RE:Implications of Fort Hills acquisitionAt the time of acquisition of Teck's share of Fort Hills, SU wrote down about 3.4 billion (if I recall correctly).
Frankly, I was surprised that they didn't do another writedown when they announced the deal with Total. I would assume that their accountants are still doing the math and we will likely see it when they announce their 4Q results early next year.
The other thing that I find interesting is that if you look at their latest presentation from August, even with the additional oil production share from the Total acquisition, they are still short replacing the production from the Base Plant. This means that SU is still in the hunt to find more oil production to replace the base Plant and the fact that they are even talking about it at all means IMO that they have pretty much acknowledged that they will not get environmental approval for an extension of the Base Plant.
No matter where they get the extra oil production it will cost them a lot of money to secure that source. More importantly, as I have mentioned in previous posts, even if successful, all this does is keep current production levels the same and doesn't grow the company. A company that is not growing is typically not a good long term core investment. Short term? Possibly.