The company was founded in 1989, beginning its operations in the gas basins of Alberta. During the 1990s, the company began extracting natural gas in northeastern BC, and heavy crude oil and thermal in situ projects throughout Western Canada. In 2000, it began its offshore activities.¹

CNRL holds two oil sands mining operations—the Athabasca Oil Sands Project and the Horizon Oil Sands mines, both located in Alberta. Its natural gas operations are located in northeastern BC, northwestern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Its crude oil and natural gas liquids deposits, located in the Athabasca and Cold Lake regions of Alberta, are known as “unconventional” oil, requiring the use of steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and other technologies to be mined.² It also mines for oil in deepwater offshore operations in the UK portion of the North Sea and in Africa (Cote d’Ivoire and South Africa); the company is planning to increase its offshore operations in both regions.³ Offshore drilling in deep waters continues to be one of the most dangerous forms of oil extraction.⁴

Included are all shareholdings of 1% and greater. Source: Orbis Database, October 2018.

At a time when many large energy companies are selling off their oil sands holdings due to the sector’s declining profitability, CNRL is doubling down on new investments, including a major purchase of Shell’s Alberta assets in 2017. To date, CNRL has made no major investments in renewable energy production. It is apparent that the firm is committed to continuing “business as usual” by developing fossil fuels in Canada, at the climate’s expense.

Perhaps CNRL’s close involvement in the Canadian policy development network for carbon extraction can shed light on its goals. Along with 12 other oil sands operators, CNRL is a founding member of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA)— an organization that brings major industry players together to generate research on technologies to help “green” oil sands development, such as carbon capture and storage.⁵

CNRL’s chairman, N. Murray Edwards, is a major shareholder of Imperial Metals and Ensign Energy. His endorsement of the Alberta NDP’s 2015 Climate Leadership Plan—which seeks to phase out coal by 2030, implement a carbon tax and move provincial energy generation toward renewables—may seem contradictory to his interests, but it appears that the plan may have substantial benefits for the oil industry. Many of Alberta’s largest fossil fuel corporations, for example, support a consumer-based carbon tax since it helps legitimate the government’s support for more oil pipelines, while deflecting the onus for carbon costs away from oil producers themselves.

CNRL has a history of oil spills in Canada. According to Greenpeace Canada, between the years 2003 and 2012 CNRL caused over 2,000 pipeline incidents in Alberta—700 more than any other company in Alberta.⁶ The most recent events are listed here.

Primrose site seepage

In 2009, seepage was detected at CNRL’s Primrose East operation near Cold Lake, Alberta, on Treaty 6 land in the traditional territory of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation.⁷ The company originally cited faulty wellbores—holes in the rock used to extract oil and gas—as the cause of the incident. However, an investigation by the Energy Resource Conservation Board, now called the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), found that the wellbore theory, which would have displaced the fault from CNRL to one of its regulators, was highly unlikely. Instead, the AER suggested that problems that arose during the process of “steaming” (otherwise known as “high pressure cyclic steam stimulation”) were the more plausible cause⁸—a finding which would call into question a considerable number of CNRL’s current operations.

In late May 2013, a seepage of bitumen emulsion—a mixture of heavy oil sands crude and water—at CNRL’s Primrose site was reported to the public.⁹ It was later announced that the seepage, which occurred at the same site as the 2009 spill, had in fact likely begun in late 2012 or early 2013 and was occurring near several of CNRL’s steam injection sites. Five months after the spill was initially detected, emulsion continued to ooze from the sites at a rate of 2,000 litres per day.¹⁰

Eventually, information surfaced about the magnitude of the incident: nearly a million litres of bitumen mixed with water had leaked from the pipes.¹¹

The AER initially reported the seepage to have been an estimated 4,450 litres. However, in September 2013, new figures released by the AER put the estimated amount at more than 1.5 million litres, or more than 9,600 barrels of oil, after other leaks were detected.¹² The seepage prompted provincial investigations from the AER and Alberta’s Energy and Sustainable Resource Development, as well as a federal investigation from Environment Canada. In a report released in the spring, the AER blamed CNRL’s extraction method and concluded that excessive steaming was one of the causative factors in the leaks.¹³

Even more concerning, the spill appears to be ongoing: in 2016 the AER confirmed that the 2009 spill site “still experiences occasional seepages,” but it does not have information on how much oil has leaked as a result of the cumulative spills.¹⁴

2014 pipeline spills

In April 2014, 70,000 litres of oil and processed water spilled from a pipeline northwest of Slave Lake, Alberta.¹⁵

In late November 2014, the AER announced that a CNRL pipeline had spilled 60,000 litres of crude oil into a muskeg region in northern Alberta, located roughly 27 km from Red Earth Creek. An incident report by the regulator stated that according to CNRL, a mechanical failure was to blame for the spill.[/efn_note]