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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: 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.