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Originally Posted by Fuzz
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You can use that data to show how much better for Alberta post-payout projects are. Compare MEG Christina Lake to Cenovus Christina Lake. They're similar and next to each other, although the Cenovus project is bigger- it produced about 2.5x more oil in 2021.
Cenovus has reached payout and MEG hasn't. In 2021 MEG paid $80MM in royalties, while CVE was over a billion. Even if you scale that up by size and say MEG would have paid $200MM on a project the same size, the difference is 5X, and it would have been much larger in the first half of 2022 when prices spiked, as both CVE profits and the governments take rate increased.
Historically operators kept doing expansions to push back reaching payout, which was good for jobs but bad for royalties. Now they've stopped doing that because the capital markets hate oil and gas capex, so projects are paying out and the AB government is cashing in.