Word: billions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...provincial government. So Alberta, rather than the national government in Ottawa, has gleefully collected the rewards of gushing oil and gas prices. The province takes an average 43% cut for oil and 33% for gas from the energy companies' local production revenues, and its royalties surged from $1.3 billion in 1974 to $4 billion this year. Coveting more of this wealth for themselves, many Canadians outside the province call Alberta "OPEC North" and refer to its leaders as "blue-eyed sheiks." After traveling throughout the nouveau riche province, TIME Correspondent Ed Ogle reports...
Sensibly, provision is being made for when the energy reserves run out. Fully 30% of all royalties are deposited in a "Heritage" trust fund, which now totals $5 billion and is expected to reach as much as $34 billion by the end of the 1980s. The fund makes major loans to other provinces (at competitive rates), but its main purpose is to bankroll Alberta's economic future. The provincial government has acquired its own Pacific Western Airlines; set up a local company to invest in all forms of energy, including oil from the thick, gummy tar sands; and offers...
...quite possible that Alberta's energy bonanza will not give out for many decades. Expert estimates of conventional oil reserves range from 5 billion to 8 billion bbl. (The U.S. has proven reserves of 28.5 billion bbl., and Mexico has 16 billion bbl.) Most significant, Alberta has huge additional "unconventional" sources of energy that are not yet economical to tap but will become increasingly feasible -and necessary-as oil prices rise. The basic sources are heavy bitumen oil and the tar sands, which together could provide as much as 320 billion bbl., or enough to supply the entire world...
...producers, Suncor and the Syncrude consortium, are turning out a total of some 150,000 bbl. a day from tar sands. A group headed by Shell has won approval for another project that will cost close to $5 billion and help lift output from the sands to an expected 500,000 bbl. daily by 1985. Meanwhile, Exxon's Imperial Oil plans to spend more than $5 billion to produce oil from heavy crude. These projects may be stretched out if some recent finds of conventional petroleum elsewhere prove more financially attractive. Some oilmen believe that two offshore strikes...
When hand-held computer toys and games first appeared on the market two years ago, retail sales climbed briskly to between $35 million and $40 million. This year's retail sales should be ten times greater (against total toy sales of about $5.5 billion). The great beep forward came when Milton Bradley noticed that adults were buying its innovative Simon -for themselves, and not just in the weeks before Christmas. The highly seasonal nature of toy buying has always been an industry bugaboo; after Christmas, retailers can get stuck with toys that won't sell...