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Canada’s oilsands appeared to be skidding toward big trouble in the dying days of 2014. Shale producers in the United States had found ways to produce oil faster and cheaper, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was pushing down prices to try to drive everyone else out of business.

By Christmas that year, a month after the Saudi Arabia-led OPEC cartel started its market share offensive, a showdown that most other oilsands companies were hoping would be short lived, Calgary-based MEG Energy Corp. was slashing its budget by 75 per cent and bracing for the worst.

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“We were all over it, focusing on how to reinvent our business and doing it in cheaper ways that would be sustainable,” Bill McCaffrey, MEG’s chief executive, recalled in a rare interview at the company’s downtown headquarters. “We knew that we had to be better than the alternative.”

To match costs in a lower oil price environment, MEG reduced staff by 40 per cent to 600 employees and accelerated the use of some homegrown technology to improve the energy efficiency of its operations.

We are becoming a greener barrel than a lot of other choices around the world Bill McCaffrey, MEG Energy CEO

Two and a half years later, MEG is the only next-generation pure-play oilsands developer growing in an industry abandoned by international players and now dominated by four Canadian giants: Suncor Energy Inc., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Imperial Oil Ltd. and Cenovus Energy Inc.