Of course the world will never run out of oil in the literal sense. There are some 170 billion barrels of the stuff trapped in the Alberta tar sands, and over 500 billion barrels more in the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela. And if we suck them dry, there are billions more barrels of oil in shale, just as there is natural gas.

But what the global economy has already run out of is the oil it can afford to burn. Depletion isn’t just a geological concept; it’s also an economic one. From a purely geological standpoint, you can always boost production—or at least offset depletion—by accessing increasingly costly and environmentally problematic sources of new supply (such as the tar sands). But as we saw from the recent recession, the global economy can’t afford to run on the prices needed to pull that oil out.

For some people, the fact that oil prices fell to around $40 per barrel during the depths of the recession was proof enough that it had no business being in triple-digit range in the first place. But what those folks forget is that world oil demand fell during the recession for the first time since 1983. Peak oil is not a problem if the economy it’s supposed to power is shrinking—it’s only a problem if we actually want our economies to grow.

The first thing you notice about an economic recovery, even an anemic one, is that the world economy starts consuming more oil. The next thing you notice is that the price of oil starts heading up.

We all might have liked the pump prices that came with $40-per-barrel oil during the recession, but we shouldn’t expect much to be flowing out of the gas pumps at that price. Even deep-water oil, like at BP’s ruptured Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, doesn’t work at that price, to say nothing of mining bitumen in Alberta and processing it into synthetic crude.

If you doubt that, just look at what happened in the Alberta tar patch when world oil prices plunged during the recession. Some $50 billion of planned investment was cancelled literally overnight.

No, the world’s not running out of oil. It’s just running out of the oil we can afford to burn.

Oil is already trading at around $80 per barrel, and we are in the very early stages of a global economic recovery. Surely time is on Alberta’s side, and on that of the royalties the province commands from the billions of barrels of oil trapped in its tar sands. Those royalties are already larger than the ones from natural gas, historically the province’s fiscal staple.

What Albertans don’t seem to realize is that they might just be in a position to take a bigger slice of bitumen’s growing royalty pie—particularly when their competitor as the primary source of tomorrow’s oil supply happens to be Venezuela’s Orinoco tar sands.

The latest estimate by the US Geological Survey claims there are 513 billion barrels of heavy oil beneath the steaming jungles of Amazonia, roughly three times the deposits in Alberta. But there is an even bigger difference between the two resources, and it’s not what lies underground.

Venezuela, like most places in the world today, believes that its vast oil reserves belong to its state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela. In Canada, by contrast, not only is there no state oil company (Petrocan, long privatized, was recently swallowed by Suncor) but there are virtually no foreign ownership restrictions on oil reserves. In a world of rampant resource nationalism, that makes Alberta a very special place.

With the enormous deposits in the Orinoco now off limits, Alberta’s tar sands represent almost three quarters of the oil reserves in the world that are open to private investment and ownership—and by that I mean where good corporate citizens like ExxonMobil can stick a huge straw in them and siphon off the resulting petrodollars to their head offices.

In Venezuela, the company had to walk away from one such straw, a multi-billion-dollar one that it built for the Orinoco tar sands (the 120,000 barrel-per-day Cerro Negro heavy crude upgrader), when President Hugo Chàvez decided to reroute that outward-bound flow of petrodollars. Next thing you know, Exxon (and its Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil) is pouring billions of dollars into its Kearl Lake, Alberta, operation, a project that was previously deemed too expensive.

The longer the Orinoco river basin remains a place to fish for peacock bass instead of extracting millions of barrels of heavy oil, the stronger Alberta taxpayers’ position is.

So forget about taking a new political direction with the upstart Wildrose Alliance Party. Facing a $4.5 billion deficit, maybe it’s time Albertans took a page out of Hugo’s playbook, and started getting a bigger share back from their biggest resource.