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Still, he said, the company is waiting to see what policy recommendations are proposed.

“Clearly, the reviews in Alberta, if you’re running a business you need to take pause and say, ‘We need to know the outcome of those before we make investment decisions,’ because they could be significant enough to change how returns on investments would perform,” he said.

The capital that would have been spent on the gas plant next year will be redeployed to other focus areas, including the Permian shale oil formation in Texas, where Suttles also said the company is accelerating its spending program for the remainder of this year.

Calgary-based Encana announced when it reported its third quarter earnings that it had increased its planned spending by US$150 million for the fourth quarter and is now on track to spend close to US$2.2 billion this year, which is the upper end of its budget.

“I’m pretty confident our capital will be less next year than this year, and our efficiencies a lot higher,” Suttles said. He did not provide a spending target for 2016.

“This is a point of concern for us as we believe the company’s capital efficiency assumptions are aggressive,” CIBC World Markets analyst Arthur Grayfer said in a research note, adding that the higher spending levels “is a bit of a negative takeaway.”

The company revealed it had taken a US$1.7 billion non-cash charge on its earnings in the third quarter for its U.S. assets as a result of the collapse in the price of oil. The charge brings Encana’s total impairments for the year so far to just under US$5.7 billion.