the first time the premier trotted out this idea of hitting the multiplication button on Alberta’s crude output.
Far from it.
She’s talked about doubling for more than two years, back when Justin Trudeau was still prime minister. But her goal might land differently in the Carney era, with his rolled-back climate policies and his federal partnership on the pipeline.
Industry analysts say there’s now more enthusiasm in the oilpatch to ramp up development than there’s been in ages.
“There seems to be a different mindset in Western Canada — maybe this is the time to actually turn ourselves back into that big growth engine that we were a decade ago,” said Andrew Botterill, energy, resources and industrials leader at Deloitte Canada.
But zooming from 4.8 million barrels a day now to eight million by 2035, or thereabouts? That much of a return to the mega-growth days of Alberta yore?
Pipeline access and environmental hurdles to more production may have eased, but other challenges would loom, analysts caution — from corporate reluctance to invest in major expansions to finding enough people to plan and build them.
Smith is committed enough to her own goal that she appears to be floating financial incentives to stoke added oil production, but it’s unclear what would be enough to go as far as she wants.
When Smith forecasts a super-cycle, she’s harkening back to the days of rapid oilsands mine expansions around Fort McMurray, which wound down with Suncor’s Fort Hills project, completed in 2018.
Provincial oil production did roughly double over a decade by then, thanks largely to tens of billions of dollars of private investment in those expansion projects.
The crash in global oil prices in the mid-2010s helped scare off such aggressive capital expenditures.
But Alberta’s production has continued to grow modestly, through what the industry calls “de-bottlenecking” and optimization measures to squeeze more value out of projects.
As of December 2025, Alberta’s daily output was 4.8 million barrels, including crude oil — mostly from oilsands — and equivalent products like condensate, according to Statistics Canada. That’s up from 3.9 million barrels in December 2018.
Over that time, daily production rose by an average of 119,000 barrels each year. Alberta would have to boost that pace to 323,000-barrel growth, year after year, to reach the eight-million barrel plateau by 2035.
Smith has employed lofty, ambitious targets before. She’s spoken of the Heritage Fund growing tenfold to $250 billion by 2050.
She used to aim to double Alberta’s population to 10 million people by mid-century, only to walk back that goal after taking a dimmer view of mass migration.
The oil production target does not live only in Smith’s rhetoric.
Last fall, the premier mandated the Alberta Energy ministry to produce a roadmap to eight million by 2035.
The department has sketched it out in an internal document, deputy minister Larry Kaumeyer told CBC News in an interview.
“I think it’s a stretch goal, I’ll be honest,” he said. “But I don’t believe it’s unobtainable.”
Smith has lately called it a goal to reach in “10 to 15 years,” giving industry a bit more runway.
Kaumeyer has been the province’s chief negotiator on its pipeline and energy policy deals with Ottawa.
As one promising sign, the senior bureaucrat pointed to the success that developer South Bow experienced with Prairie Connector, its proposed pipeline from Alberta to Wyoming, a revival of sorts of the cancelled Keystone XL project.
South Bow announced in May it reached its goal to get oil company pledges to ship 450,000 barrels daily through the connector. Where there’s pipeline access, Kaumeyer said, there is desire to fill it.
He predicts there’s “good growth” to come, between the sort of incremental increases companies have on their books and larger expansions that will come to make use of the West Coast pipeline, and then some.
The government is mindful of Alberta’s 177 billion barrels’ worth of oil reserves, Kaumeyer said.
“If we leave it stranded, we can’t build the schools, the hospitals and the social fabric that we so desperately need in the province, right?”
Carney has steered clear of talking about doubled oil production himself. But at the June announcement of the next pipeline’s southern B.C. route and a commitment on the Pathways carbon sequestration project, he said the new infrastructure “will catalyze well over $200 billion in direct investments in Canada.” That was a nod at extra upstream oil development.
But while Smith and Carney may be keen for industry to hit the accelerator pedal, what of the oil companies that would be expected to speed up their spending?
They’d have to change their habits, and decisively.
Analysts have observed that in recent years, oilsands giants have bowed to investor demands to direct more of their profits and cash flow to shareholders instead of reinvesting in growth.
“The patience for capital has declined. They want returns faster,” said Kevin Birn, S&P Global’s chief analyst for Canadian oil markets.
Modest growth through optimizations is the most affordable and low-risk route, he said. Next on the chain of feasibility is what’s called “brownfield” projects that break new ground but are adjacent to existing mines or thermal projects, which involve heating bitumen underground and pumping it to surface level.
Several brand-new “greenfield” developments on untapped sites would also be required to begin approaching Smith’s goals, Birn said.
To merely break even, most thermal greenfield projects would need oil prices that are twice as high as what it takes to make the smaller optimization plays a reasonable investment, he said. New mines, costing much more and taking more years to plan and construct, would need even higher oil prices to make balance-sheet sense, Birn said.
