Report: Canadian oil sands key after '09

TORONTO, Dec. 8 (UPI) -- Canada holds almost 60 percent of the investable oil reserves in the world today, CIBC said Friday.

The Toronto bank also said by the end of the decade Canadian oil sands production will be the planet's single largest source of new supply.

"With the Middle East and even Russia increasingly off-limits, we estimate that the oil sands and Canada's other deposits represent 56 percent of the world's investable reserves," said Jeff Rubin, chief strategist and economist at CIBC World Markets.

The CIBC report notes that despite soaring crude prices, conventional oil

capacity dropped in 2005 for the first time in history and will continue to

decline for the foreseeable future. It also notes that all of the projected

3 million barrel-a-day increase in world production between now and the

end of the decade will come from non-conventional sources -- with Canadian

oil sands accounting for larger share of incremental production growth

after 2009.

Canada's current 2 million barrels a per day of conventional oil production never qualified the country as anything more than a secondary oil producer. But with some 174 billion barrels of oil sands reserves, Canada now has the potential to become a major global producer by 2010.