Canada Tries the OPEC Way

摘要

When prices for Canada's heavy crude collapsed late last year, Alberta did something quite out of character. The traditionally conservative, free-market-loving province took a page out of OPEC's handbook and ordered its largest oil producers to throttle back output by about325,000 barrels a day, the equivalent of almost 9 percent of daily production.The move was an unprecedented intervention meant to rescue Canada's oil producers-and the province's tax revenue-from a lack of pipeline capacity that caused a glut of crude to back up in storage tanks. It worked: The price of Western Canadian Select, the benchmark for crude extracted from Alberta's oil sands, has more than tripled since closing at $13.46 a barrel in mid-November, its lowest level in at least a decade. But the unintended consequences have critics fuming and even some of the policy's supporters wringing their hands.