Canada is poised to lose energy companies as the industry faces lower and more volatile oil prices along with tougher climate and regulatory policies, billionaire investor Murray Edwards warned at a conference hosted by Bennett Jones LLP in Alberta, Bloomberg reports.

The chairman of the nation’s largest heavy-oil producer, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., likened the oil industry to a horse race in which western Canadian producers are struggling to compete with developers of light crude from U.S. shale.

Canada is one of the most expensive places to extract crude, yet some of its largest energy companies publicly embraced the province’s new climate policy even if it means that only oil-sands projects with the lowest carbon footprint get developed in the future, Edwards said.