TransCanada's Energy East pipeline, primarily re-purposing an existing natural gas pipeline system that crosses Canada's southern zones, seems poised to make the troubled Keystone XL pipeline a distant memory. At 4600 kilometers, the route would allow tar sands crude from Alberta to reach refineries on Canada's east coast without needing to cross any of the large aquifers which made the Keystone XL project so troubling.
The project, characterized by an in-depth Bloomberg article as an "end run around Obama", details both the project's context in the present day and its historical roots.
"Thus was born Energy East, an improbable pipeline that its backers say has a high probability of being built. It will cost C$12 billion ($10.7 billion) and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer (2,858-mile) 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.
Its end point, a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply."
More below the fold.
Another recent development, as described by DK diarist Lake Superior, indicates the end of EU opposition to Canadian tar sands crude.
The US political fallout of this remains unclear, but it seems likely that campaign strategies of candidates on both sides of the aisle promoting Keystone XL's economic benefits will need to address this sea change very soon.
As detailed in a January 23 article in Roll Call:
The national support translates into interesting Senate politics, where 14 different races can (and likely will be) affected by the president’s decision whether to permit Keystone XL or not: open seats in Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska Montana, South Dakota, Michigan and West Virginia, combined with states where incumbent Democrats running for re-election have voted to support the pipeline in Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, North Carolina and Virginia.