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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 16 2014, @03:02AM
That's how I see anything oil related anymore. Solar and wind are very close to grid parity now and have been dropping like a rock for the past 10 years. Electric cars are getting close to the tipping point as well. The end is nigh for Big Oil.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Entropy on Thursday October 16 2014, @12:48PM
Solar payback(breakeven) is when I last calculated it(1-2 years ago) is about 15-years. The warranty on the products was about 25-years. That does not calculate for lesser yield as time goes on. The guy started talking about the "green" benefits to which i replied sorry--The ROI sucks.
We keep hearing about next generation 1/10th the cost solar panels, but they never seem to get here. The only benefit I've actually seen are micro-inverters which are really a step up from where we were ~10 years ago. 10 years ago the payback(breakeven) was around the 25-30 year mark, with the same 25 year warranty.
We were idiots to delay the keystone pipeline. I'd like some cheaper oil and oil not from the middle east..now someone else gets that oil...thanks.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Nygmus on Thursday October 16 2014, @07:01PM
I'd like to see how oil stacks up against solar/wind in the absence of the massive subsidies that the oil industry receives, and when forced to account for the serious negative externalities associated with oil use.
The equation would be much, much less favorable for oil's costs if that were the case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 16 2014, @08:13PM
Not grid parity, but if you're willing to pay double, or triple, in good places, at the right time of day, wind and solar will be good enough to turn off the coal power plant for several hours per day.
However, fossil fuels can easily do things that wind and solar are bad at. If it gets very cold only a few times a year, and you need a powerful blast of heat then, renewables can't beat the low cost storage of coal or oil. If you need a compact energy source for air travel, or a muscle car, you need fossil fuels. If you want to make plastics, you need oil.
So, wind and solar will let us use less fossil fuel, but we will still need lots of fossil fuel. I think fossil fuels are undervalued, and should be taxed to their true value, to maximize efficient use.