Osum gets approval for Taiga project near Cold Lake

Taiga cross section stolen from the Osum website.

Osum Oil Sands Corp. (my personal favourite oil sand company name) has received authorization from the ERCB to build its Taiga project 25km north of Cold Lake. The plan is for a 35,000 barrel per day SAGD project, the first 10,000 barrel per day phase of which will supposedly startup in 2013.

Osum is a private company with a bunch of deep pocketed partners, including Warburg Pincus, Blackstone Capital Partners, Camcor Partners Inc., Kern Partners, Goldman Sachs and the Singaporean and South Korean sovereign wealth funds. Perhaps its most attractive assets are the Grossmont carbonates it owns with Laracina, which contain a massive amount of bitumen but have yet to be effectively extracted. Taiga is clastic, not carbonates, and so is a much more conventional oil sands project, to the degree that any oil sand project can be conventional. Osum also has a pretty slick website that moves and bounces and stuff.