The number of OPEC countries has dropped to 12 from 13 after Indonesia an OPEC member since 1962, has announced it will leave the oil producers’ consortium due falling oil production. This from Bloomberg:

Indonesia, the only OPEC member in Southeast Asia, will pull out of the group as aging fields and declining production force the region’s biggest economy to boost imports.

Energy Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro will sign a decree today to exit the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, he told reporters in Jakarta. The nation, a member since 1962, has been considering leaving the body in the past three years.

As OPEC shrinks in numbers, there’s a new oil rush going on in Alberta, Canada.

“Alberta’s oil sands are the largest known reserve of oil on earth containing between 1.7 and 2.5 trillion barrels,” says Alex Green in InvestmentU. (Saudi Arabia, by comparison, has only 262 billion barrels of proven reserves. In fact, all OPEC nations combined have less than 900 billion barrels.)

“For decades, these sands weren’t even considered part of the world’s oil reserves because the oil there wasn’t economically extractable at prevailing prices using then-current technology. But times have changed… And the new gold rush is on.

“Here’s the kicker: Exploration of Alberta’s oil sands is virtually risk-free. You can’t drill a dry hole here. There’s no drilling at all. It’s a mining operation – and the reserves are thoroughly outlined. So what you really need is a company with plenty of machinery, money and manpower to dig it up and process it as quickly as possible.”

Read on here to find out the one undisputed blue-chip play on Alberta’s oil sands.

The good news is that there is new oil production capacity in the pipeline this year and next,” says Dan Denning in The Daily Reckoning Australia.

“Keep in mind that the final investment decision on the projects entering into production this year was made anywhere from 3-6 years ago. That shows you how far in advance you have to plan for new production (assuming you’ve even found oil in the first place).

“There are some massive LNG and natural gas projects coming on-stream between 2011 and 2015. Gazprom, Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil all look like big winners, should oil prices stay high and pass through to higher LNG prices.”