BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The Canadian company behind the long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline will seek U.S. government approval for another pipeline — this one going north.
Industry officials in North Dakota say the proposed Upland Pipeline could reduce reliance on the railroads to ship crude following recent concerns about safety.
TransCanada Corp.’s proposed $600 million Upland Pipeline would begin near the northwestern North Dakota oil hub of Williston and go north into Canada about 200 miles. At peak operation it would transport up to 300,000 barrels of oil daily, connecting with other pipelines including the Energy East pipeline across Canada.
“We expect Upland and Energy East to play a key role in providing sufficient pipeline capacity to improve supply security for eastern Canadian and U.S. refiners, and reduce the need for foreign imports,” TransCanada said in a statement.
The company last year sought commitments from shippers and said in its quarterly earnings report last Friday that the effort was successful. TransCanada hopes to have the Upland Pipeline operating in 2018, pending approval from the U.S. State Department, North Dakota’s Public Service Commission and Canada’s National Energy Board. The company plans to submit an application to the State Department in the second quarter of this year.
TransCanada has been trying for years to get U.S. approval for the 1,179-mile Keystone XL, which would connect Canada’s tar sands to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast but has sparked environmental objections. Congress last week approved construction but President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the measure.
TransCanada spokesman Davis Sheremata on Thursday said the company can’t speculate on whether it might run into similar problems with Upland. Company President and CEO Russ Girling last week told analysts and reporters that he hopes the drawn-out Keystone XL process is “an anomaly.”
“Obviously, the market isn’t waiting for the regulators to catch up with their decisions — they’re moving the oilnow,” he said.
North Dakota Petroleum Council President Ron Ness on Thursday called the Upland proposal a needed project that would move the state’s crude to “great markets” in eastern Canada and the northeastern U.S.
North Dakota, the nation’s No. 2 oil state behind Texas, is producing about 1.2 million barrels of crude daily. Several pipeline projects are proposed to move the oil, 80 percent of which now is being hauled by rail, according to North Dakota Pipeline Authority Director Justin Kringstad.
The Keystone XL would move 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada south, as well as about 100,000 barrels of domestic oil daily from North Dakota’s Bakken region. With Upland, a total of about 1 million barrels of oil could be moved by pipelines from North Dakota to markets across the U.S., Ness and Kringstad said.
That would help displace rail shipments of North Dakota oil. Trains hauling crude from the state’s rich oil fields have been involved in major accidents in Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Alabama, as well as in Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.
“Producers want to put oil on pipelines to get it to these key markets,” said Ness, whose group represents more than 500 companies working in western North Dakota. “We’ve just got to get them permitted.”
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The real intent of the KXL is to consolidate all North American Oil under US control, thus gaining far greater control over the global oil market. The US wants Canadian and Mexican oil under its control, in effect making both of those nations puppet states of the US with regard to their mineral resources. Tar Sands oil is right now crossing from Canada into the US through several other pipelines, PLUS the US is shipping light sweet crude INTO Canada for the specific purpose of mixing it with Tar Sands oil to allow it to flow better in EXISTING PIPLELINES INTO THE US! There is extra capacity in those pipelines. KXL is not necessary at all, but it serves a purpose in rallying Republicans against the Bad Obama who cares more about the planet than he does about KXL. Ask any member of Congress if they’re aware of extra existing spare capacity in nearly every other pipeline coming from Canada into the US. Ask any member of Congress if they’re aware that the US is exporting light sweet crude into Canada in order to enable the flow of the worst oil on the planet back into the US. Tar Sands oil is absolutely one of the worst forms of energy on the planet. But, this just illustrates that nearly all of the easy sweet crude is all gone, and new oil fields are drying up, and new sources are dwindling every year. Humans are now literally scraping the bottom of the barrel in our demand for oil, and extracting what’s left is getting more and more expensive all the time. At current oil prices, drilling new oil wells is a financial loss. Banks won’t lend money to oil drillers when they, too, stand to lose money on that loan. The KXL is all about putting control of the world energy market into the hands of the US, crippling Russia and most of the Middle East in the process. THAT is its only purpose.
There is no need for Obama to veto any bill from Congress on the Keystone. They have no say in the matter to begin with.
