This has been in the news time and time again. It is a political issue with a lot of money riding on it. How much money? That’s hard to tell. For starters, TransCanada Corporation is a major North American energy company based in Calgary, Alberta, developing and operating energy infrastructure in North America.
Oil sands are a mixture of sand, water, clay, and bitumen. Bitumen naturally occurs along the river banks and in the Athabasca River area. Bitumen is oil that is too heavy or thick to flow or be pumped, without being diluted or heated. At 11 degrees Celsius bitumen is as hard as a hockey puck. Canada’s oil sands are found in three deposits–the Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake areas in Alberta, and part of Saskatchewan. The greatest quantity is found in the Athabasca deposit. The oil sands are sometimes called tar sands.
TransCanada wants to build and operate the Keystone XL Pipeline, estimating the cost of building it to be $7.6 billion dollars. Once built, they will make their $7.6 billion back–and a lot more–by charging the companies extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands a “transport fee.” That is so the extracted heavy oil can be loaded onto ships in Louisiana and transported to markets around the world. Trucking their oil to Western Canada, to ship overseas, makes it more expensive and less competitive on the oil market.
Also hindering competitiveness is the fact that it costs more to extract and process this bitumen into useable oil. United States extraction costs are about $6 dollars per barrel, and Saudi extraction costs only a $1 a barrel. Tar sand oil costs between $33 and $40 dollars a barrel to extract!
However, the Athabasca oil sands, a.k.a. Alberta tar sands, are the largest known deposit of bitumen in the world, located near Ft. McMurray. Even though it is the least profitable oil, the dirtiest oil, and the most environmentally threatening oil, there is money to be made. This issue is about making money (as if oil companies were going broke.)
Republicans claim this is about job creation. Really? No, it’s about making money! Russ Girling, who is the current CEO of TransCanada, the company developing the pipeline, admitted that, when it is finally built and in operation, the pipeline will create less than 50 full-time, permanent jobs.
Republicans claim that this project will create thousands of jobs. True enough, but not the full truth. TransCanada estimates it will create 9000 temporary construction jobs and maybe 42,000 “indirect” jobs. These also will be temporary–such as selling sandwiches, etc., to construction workers.
Republicans also neglect to mention thatTransCanada bought its steel pipe from India, not the U. S.
The Sioux Nation is opposed to this pipeline running through their borders. Rosebud Sioux Tribal President Cyril L. Scott says his Nation has not been properly consulted. To allow the pipeline to pass through their sacred lands would violate the treaties signed in 1851 and again in 1868 at Ft. Laramie. Really? Since when would the U. S. Government break a treaty with the indigenous natives? This time the restless natives plan to drag the whole project to the United States Supreme Court.
Editor’s note from the Sunday, November 16, Huffington Post: “The President of South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux (Sicangu Lakota Oyate) Tribe has called the House of Representatives’ vote to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline an ‘act of war,’ the Summit County Citizen’s Voice reported on Saturday[, November 15, 2014]. ‘The House [of Representatives] has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands,’ President Cyril L. Scott said in a statement. “We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL.'”
Environmentalists and others object, because of the environmental destruction caused by the enormous piles of toxic talings that are a by product of mining the sand tars. They also point out that pipeline oil spills will be far more disastrous, poisonous to people and the environment, and much more difficult to clean up. They point to the numerous spills from the Alaskan Pipeline as evidence that spills will happen.
Oil shipped through the pipeline will not necessarily be refined in the U. S. nor sold to customers in the U. S. It will be refined where it can be done cheaply and sold to the highest bidder.
For those supporting the Keystone XL, it is about money. The lobbyists love it, politicians love it, and certain wealthy investors look forward to profiting handsomely from it.
What’s in it for the Sioux and the American people? Oil spills.