Alberta provides the cheapest oil there is to the US.

“At the same time, the development of these things (tar sands) is pretty important, in our judgment, to North American energy security." Says Obama.

It is time to take a closer look at the tar sands crude output.

Tar sands output is a crude oil that has been heavily refined before going to market as crude. There is none of the sulfur or other impurities in the crude. These have been taken out.

Essentially it is clean, ready to be used. This means the refineries in the US who are intent on doing the final cracking in the US are going to be able to collect big bucks back on Carbon reductions.

Very little needs to be done to the Alberta Crude so, they can claim operational improvements in reducing their carbon foot print. Estimates from industry have put a value of the Alberta Tar Sands oil as being underpriced by as much as 30% because of the state of distillation of the product.

If you add the underpriced base oil to the short shift we got when the Conservatives put the oil to Canadian dollars for figuring out royalty you can see where we are paying the oil companies to take the resource away from Alberta.