indicatorThe Twenty-Four

The best year so far

Alberta’s oil production in 2024

By Rob Roach, ATB Economics 4 February 2025 1 min read

The numbers for December just came out and it’s official: Alberta’s crude oil production set a new record for annual output at 1.5 billion barrels in 2024.

An additional 63 million barrels increased annual production by 4.5% over 2023.

Translated into daily output, production averaged 3.98 million barrels per day compared to 3.82 million in 2023.

The increase extends a long-standing trend with annual output increasing every year since 2011 except for 2016 (when forest fires shut-in oil sands production) and 2020 (when the pandemic and an oil price crash were in play).

The rise in production is a key reason Alberta’s economy is estimated to have grown by 2.5% last year and will continue (barring the impact of tariffs) to grow by a similar amount this year.

Conventional production went from 189.5 million barrels in 2023 to 196.5 for an increase of 3.7%.

Oil sands output rose from 1.18 billion barrels in 2023 to 1.23 billion in 2024 for an increase of 4.3%.

Although accounting for only about 2% of total production, condensate output grew by 20.9% last year, going from 25.9 million barrels to 31.3 million.

While the U.S. remains Alberta’s primary market, more Alberta oil is making its way to Asia via the recently-expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline. Crude sales to Asia went from effectively zero at the start of 2024 to about 4% of total exports over the second half of the year.

Answer to the previous trivia question: Located just south of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s mainline, Calgary’s Customs House building was completed in 1916.

Today’s trivia question: Which country has the larger oil reserves: Canada or the U.S.?

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