The prospect of Chinese oil companies diverting the bitumen reserves to refineries in the People’s Republic is creating anxiety in Washington and concern in the Alberta government. The high price of crude oil has stimulated billions of dollars of new investment in Alberta’s tar sands which contain more than 1 trillion barrels of oil. Greg Melchin, Alberta’s energy minister, said that he was opposed to state-owned companies buying up the resource for processing in China, exporting the value from Canada.

Enbridge, a Canadian pipeline company, is in talks with Chinese companies over a $2.5 billion (£1.3 billion) pipeline that would move liquefied bitumen across the Rockies to Prince Rupert, a port on British Columbia’s Pacific Coast. Chinese investors, encouraged by the Government in Beijing, have pursued oil investments in Canada for the past year, most recently linked to bid talks with Husky, a big Canadian energy company.

The world’s leading oil companies are pumping money into bitumen mining operations in Northern Alberta. An investment of C$60 billion over the next decade in a resource that rivals that of Saudi Arabia will raise production to 3 million barrels per day.

However, Alberta is keen to keep its oil North American. “Albertans could lose the value of the hydrocarbon chain,” Mr Melchin said. “It may be in another country’s interest to take the raw resource.”

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