Approves Asia Supply Route, Ignores US Route
H/T Eric Worrall and Breitbart – Obama’s inability to make a decision on Keystone has finally yielded a result – Canada has made the decision for him.
Breitbart reports Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project – a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil to Asia.
The Canadian oil will still be burnt – in Asia, instead of America.
All the jobs and energy security which Canadian oil could have delivered to America, will instead be delivered to Asia.
Rather than purchasing crude from a friendly and allied neighbor, the United States will most likely need to continue its reliance upon hostile sources like Venezuela. Energy analysts had hoped that construction of Keystone could have replaced almost half of the current U.S. daily crude purchases from that volatile, anti-American dictatorship, depriving Venezuela of the resources it relies upon to stay in power and fund its Cuban allies.
You can’t say Canada didn’t give America a chance – they waited years for the American administration to come to their senses. But in the end, they couldn’t wait any longer, and have put the interests of Canadians first.
Below is a helpful timeline of Keystone events, courtesy of Al Jazeera.
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There was this interesting post at Zero Hedge not long ago:
“Meet The Man Who Killed Keystone”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/guest-post-meet-man-who-killed-keystone
“One man stands in her way. No, not President Obama, but the billionaire environmentalist Thomas Steyer. The leftwing Steyer undoubtedly is sincere in his green beliefs but sincerity on an issue is easier if you also stand to make a fortune from it.”
Is the “Enbridge Northern Gateway Project ” not the TransMountain expansion mentioned there? Just curious…
Oh!Bummer! for the LOSE!
Northern Gateway is just a bargaining chip. The wacky-west-coast-greens will be able to see the Keystone deal as a small victory (if the Enbridge thing doesn’t happen), and the threat of the Enbridge pipeline should help convince Americans that there is no benefit to saying ‘no’ to Keystone.
Haha.. love it!
Wouldn’t surprise me if Tony Abbott suggested it in passing. In any case, Canada jot got fed up with Obama’s head up his own unscientific chocolate starfish.
What would you expect from the Keystone President? He had to f..k this one up. America is next.
From what I can gather from the original source, the US Keystone pipeline is still a very real possibility, so I think this post is misleading (especially if you consider the economic competiveness of each proposal). I remember a similar tactic used by mining companies in Australia, saying that if taxes were too high, they’d move to Canada. Of course, if you actually look at the numbers, the Canadian option was a drop in the ocean compared to reality (about 10 fold in production). Same case here probably.
XL Door still wide open for Obama….or the next president.
speaking of Asia, read this and weep:
29 June: UK Daily Mail: David Rose: BBC spends £500k to ask 33,000 Asians 5,000 miles from UK what they think of climate change: Corporation savaged for ‘astonishing’ campaign survey on global warming
BBC under fire after spending hundreds of thousands on survey in Asia
Taxpayers’ money used to ask 33,000 people their views on climate change
More than £500,000 spent by little-known BBC Media Action for survey
It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.
Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development…
The report ends with advice, apparently written for climate activists: ‘Do not talk about scientific or technical abstractions. Talk about the problems they face in their daily lives… Speak in language that makes sense to people in terms of how they experience climate change.’…
BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673654/BBC-spends-500k-ask-33-000-Asians-5-000-miles-UK-think-climate-change-Corporation-savaged-astonishing-campaign-survey-global-warming.html
Does this increase the risks of the US invading any oil-rich dictatorships before 2016??
pat says:
June 29, 2014 at 1:28 am
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O/T but Sunday morning is always a good time for some BBC bashing.
I do not understand why the ‘forced’ payment of the licence fee is not a human rights issue. Surely it is a basic human right to be able to watch TV (and also thereby be informed as to what is going on in the world) without being forced to donate to a particular political sect (Champagne drinking Leftwing/Liberal/Guardianista sect) which may hold and espouse polictical views and dogma at odds, or even offensive, to the individual.
The BBC should be scrambled and if people want to watch it, they pay a licence fee for the decoding card. All other free to air channels will be available for those who do not wish to pay the BBC subscription which supports the left wing/liberal/guardianista view of the world and seeks to indoctrinate people into their way of thinking.
I bet Russia is not happy about this.
Hmmm.. this could be a debilitating problem for our countries future. Only time will tell if this procrastination from Obama will doom us or help us.
I expect that approval for Keystone might be given after next years elections. I would be very surprised if there is a shovel in the ground on Gateway before then. There are times when I wish our Government would copy India, and look at all the foreign money that is being pumped into our country to restrict development, with an eye of pursuing criminal charges.
The west/east pipeline will likely be in operation long before that.
In the seventies we built a pipeline to carry oil-sand oil to the east coast. When OPEC crashed the prices, the flow was reversed and it was used to carry cheaper mid-east oil from tankers to the west. Approval has been given for it to reverse flow once again and after a certain amount of refurbishment, to start carrying oil to the east again.
Many Canadian’s wish they’d build a proper refinery in Alberta itself, instead of just shipping our raw natural resources out of the country to have value added via refining. Problem is, they’d still be stuck shipping all those finished products to markets thousands of miles away.
Unbelievable stupidity of Obama. Is he really intent on destroying the USA?
Not so fast:
1. Keystone XL is still a desired option and is ready to begin if the Americans make up their mind. The Northern Gateway is just a separate means of selling oil to other customers. The approval of Northern Gateway does not preclude Keystone XL.
2. If the Liberal Party of Canada form the next government in next years federal election, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has promised to scrap the Northern Gateway Pipeline….although he then said that he approved of selling oil to Asia, but didn’t say how it was to get there. Was Justin playing politics to gain the support of the voters that opposed Northern Gateway or was he being his usual obtuse self?