But the sector is “inching slowly” toward potentially pulling the trigger on some big projects, especially given the positive signals from governments, he added.
Corporate focus remains on smaller, near-term projects, Deloitte’s Botterill said. “But I think companies are spending more energy thinking about greenfield projects in the last six months than they probably have in the past six years before that.”
Smith has shown a willingness to induce potentially reluctant companies to grow aggressively.
As part of an agreement released this week to the $16-billion Pathways carbon capture project, the province agreed to “implement financial supports to encourage the oil production growth required” by new and expanded pipelines, although it wasn’t specified if that would include tweaks to Alberta energy royalty rates.
Oilsands companies would look for the “right fiscal framework” in order to grow production, said the Oilsands Alliance, a consortium of the five major bitumen producers, in a statement to CBC News this week. The group did not directly answer a question if it supported Smith’s eight-million-barrel target.
Alberta, Ottawa, oilsands producers sign MOU on Pathways carbon capture project
That would mean new royalty or tax breaks to encourage production, on top of the provincial-federal involvement in building new pipeline infrastructure, said Janetta McKenzie, oil and gas director for the Pembina Institute, the Alberta-based environmental think tank.
“It really does beg the question … who’s that interested in producing this oil and selling it to this extent and sort of at this scale?” she said.
“Because that’s a lot of public funding that’s being talked about for what is a pretty profitable and well-established industry at this point.”
Strong oil prices are the cost factor that could always help propel growth, but it’s a perennially volatile commodity, as the supply shocks during the Iran conflict have proven.
Long-term demand is the other trend that will weigh on any growth ambitions.
The International Energy Association’s latest major outlook offers a conservative scenario that global oil consumption could keep rising slowly toward 2050.
But even amid some bullishness, China and other countries will continue moving toward electric vehicles — a real potential fly in the ointment if Alberta bases its growth strategy on pipeline exports to Asia, Pembina’s McKenzie said.
“Is the customer going to be there for this eight million barrels a day and this new million barrel a day pipeline?” she asked.
Even if IEA’s growth forecast holds true, global demand rises only by five million barrels a day between 2024 and 2035. Smith’s Alberta scenario envisions 3.5 million more in her province alone.
“What’s the ability of Canada to sell itself to take market share from other [countries]?” Birn asked.
To return to grand-scale expansion, Alberta’s oil sector would need massive growth in the workforce — more engineers and planners in corporate headquarters, and skilled tradespeople in the oilsands.
The competition for labour would require oilsands firms to co-ordinate with each other like never before, and even consider the pacing of annual maintenance for current plants, Kaumeyer said.
But consider this: when Fort McMurray became a magnet for labourers in other struggling regions of Canada and abroad in past decades, that was absent a nation-wide industrial megaprojects plan like what the Carney government has plotted.
In a 2020s-2030s oil boom, Alberta might be competing against things like pipeline and liquefied natural gas ventures in British Columbia, mines in Saskatchewan, northern Ontario and Quebec, and a defence manufacturing spree in Atlantic Canada and elsewhere.
“You’re talking beyond full employment for certain skilled trades,” Birn said.
He also noted that such ambition in Alberta and Canada would require a major buildup in immigration policy to help it. That could clash with the Alberta premier’s recent mission to deter some temporary residents, including her fall referendums to cut their social services or charge them extra fees.
What else could soar in an oil production boom? Carbon emissions, adding to the oil sector’s status as Canada’s biggest source of the climate-change-worsening gas.
Ahead of a national meeting of environment ministers in Calgary this week, Alberta touted a report proclaiming that the per-barrel emissions intensity from oilsands production dropped by 28 per cent since 2012 — but doubling the number of barrels produced will lead to an overall rise.
The Pathways carbon sequester project would store underground six megatonnes of carbon emissions yearly by 2035, and pledges an additional 10 megatonnes of reductions by storage or other means by 2045. But overall greenhouse gas output from the oilsands was 92 megatonnes in 2024, according to federal statistics.
And that’s before factoring in production growth, doubling or otherwise. “It’s become an equation that’s been more and more unbalanced in the last several months,” said McKenzie, the Pembina Institute analyst.
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Think of the turbulence of the last decade, or even the last couple of years. So much could change in the next 10 to 15 years, from government’s interest in climate action to demand curves to the oilpatch’s willingness to greenlight multibillion-dollar, multi-year projects.
The many exclusive parties, pancake breakfasts and business gatherings during Calgary Stampede have long served as a key barometer of the oilpatch’s sometimes volatile mood. The analysts Botterill and Birn both emerged to report they hadn’t encountered industry optimism like this in several years.
But it doesn’t appear that anyone beyond Danielle Smith and her coterie is echoing talk about producing eight million barrels a day in the non-distant future.
Not yet, at least.
