Finally, the day the industry has been on pins and needles for…Alberta’s long-awaited Competitiveness Review will be released this afternoon by Energy Minister Ron Liepert, bringing salvation and sustainability and certainty and longevity and…well, you get the idea.

I don’t recall this much buzz and anticipation for a missive from the provincial government since…well, since the New Royalty Framework (NRF) was announced, and we all know how well THAT turned out.

When I interviewed Liepert a month or so ago (you can read it all in the April edition of Oilweek, due on the streets tomorrow), he told me that the Competitiveness Review vis-a-vis the royalty structure in Alberta would not include a New New Royalty Framework (NNRF) or Son of NRF, if you will, but rather various appendages and modules hung on the NRF and designed to address the short-comings of the NRF. The intent, he said, would be to correct the errors of the NRF and make permanent the tweaks that were implemented post-NRF to address the so-called “unintended consequences” of the original review.

I guess we’ll see….