Obama Announces "No Keystone Pipeline"!

a reply to: Enochstask

No. It wouldn't. That oil was never going to be for US consumption. Few permanent jobs would have been created, and homes, land under private ownership or Native sovereignty would have been confiscated by the government under Eminent Domain.

a reply to: Kali74
Umm, yeah, that oil is being refined in the U.S. right now. Everyday, in fact. We unload, refine, and send it out @ Motiva every day.

a reply to: quercusrex


Stop trying to ruin the narrative with facts!

a reply to: Bluntone22

Lol! O.K. I'll quit. They won't listen anyway.

a reply to: quercusrex

Send it out to where? It was to be refined here and sold to other markets, not ours.

a reply to: quercusrex

The fact of the matter was this line would do nothing for us and we would STILL have oil spills.
This pipeline would not have solved what you are talking about, far from it. Would just add MORE oil going through our land that we wouldn't see any of. Pipelines might has less spills, but the risk of this one having an issue would still be there and it wouldn't even be our oil.

So ya, lets actually start using facts, then some will listen.

a reply to: Kali74

Motiva owns and operates three refineries – located within a 120 mile radius of each other - in Convent and Norco, Louisiana, and Port Arthur, Texas. The combined refining capacity of the three sites is approximately 1.1 million barrels per day. In addition to strong manufacturing assets, Motiva’s 34 operating refined product storage terminals are strategically located throughout the company’s geographic area and have an aggregate storage capacity of approximately 16.5 million barrels.

Motiva markets gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products in 26 states and the District of Columbia through a network of more than 8,200 Shell-branded service stations as well as unbranded wholesalers.

Fill up at a Shell station lately? Yep, like it or not some of that gas came from Canadian heavy crude. You can naysay it all you want but it's true.

Source

a reply to: Sremmos80 Your amount of pipeline ruptures vs. rail car releases is what? Just curious.

Fact... people will continue to fuel the oil industry for many years to come.

Fact... industry will continue to look for cheaper ways to provide energy

Fact... just as humanity transitioned from whale oil to petroleum, there will be another transition in our future.

Fact... regardless of how anyone feels about impacts to economies, people around the globe will demand less pollution of the world's air, soil and water.

Personally, I drive a car, have flown recently, collect my crapload of recyclables (plastics, etc.) to be disposed of in a (hopefully) intelligent manner and try to be a good stewart of my little piece of this planet.

I'm sure the Alberta Tar Sands will continue to mine product regardless of what happens to the Keystone project. There is an existing pipeline called 'West to East' which is being looked at as a possible way to get Alberta oil to tidewater. Wringing our hands over this announcement is meaningless (unless you work for TransCanada Pipelines).

The oil industry in Alberta is shedding jobs lately, but that province has experienced 'boom or bust' cycles for many years and better times are ahead. I'll not cry for Big Oil.

a reply to: quercusrex

Doesn't Motiva only refine Saudi crude? Also I never said we don't get any tar sands crude... but the KXL was going to bypass several refineries and go to refineries for foreign exporting. Were you slated to get crude from KXL?

a reply to: masqua
Amen! I should have written things as succinctly. Your post sums up what I have argued for years on this site. We all use oil and petroleum products hundreds of times daily. Stop being hypocrites and change what you use and how you use it. Until then I will continue to build and work in the refineries that you all hate but enjoy the products of.

I do the pipe in solar fields too, so I'm good with change.

a reply to: Kali74
Motiva is owned half by the Saudis and half by the Dutch (Shell). It takes in crude from the U.S. and Canada.

a reply to: quercusrex

You mean like the ones on this Enbridge pipeline
en.wikipedia.org...

Or maybe the meters that caught this leak before it caused damage?
www.cbc.ca...

Shall I go on or can we claim meters only work if someone actually watches them or if the loss is large enough to register
When you measure flow in millions of litres and a small leak can go unnoticed for weeks or months it nullifies the efficacy of such monitoring.

a reply to: Kukri

Four tank cars leaked an estimated 35,000 gallons of oil after a train hauling fuel from North Dakota derailed in rural northeastern Montana, authorities said.

