Go East, Canadian Oil

(H/T Kel of Red Fox Blogger)

For six years, President Obama has been delaying giving his approval for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian crude oil from oil-sands in the province of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf coast in Texas.  From Bloomberg:

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few years back, America desperately wanted that oil.

Then one day the politics get sticky. In Nebraska, farmers don’t want the pipeline running through their fields or over their water source. U.S. environmentalists invoke global warming in protesting the project. President Barack Obama keeps siding with them, delaying and delaying approval. From the Canadian perspective, Keystone has become a tractor mired in an interminably muddy field.

Our neighbors to the north have considered an alternative pipeline to their west coast, but it too had some problems, in this case of an internal nature.  Back to Bloomberg:

How about an all-Canadian route to liberate that oil sands crude from Alberta’s isolation and America’s fickleness? Canada’s own environmental and aboriginal politics are holding up a shorter and cheaper pipeline to the Pacific that would supply a shipping portal to oil-thirsty Asia.

The latest proposed solution?  Build a pipeline from Alberta eastward to New Brunswick, where there are refineries in the area of St. John.  The city is on the Bay of Fundy, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean.  Oil piped into New Brunswick could then be shipped to any place equipped to receive oil tankers.  One other positive consideration, again from 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.

Read the full story.