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Kock brothers aside, few in the Western Hemisphere will buy Alberta sludge.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/keystone_xl_cold_war_20_and_the_gop_vision_for_2016_20150213
"It’s a ritual long familiar to observers of American politics: presidential hopefuls with limited international experience travel to foreign lands and deliver speeches designed to showcase their grasp of foreign affairs. Typically, such escapades involve trips to major European capitals or active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, however, has broken this mold. Before his recent jaunt to London and into the thickets of American vaccination politics, he chose two surprising destinations for his first trips abroad as a potential Republican candidate. No, not Kabul or Baghdad or even Paris, but Mexico City and Alberta, Canada. And rather than launch into discussions of immigration, terrorism, or the other usual Republican foreign policy topics, he focused on his own top priority: integrating Canada and Mexico into a U.S.-led “North American energy renaissance.”
By accelerating the exploitation of fossil fuels across the continent, reducing governmental oversight of drilling operations in all three countries, and building more cross-border pipelines like the Keystone XL, Christie explained, all three countries would be guaranteed dramatic economic growth. “In North America, we have resources waiting to be tapped,” he assured business leaders in Mexico City. “What is required is the vision to maximize our growth, the political will to unlock our potential, and the understanding that working together on strategic priorities… is the path to a better life.”
At first glance, Christie’s blueprint for his North American energy renaissance seems to be a familiar enough amalgam of common Republican tropes: support for that Keystone XL pipeline slated to bring Canadian tar sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, along with unbridled energy production everywhere; opposition to excessive governmental regulation; free trade… well, you know the mantra. But don’t be fooled. Something far grander—and more sinister—is being proposed. It’s nothing less than a plan to convert Canada and Mexico into energy colonies of the United States, while creating a North American power bloc capable of aggressively taking on Russia, China, and other foreign challengers.
This outlook—call it North Americanism—is hardly unique to Christie. It pervades the thinking of top Republican leaders and puts their otherwise almost inexplicably ardent support of Keystone XL in a new light. As most analysts now concede, that pipeline will do little to generate long-term jobs or promote U.S. energy independence. (Much of the tar sands oil it’s designed to carry will be refined in the U.S., but exported elsewhere). In fact, with oil prices plunging globally, it looks ever more like a white elephant of a project, yet it remains the Republican majority’s top legislative priority. The reason: it is the concrete manifestation of Christie-style North American energy integration, and for that reason is considered sacred by Republican proponents of North Americanism. “This is not about sending ‘your oil’ across ‘our land,’” Christie insisted in Calgary. “It’s about maximizing the benefits of North America’s natural resources for everybody.”
While North American energy integration may, in part, appeal to Republicans for the way it would enrich major U.S. oil companies, pipeline firms, and some energy-industry workers—the “everybody” in Christie’s remarks—its real allure lies in the way they believe it will buttress the more hawkish and militarized foreign policy that so many in the GOP now favor. By boosting fossil fuel production in North America, Keystone’s backers claim, the U.S. will be less dependent on imports from the Middle East and so in a stronger position to combat Russia, Iran, ISIS, and other foreign challengers.
Authorization for Keystone XL and related energy infrastructure is important “not just for economic development, not just for jobs and growth,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared in January, “but also for the enormous geopolitical advantages that it will present to the United States [by strengthening] our hands against those who would be enemies of America.”
Brace yourself. This combination of fossil fuel optimization and North American solidarity against a potentially hostile world is destined to become the core of the Republican economic and national security platforms in the 2016 presidential election. It will similarly govern action in Congress over the next two years. So, if you want to understand the dynamics of contemporary American politics, it’s crucial to grasp the new Republican vision of an energy-saturated North America.
Exxon’s Neo-Imperial Vision
Republican-style North Americanism is, in fact, an amalgam of two intersecting urges. The first of them involves a quest by U.S.-based giant oil companies to gain greater access to the oil and natural gas reserves of Canada and Mexico; the second, a drive by neoconservatives and national security hawks in Washington to rev up Cold War 2.0, while stepping up combat with both Iran and the Islamic State.
Let’s start with the altered world energy order once dominated by privately owned giants like BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil—a.k.a. the international oil companies, or IOCs. For most of the twentieth century, these companies controlled a majority of the world’s oil and gas reserves and so almost completely dominated the global trade in hydrocarbons. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, many of their overseas assets were systematically appropriated by governments in oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Venezuela, and placed under the control of state-owned, national oil companies, or NOCs. In response, the IOCs sought to increase their production from reserves in Canada and the U.S., as well as in Mexico, which has its own state-owned oil company but was facing declining output. This led those big companies to believe that, in the long run, Mexico would be forced to open its doors to greater foreign involvement."
Follow the link. There’s more. Much more.