Suncor Energy CEO Rich Kruger sought to defend his company’s pivot away from renewable energy, touted his own 40-year career as a fossil industry executive, and largely avoided a Member of Parliament’s questions on oil and gas companies’ liability for climate impacts in an hour-long appearance yesterday before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources.
The discussion had Kruger, a relatively new arrival at Suncor who previously spend 31 years at ExxonMobil and as CEO of its Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil, doubling down on what he previously described as a “revised direction and tone” for Suncor during a call with industry analysts in August.
“We have a bit of a disproportionate emphasis on the longer-term energy transition,” Kruger said at the time, adding that while those pursuits are important, they won’t make money for shareholders today.
“Today, we win by creating value through our large integrated asset base underpinned by oil sands,” he declared.
Kruger’s committee appearance began just half an hour after two environment groups warned that the expansion plan for Suncor’s Fort Hills oil sands mine in northern Alberta will produce an estimated 732 million cubic metres of new tailings waste over the project’s lifetime, enough to fill 60 square kilometres of new tailings ponds. That’s “an area large enough to cover the island of Manhattan,” the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society-Northern Alberta and the Alberta Wilderness Association said in a release.
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