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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 30 2016, @09:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the burn-the-dinosaurs dept.

The CBC Reports:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet colleagues signed off on two major pipelines today, projects that will pump nearly a million more barrels of oil a day from Alberta's oilsands to global markets, if they are constructed.

Ottawa gave the green light to Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline and Enbridge's Line 3, while it rejected Northern Gateway.

Trudeau also announced that the government would ban crude oil tankers along B.C.'s North Coast, promising legislation in the new year to implement a moratorium.

[...] The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency estimates that the new capacity will result in roughly 13.5 to 17 megatonnes of additional upstream greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Kinder-Morgan's Trans Mountain project is an expansion of an existing pipeline that runs between Edmonton, Alberta, and Burnaby (part of Greater Vancouver), British Columbia. The expansion will nearly triple the amount of product that can be shipped to just under 900,000 barrels/day.

Line 3 is a 1,660km pipeline that runs between Hardisty, Alberta and Superior, Wisconsin. The proposal by Enbridge is to replace the 34" pipeline with a 36" pipeline. Enbridge expects 760,000 barrels/day of light, medium and heavy crude to flow through the upgraded pipeline


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday December 01 2016, @12:24AM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday December 01 2016, @12:24AM (#435213)

    I was talking purely from a price-to-market standpoint, without even touching on the emissions. Tar sands are costly at every stage of their processing (and later, cleanup), and require a sustained high barrel price to be viable compared to already-costly fracking, let alone the rest.
    Obviously, others have made the math and decided that it was worth a few billions, but the question remains of how much Alberta cashes in compared to the other actors in the market.

    Like many other giant dirty endeavors before it, the question is always whether the future cleanup/retraining costs will be properly deducted, safely invested and available when the operations eventually cease. The list of places where the immediate profit-taking was maximized, and someone else got left with the mess, is a huge and ever-expanding one (especially in the US).

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  • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday December 01 2016, @04:10PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday December 01 2016, @04:10PM (#435489)

    Tar sands are costly at every stage of their processing (and later, cleanup), and require a sustained high barrel price to be viable compared to already-costly fracking, let alone the rest

    You'd think that with all the other facilities already built to process/cleanup tar sands, that they might as well just build the refineries there as well.

    That said, I've read that it's not cost effective to refine in Canada vs ship/pipe the crude to China or the Gulf of Mexico.

    Then again, they say the same thing about assembling iPhones in the USA vs cheap labour in China, but Trump keeps talking about making Apple do exactly that, so what the heck do experts know.

  • (Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:22PM

    by Snow (1601) on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:22PM (#435732) Journal

    I agree. Speaking from a purely logical (energy in : energy out) standpoint, it would make more sense to use conventional oil reserves. It's clear that there is more oil available than could be burned without completely screwing up the atmosphere, so it would make sense to use the oil that gives the biggest energy return on investment. It's a tragedy of the commons type of problem.

    As for who gets to pay for the final cleanup once it's no longer profitable... The answer, unfortunately, is almost always the taxpayer.