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Compounding the problem is Notleyhad already announced a plan to buy 7,000 railcars for a government-sponsored oil-by-rail program. The economics of that plan are blown to smithereens under the current scenario.

It’s darn tricky to get central planning right. We need to end curtailment as soon as possible.

To this point, everyone — including me — has been saying that new pipelines are the only real solution to get out of this mess. Now it appears there may be another way.

A private company has been quietly working to solve the problem of the bitumen bottleneck and make Athabasca oilsands the safest oil in the world to transport.

This week I spoke to Cal Broder and Andy Popko from Bitcrude. If what I’m about to tell you seems too good to be true, you can check their presentation out yourself at bitcrude.ca.

Their plan is to transport bitumen in semi-solid form by rail to any market in the world. It turns out Athabasca bitumen is naturally a semi-solid; it’s the reason why companies have to mix it with diluent to get it moving through pipelines. Their plan is to transport it as a semi-solid and only convert it to a liquid once it reaches the refinery for processing.

How would it work? They are building a processing centre in central Alberta to extract the diluent from the bitumen. They will then pour pure liquid bitumen into a liner where it will solidify. A railcar will transport it to the port of Prince Rupert for loading on a container ship bound for Asian markets.