The spill marked the latest in a series of wrecks across the U.S. and Canada that have highlighted the safety risks of moving crude by rail.

No one was reported injured in the accident Thursday night that triggered the evacuation of about a dozen homes and a camp for oil field workers, according to state and local officials. It comes after recent oil train crashes, including a 2013 derailment in Quebec that exploded and killed 47 people.

AP

Pipe is better!

a reply to: quercusrex

I have a question for you, since you seem to be knowledgeable on the subject of oil transportation:

Does the bitumen in railcars use a similar amount of dilbit as is used in pipelines?

This question has bothered me for as long as the pipelines/rail issue has been in the news.

originally posted by: masqua
a reply to: quercusrex

I have a question for you, since you seem to be knowledgeable on the subject of oil transportation:

Does the bitumen in railcars use a similar amount of dilbit as is used in pipelines?

This question has bothered me for as long as the pipelines/rail issue has been in the news.

The stuff in the railcars is compositionally identical to what goes through the pipelines because it is straight out of one of the pipelines. It would obviously be at atmospheric temperature after being loaded rather than maintaining the higher temps required by the pipeline to keep it flowing, but the substances are the same. The corrosiveness is somewhat of a misnomer. The sands aren't any more corrosive than any other petroleum product, but the gritty nature of the bitumen make them highly abrasive when flowing. Total quantity at risk for a spill is likely a bit higher with a pipeline, assuming catastrophic rupture, depending on the distance between shutoff valves which would dictate the volume potentially spilling.

a reply to: quercusrex

Of the upstream infrastructure — or the loading terminals up near the tar sands, the Oil Change International report explains:


At the time of writing there were 31 terminals in operation that load tar sands or heavy crude, with six of these expanding and an additional eight planned or under construction…

The first terminal designed to load unit trains with Canadian tar sands crude, the Canexus terminal in Bruderheim, northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, started operations in December 2013. It has a capacity of 70,000 bpd and loads tar sands bitumen from MEG’s Christina Lake SAGD project, among others.

Downstream, rail terminals are similarly adapting to handle shipments of tar sands crude. From the Runaway Train report:


Terminals designed to unload tar sands crude are currently concentrated in the Gulf Coast region, where the biggest concentration of heavy oil refining capacity is located…

The Gulf Coast terminals have about one million bpd of unloading capacity today, set to grow to over two million bpd in 2016. Some of this capacity is at refineries such as those operated by Valero in Port Arthur, Texas, and St. Charles, Louisiana. Valero has ordered 1,600 insulated and coiled tank cars specifically for hauling tar sands crude to its refineries.

Info

Ultimately, my whole point is that the oil is coming through and being refined regardless of the pipeline. It will get here one way or another.

a reply to: masqua Railbit is becoming more common, but most of the infrastructure is set up to receive dilbit

a reply to: quercusrex

Thanks for the search term railbit:

Railbit is a relatively new designation for crude, and is defined as bitumen that has been mixed with roughly 17 percent diluent. Moving railbit, rather than dilbit, saves tar sands shippers about half of the so-called “diluent penalty,” or the cost of adding the diluent to the mix.

I’m thinking about the Lac Megantic event and if there has been any changes to the product for rail transport. This answers my question perfectly.

ETA... yes, I know the crude that levelled downtown Lac Megantic was from the Bakken (sp?) field and that H2S was the likely culprit.

originally posted by: Enochstask
Here we go again! Anything the Kenyan Communist can do to hurt America he will do.

I'll bite.

Who is the Kenyan Communist, how is he related to this thread and how is he destroying America? I'll assume that you mean not supporting a pipeline will destroy us, but what else has this mystery person done to destroy America? Is Dr. Evil Real? Spectre? Hydra?

Sorry I misread "Hurt" for "Destroy". Now it's not so diabolical.