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Bloomberg reports that Canadians have come up with an all-Canadian route to get oil-sands crude from Alberta to a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick that will give Canada access, via supertanker, to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. The pipeline, built by Energy East, will cost $10.7 billion and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. "It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude," writes Bloomberg. "And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it." So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal. “With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” says Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”
The pipeline will also prove a blow to environmentalists who have made central to the anti-Keystone arguments the concept that if Keystone can be stopped, most of that polluting heavy crude will stay in the ground. With 168 billion proven barrels of oil, though, Canada’s oil sands represent the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and that oil is likely to find its way to shore one way or another. “It’s always been clear that denying it or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” says Michael Levi. What Energy East means for the Keystone XL pipeline remains to be seen. “Maybe this will be a wake up call to President Obama and U.S. policymakers to say ‘Hmmm we’re going to get shut out of not just the energy, but all those jobs that are going to go into building that pipeline. Now they are all going to go into Canada," says Aaron Task. “This is all about ‘You snooze, you lose.’”
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @06:23PM
A friend of mine used to work on a natural gas pipeline. There were about 15-20 people at each pumping station of which there are hundreds. Plus the people who maintained the pipes driving around sampling and fixing things (these are not put in the ground and forget it lines). I dont think you realize the scale these pumps are. They are large building size. They alternate them so while one set is being rebuilt the others are running. As NG and oil are both corrosive.
Basically the whole idea with keystone not being built was to save the Canadian wilderness. Apparently the companies are going to do it anyway and just put it into tankers. That is not as cost effective. But it does give them the option to sell the crude to other countries instead of being locked into the Americans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:06PM
There are 11 pump houses on the 800 mile trans alaska pipeline. So your "hundreds" of pump houses line is full of shit. What pipeline did you work on, put your money where your mouth is.
There is no reason to risk things like the sand hills for that few jobs. Fuck Keystone, and fuck liars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:17PM
and fuck liars
http://www.eia.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngpipeline/compressorMap.html [eia.gov]
Yep only 10 compressor stations in the WHOLE of the US. I am such a 'liar'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:23PM
Those are compressor stations for natural gas. You said pump stations for crude. So yeah, liar it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:24PM
10 stations on one pipeline.
Keystone would be one pipeline.
How many compressor stations does a heavy oil pipeline need versus an NG pipeline?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:34PM
To answer my own question it looks like 27 pump stations in the US if keystone XL is built. [pipelineandgasjournal.com]
The trans-alaska pump stations employ between 10 and 25 people each [rigzone.com] so it is reasonable to assume the same or less for keystone.
It is weird that they've already built 23 of them for keystone. I wonder if they have contingency plans to use them for something else?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:49PM
It is weird that they've already built 23 of them for keystone. I wonder if they have contingency plans to use them for something else?
They're probably a low cost component (if the "pump station" doesn't have any pipe or pumps!). Now the Keystone pipeline (or at least the segment of it that has the pump stations) is officially under construction which might have some rhetorical advantage in the negotiations over permits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @07:36PM
Basically the whole idea with keystone not being built was to save the Canadian wilderness.
No, that's just one of the ideas. Another one of the ideas is to simply raise the costs of getting the oil out of the ground so it is less economically attractive to burn it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @08:34PM
With the environment, obviously as long as it is the Canadian environment that might get jacked then it is OK because the Canadian wilderness doesn't count to the environmentalists /sarc but seriously there will be a lot less environmental complaining about this pipeline solely because it is in Canada.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15 2014, @09:47PM
> Screwing with prices to favor a competing business or commodity is a lose-lose situation with FAIL all over it.
Since that's what we've been doing for oil since practically day one, the ship has sailed on that argument regardless if it is or is not just something you pulled out of your ass.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:45AM
> All that happens is I have less money at the end of the day.
Will that make you consider using other ways to get the same result? (better car, better house insulation...).
Making a smarter choice because you were cattle-prodded into it, might actually save you money in the long run. And it will help "democracies" reduce their needs to pander to oil autocrats, saving another lot of dough (that deficit thing is still ongoing, isn't it?)
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:04AM
I'm no expert on these things, but how does this lock them into the Americans? Oil operates on a global market. One of the misconceptions you hear a lot is how, for instance, if the US opened up all of Alaska for oil production, all that extra Alaskan oil would go to the US and every barrel that comes out of the ground is a barrel that doesn't need to come from Saudi Arabia. But it doesn't work that way; that extra Alaskan oil would go on the world market, which would make the global pot a little bit bigger and thus reduce the cost of oil a little bit, but it isn't this 1-for-1 deal that gets beat about politically.