Keystone Pipeline: An oil rush up north

The Washington Post ^ | Saturday, June 30, 2012 | Steven Mufson

[MinorityRepublican]

Repairman Shawn Flett stood 30 feet above the ground on the deck of a truck the size of a house. He had just waved it gingerly into the repair shop as if guiding an airplane into a hangar.

This is a beast of a machine, with 14-foot tires and weighing in at more than a million pounds. The truck burns 50 gallons of diesel an hour as it rumbles with 400-ton loads across the giant open-pit mines that have transformed a swath of Alberta’s vast northern forest into unsightly but lucrative sources of oil.

“It handles like a Cadillac,” Flett joked.

Every day, fleets of these Brobdingnagian trucks are digging up countless tons of Alberta’s oil sands — a black, gooey mixture of sand, oil and water that lies just below the Canadian province’s boreal forest, an immense region thick with jack pines, spruce, aspen and tamarack trees and fed by wetlands that cover most of the area.

The viscous petroleum, or bitumen, is so common that, in some places, it oozes out along the banks of the Athabasca River and was used by Native Americans to seal canoes. Canada’s economically recoverable oil sands are estimated to be about 170 billion barrels, reserves second in size only to Saudi Arabia.

[CedarDave]

Why such an uproar over the Keystone pipeline? The environmentalists object to the oil sands project because it takes more energy to recover the oil than conventional drilling thereby releasing more CO2 to the atmosphere (estimated 14 to 20 percent more by the Congressional Research Service), more energy to process it than imports, and because it damages the environment (trees cut and swamplands drained which previously stored CO2).

The money quote:

That’s why foes of the Keystone XL have turned the pipeline, just one of many built or expanded every year, into a test of President Obama’s commitment to slowing climate change.

[Former Proud Canadian]

The key to prosperity and growth is cheap, abundant energy in all forms. Every industrial and agricultural activity requires an energy input. Every product needs energy to ship it to market. The internet runs on energy.

North America has a huge comparative advantage in the energy sector. It's time we started to employ it.

[deks]

Link to picture
Oil sands in Alberta, Canada. The wheels on the yellow truck on the right are 14 feet tall...

Photo : Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

Title of article in the Washington Post (they don't seem to like being linked, so this may or may not work)...

Keystone XL pipeline expansion driven by oil-rich tar sands in Alberta

[deks]

Keystone XL pipeline primer, with map and diagrams...

http://www.washingtonpost.com//wp-srv/special/business/keystone-xl-pipeline-primer/

[1010RD]

Nope, here's the money quote: “The projects themselves are enormous and ugly — but even uglier is the freight of carbon they contain,” said Bill McKibben, a Middlebury College professor who has been a leading voice against the pipeline. “That’s the second-largest pool of carbon on Earth. . . . No one who is serious about fighting climate change can want to see that oil out of the ground and into the air.”

"Enormous", "ugly", carbon and "climate change" - proof that the speaker isn't rational. These are nonsense words, wholly subjective and typical of every liberal thinker. Luckily he's a college professor so he must be smart.

[1010RD]

Brobdingnagian trucks = English Major

They’re all taught to use big words so as to rationalize their small salaries and expensive big name degrees. I wonder if he’s paid off his student loans yet?