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Alberta’s effort to alleviate a crude glut through mandatory production curtailments may be backfiring, as Canadian heavy crude has become too expensive to ship by rail.

Two months after the provincial government announced the cuts, crude-by-rail shipments are declining even as pipelines remain at or near capacity. Rail volumes fell 56 per cent last week compared with three weeks earlier, after setting a record in December, according to Genscape Inc., which monitors crude-by-rail loadings at some of the larger terminals in Western Canada.

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“The rail economics are seriously damaged, and a lot of the rail movements are stopping or have stopped,” Suncor Energy Inc. Chief Executive Steve Williams said Wednesday on a conference call with analysts. “That’s going to have the opposite impact to what the government wants.”