I have to ask myself if I am better exposed to the sector in another equity and after careful consideration I believe Imperial's shares are more than reasonably valued, roughly trading at 17.8 x 2009E compared with the company's hiostorical consensus forward P/E of roughly 15x, and generally in line with 2009 net asset value estimate based of course on NYMEX forward market prices. a while back I figured higher share price was in order based on 2010 net asset value estimate and 2010 p/e of ~13.3x. Phase 1 of Kearl oil sands project was a wise move by the baord and gave me reason to hold as the move will add 110,000 b/d of bitumen production by late 2012. So what if capex of that Phase 1 is $7.9 Billion!!!! (wow eh) --- oh don't forget the $800M spect so far... but I look at it this way the capex of $7.9B is only $72,000/bbl/d of capacity. What really freaks me out -- in a good way is the company plans to use a proprietary paraffinic froth treatment process that will make Kearl production the only pipeline-acceptable diluted bitumen product among the oil sands mining projects.

On another topic that you might appreciate being long or looking into is a jr oil and gas that has large reserves and is a small producer, (until now they have been hands off the deep reserves where it is a "company maker") -- they just got capitalized to go deep and there appears no downside but large upside. Here is url of story on it http://energymarketwatch.net/ode.htm I see a few 100K socked away now will reap large yield imo.