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If oil under $50 a barrel hasn’t put enough pressure on Canada’s oil industry, a report this week calls for the shuttering of all oilsands mines within five years, production to be reduced by three-quarters from the current level and the vast majority of the bitumen to remain in the ground.

Two out of those three certainly aren’t going to happen.

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And — with 2.5 trillion barrels of the bitumen in the oilsands — the old adage the Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones puts the third scenario into perspective. The petroleum age will undoubtedly end with plenty of oil and gas still in the ground.

The more distressing element of the report from British researchers Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, published in the respected magazine Nature this week, was its perspective on the limitations of carbon capture and storage to substantially extend time horizons for fossil fuel developments like oilsands.