In his crusade to protect Alberta’s oilsands from what he calls a predatory federal government, Premier Jason Kenney is fighting a losing battle.

He is losing not because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is fated to win next October’s federal election. The Liberals, along with their complicated plan to marry economic and environmental goals, might well be ousted from power.

Rather Kenney will ultimately lose because, in the long run, the oilsands are unlikely to survive economically.

At a time when cheaper shale oil is readily available and renewable energy increasingly less costly, Alberta bitumen is simply too expensive to mine.

Existing bitumen mines will continue to produce heavy oil. The marginal cost of producing a barrel of oil from an existing operation is low enough in most cases to justify exploitation.

But new investment is falling fast. Figures from the National Energy Board show that new investment in the oilsands dropped from a peak of $34 billion in 2014 to $11 billion last year.

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One of the world’s biggest petroleum companies, Royal Dutch Shell, has pulled out of the Alberta oilsands almost completely.

The reasons are simple and have little to do with the usual bogeymen cited by Kenney — including lack of pipeline capacity, interference by foreign-funded environmentalists and an uncaring federal government.

Investment is drying up because it is just too risky to sink billions of dollars upfront into an energy project that can take 10 years to come into production.

Shale oil is easier and cheaper to produce. A shale oil project can be quickly shut down if the world oil price drops and just as quickly restarted if that price rises again.

What’s more, shale oil is lighter than bitumen and liable to cause less environmental damage in the event of a spill.

Thanks to its shale oil resources, the U.S. has become the world’s number one petroleum producer, surpassing even Saudi Arabia. Among other things, this means the U.S. is no longer as dependent on Alberta oil, heavy or otherwise.

So that’s the first reason for the province’s woes: compared to other sources of petroleum, its bitumen is expensive to produce.

The second is that renewable energy is becoming cheaper. As the Globe and Mail has reported, the cost of solar and wind-generated energy has dropped in parts of the U.S. to below that of conventional sources, such as coal.

As a result, investment in renewable energy is soaring. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2016, global investment in renewable energy reached $297 billion, more than double the amount spent on conventional electrical generating plants powered by coal, nuclear material, gas and fuel oil.

This is the reality facing Alberta and the rest of Canada. Ownership of oil reserves, particularly heavy oil reserves, no longer guarantees prosperity. Kenney can rage against the federal government’s Bill C-69. But that bill, which among other things would rework the national energy regulation process to bring it into line with recent court decisions, is not the cause of Alberta’s distress.

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Nor is the lack of pipelines the source of all evil. Writing in the National Observer, energy analyst Ross Belot argues convincingly that existing and approved pipelines are more than sufficient to handle the expected output of bitumen from the tar sands.

Indeed, one major producer, Suncor, is already using this existing pipeline capacity to ship refined gasoline and diesel fuel to the lucrative British Columbia market.

Alberta’s core problem is simpler. The province has bet the farm on the oilsands. It’s a bet that, for reasons that have nothing to do with either Trudeau or Kenney, is no longer paying off.

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