Anglo Dutch Shell boss Jeroen van der Veer said that the company...

Anglo Dutch Shell boss Jeroen van der Veer said that the company remains committed to investing in Canadian oil sands after putting on hold the expansion of the second phase of the Athabasca project in Alberta.


“Looking at the long-term energy agenda, the Canadian oil sands will be exploited,” said van der Veer.

“And we will continue to expand, though we have postponed the expansion for now,” he said.

The company said on 30 October that it was pressing ahead with the first expansion phase of its Athabasca Canadian oil-sands project, while putting further investment there on hold because of mounting local construction costs, said a Bloomberg report.

The company expects to add 250,000 barrels of oil production by the end of this year, helped by winter oil output from its Sakhalin project in Russia’s Far East coming on line soon.

Van der Veer said even under the current market circumstances the company will continue to be a “relatively large investor.”

Cutting or stopping investing would be “highly undesirable. We have made that mistake before and we learned a lesson from it,” Van der Veer said, referring to the late 1990s when crude prices collapsed and oil companies curtailed spending.

Van der Veer said he is urging colleagues to control costs