this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
74 points (98.7% liked)

Canada

12251 readers
218 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 Sports

Baseball

Basketball

Curling

Hockey

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


🌐 Other Relevant Communities


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If they're building massive data centers, and power plants, why not build refineries too?

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Idk if you've ever play Factorio, but it's the same premise:

Complexity: Essentially, there isn't enough demand to justify the expense and massive investment of money and resources. With petroleum refinement, you get byproducts and you need to either store them or make products from them, so it's not just a plant or two, it's a whole set of them.

Cost: Alberta is rich in extracted, stable crude oil and bitumen, but refineries are expensive. Like, really, really expensive. It doesn't make economic sense to heavily subsidize its processing locally, when it's so much cheaper to send it to the USA and elsewhere.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I do play factorio. Complexity is the point...

However, these power plants don't need or use the oil refineries you're referring to. They are natural gas power plants, and thus need natural gas refineries, which are MUCH simpler and cheaper because it's mostly just a cleaning step. Alberta already refines and consumes about 50-60% of it's natural gas production.