The world is awash with petroleum-soaked rock near the surface.  I did a survey years ago taking into consideration which, if any, of these reserves could be exploited by our technology.  It concluded that the slightest variations in make-up of reservoirs had enough effect on processing to necessitate almost new methods and produce new risks.  Chinese and other Asian investments have been more driven to date, by learning than by acquiring reserves.  As easy oil is drawn down globally, lower grades of known reserves (including Canadian oil sands) are attractive but that will not long be the case as the age of oil is changing totally.  Long lake was largely a learning project legally, technically and economically.  It was highly successful for those purposes.  It was not well run.  The point is this is too complex a situation to be treated with a lot of conventional wisdom and ignorance of the details in its history.