As speculation swirled Monday about the potential impact of U.S. President Donald Trump's renewed moves on Venezuela, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pointed to the situation as a clear argument for expanding the province's pipeline capacity to the Pacific coast.
A Call for Market Diversification
Premier Smith emphasized that recent events involving Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro highlight the critical need for Alberta to diversify its oil export markets. She specifically advocated for accelerating the development of pipelines, including a new Indigenous co-owned bitumen pipeline to British Columbia's northwest coast to reach Asian customers.
"Alberta's government is continuing its work to submit an application to the major project office and expects the federal government to move forward with urgency," Smith stated. She added that the province supports building pipelines in all directions to get its resources to market and looks forward to collaborating with provincial and federal partners.
Expert Analysis: A Long Road for Venezuela
Economic experts, however, caution that any significant change in global oil markets from Venezuela's sector is a distant prospect. Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, noted that the development makes budget forecasting more challenging for the Alberta government. January is when the province internally locks down its budget numbers based on energy market predictions for the coming year.
Andrew Leach, a professor of economics and law at the University of Alberta, underscored the uncertainty. "What Venezuelan oil? We're months if not years away from any sense of the future of Venezuelan oil production," Leach said in an email. He explained that Venezuela's oil industry, while sitting on the world's largest proven reserves, is aging and plagued by technical and investment problems, with interests from China, Russia, and U.S. companies whose assets were nationalized.
Tombe echoed this long-term view, stating, "Best case scenario, it will take years for Venezuela's oil sector to increase in scale in a way that actually affects global markets."
Alberta's Budget and Price Volatility
The discussion comes as Alberta, perpetually on a resource royalty roller-coaster, faces volatile energy markets. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude peaked near US$125 per barrel in 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine but dipped below US$56 in mid-December 2025. It was trading around US$58 on Monday.
The province has experienced dramatic shifts before, notably in 2015 and 2016 when oil prices collapsed relative to 2014 levels and remained low for an extended period. For Edmonton consumers, the current situation had a silver lining, with gas prices plunging below one dollar per litre to as low as 98.8 cents at some local stations.
The Premier's push for pipelines frames the geopolitical uncertainty as a domestic imperative, while economists stress that the immediate budgetary and market impacts hinge on factors far beyond Venezuela's near-term capacity.