One can expect that millions of dollars from Middle Eastern and Russian official sources will continue to be invested in the propaganda of various Environmental groups (such as the The Tides Foundation) that oppose the Oil Sands, Northern Gateway and Keystone XL.
Has there been an article or two posted here about the foreign investment in the Environmental lobby to undermine the economies of North America?
I would bet that, if any pipeline is built at all, it will be Keystone.
Feeling better yet McKibben et al.? These bitumens will be burned. What does it matter to the Canadians if a chunk of it gets burned on the way to Asia et al.?
The stupid, it hurts……………
Mike McMillan says:
June 29, 2014 at 12:21 am
“You take a guy from Indonesia with no experience, no accomplishments, and average intelligence and put him in the White House, then you expect leadership?
Time to give Biden a chance.”
———————————————————————————————————————-
It has been history that President’s always tote along a VP that appears to be worse then themselves, a little extra insurance against opponents who might consider removing a sitting President (one way or the other). However, in this case perhaps you are right.
A few commenters have suggested the Canadian decision is not the end of Keystone. I maintain it very likely is – my evidence is the following quote from the original source referenced by Breitbart:-
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/canada-oks-oil-pipeline-pacific-coast
… Meanwhile, China’s growing economy is hungry for Canadian oil. Chinese state-owned companies have invested more than $40 billion in Canadian energy in the past few years.
“They are watching this very, very closely,” said Wenran Jiang, an energy expert and special adviser to Alberta’s Department of Energy.
“They told us as recently as a couple of weeks ago that further investment will depend on whether there will be at least opportunities to ship some of this crude to China. Currently all of their investment and production goes into the U.S. They are currently living with that,” he said. …
If this expert opinion is correct, the Canadian decision must be seen in the context of being part of a larger commitment to allow Chinese companies more ownership and control over Canadian oilfields.
Whoever owns the oilfields controls where the oil goes, and so far, China is the key investor. If Keystone had been built, America might have had more incentive to invest, but once the Enbridge project is completed, the Chinese owners of the Canadian oilfields will have no reason to ship oil to America, regardless of whether a Keystone pipeline is eventually constructed – China will consume all the oil Canada can produce, and pay top dollar for it.
There might still be a window of opportunity for America to get in on the action, but that window is closing fast.
Let the man finish his job. If you have food stamps the one and only logical step forward are gas stamps.
Eric, it’s really not that simple. The plan always was for Keystone AND the Gateway to be built. We have a LOT of petroleum in Alberta – something like 3.5 to 4 Trillion barrels. The current estimate of oil recoverable economically using today’s tech is 180 billion barrels, which is a 4900 YEAR supply at current extraction, 500 year at the planned rate.
Pretty surprising numbers for the “peak oil” crowd, many that I talk to simply can’t wrap their heads around the numbers and think they’re somehow fabricated. The numbers are real.
Keystone or it’s successor WILL eventually be built, the moment the democrats are kicked to the curb.
China’s 40 billion, while a gigantic number, is still just the proverbial drop in the ocean compared to the real money going into the Sands. There are a lot of people here complaining that China is getting too big a piece of the action, but I hardly think so.
Also, Alberta is currently going through somewhat of a government crisis, when it was revealed that the currently In-Power “Progressive Conservatives” have completely ignored the second word and are calling themselves the first. We recently hounded our Premier right out of office and they already had one incident of completely screwing up the oil industry by demanding “fair share” on royalties.
“depriving Venezuela of the resources it relies upon to stay in power and fund its Cuban allies”
Well not really. The oil marketplace is global and obviously Asia wants to buy more oil. If Keystone had gone to the US then the US would buy more Canadian oil and less Venezuelan oil while Asia would have bought more Venezuelan oil and less Canadian. Without Keystone the US buys more Venezuelan oil and less Canadian while Asia buys more Canadian and less Venezuelan. Either way both Canadian and Venezuela sell about the same amount of oil.
Now I know it is not quite that simple. Shipping costs and trade agreements and tariffs and such change the simple economic model I described. So with Keystone Venezuela may have made less profit and the US may have paid less for the oil from Canada versus oil from Venezuela. But with or without Keystone I don’t believe Venezuela would see a significant change in their oil revenue.
CodeTech
Eric, it’s really not that simple. The plan always was for Keystone AND the Gateway to be built. … Keystone or it’s successor WILL eventually be built, the moment the democrats are kicked to the curb. …
Why? Imagine Gateway is complete, and Canada is shipping all the oil it can to China. The only economic incentive to build keystone would be if the Chinese market was saturated – if America was prepared to pay so much more for oil than China was already paying, it made economic sense to do so.
Its much easier to expand the capacity of an existing pipeline, than to build a new one.
Obama seems to go out of his way to destroy the US economy…
This pipeline would have helped keep energy prices down and the pipeline would have created many thousands of jobs..
I can’t believe America elected Obama Bin Lyin’…TWICE!!
If the latest new record Ice Anomaly (2.07 million sq km, 27 June) in the SH is any indication of things to come; perhaps freezing in the dark in Wash D C or Chicago will be a common annual event. Colder temperatures will require more energy and support higher prices.
Actually Canada hasn’t pulled the plug because Keystone is a private project, any government involvement has to do with approvals which have been done. The private company might abandon it but I doubt that.
Gateway has also been approved by the federal government but there is the need to get First Nations on side. Opponents think that First Nations will stay on side with them but once real money is on the table First nations will become supporters of Gateway