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Connacher is a growing exploration, development and production company with a focus on producing bitumen and expanding its in-situ oil sands projects located near Fort McMurray, Alberta

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Message: MRCI Impact

MRCI Impact

posted on Mar 26, 2009 05:16PM

MRCI Confusion

I realize things will get better this year, and am excited to see events unfold, but wondering about the seemingly conflicting statements on page 55 ...

"The Refinery provides a physical hedge for our bitumen revenues by recovering a portion of the differential between West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and heavy crude oil price."

vs.

"Our refining margins fell markedly in 2008, as the selling prices of refined products did not keep pace with rising crude and other feedstock costs. Our heavy oil refining margins also typically capture a portion of the difference between heavy and light crude oil costs. As this differential narrowed in 2008, so did refining margins."

Aren't these statements at odds? This seems important relative to the negative $55M change in the "Downstream margin - net" portion of the "Reconciliations of Upstream Operating Netback to Net Earnings", realized from 2007 to 2008. This was a change of about double the loss in net earnings. The information confuses me because it seems like they say the refinery is great because it hedges us against differentials, but we got hammered because the differential hedge didn't work.

I'm not trying to sound negative, just wondering what others are thinking. Speaking of negativity, I actually went to look at the other board due to Agoracom's outage ... talk about negative ... yikes.

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