Boom, Bust and Consolidation: Corporate Restructuring in the Alberta Oil Sands

The accumulation dynamics of the Big Five must be examined in the context of the commodity cycles that mark the development of extractive capital. [...] Suncor alone spent $10 billion of the total overhead costs of the Big Five because of the size and complexity of the firm. [...] To summarize, in terms of accumulation dynamics over time, the higher the gross profits, the wider the scope of the organizational capacity of these corporations and the larger the scale of their extractive capacity (the two economic foundations of the Big Five’s corporate power). [...] The exodus of global oil giants from direct involvement in the Alberta oil sands (besides owning stock in the oil sands majors) must be examined in the context of the North American investment boom in unconventional oil moving south towards shale oil basins in the US. [...] The potential output controlled by the Big Five forms the basis for their oligopolistic power over the resource and its capitalist development, and the realized “flow” of bitumen generates the income that realizes the value locked in the oil sands.