Imperial looks to the future

Article Excerpt

IMPERIAL OIL LTD. $39.57 (Toronto symbol IMO; Shares outstanding: 795.8 million; Market cap: $30.4 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Average; Dividend yield: 1.9%; www.imperialoil.ca) is Canada’s third-largest publicly traded oil company, after Suncor (No. 1) and Canadian Natural Resources. U.S.-based ExxonMobil (New York symbol XOM) owns 69.6% of Imperial. Imperial now plans to develop the Aspen oil sands project 45 kilometres northeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta. The project will cost $2.6 billion. That’s equal to 8.3% of Imperial’s $31.4 billion market cap. The company plans to begin construction later this year. Aspen should begin operating in 2022. It will initially produce 75,000 barrels a day. To put that in context, Imperial’s overall production in the third quarter of 2018 averaged 393,000 barrels a day. Future expansion could increase Aspen’s daily output to 150,000 barrels a day. Imperial Oil is a buy. buy…