patrick.net

A good day for "Hydrocabron/Ebola":
.................

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.

In this period of national gloom comes an idea -- a crazy-sounding notion, or maybe, actually, an epiphany. 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.

Instead, go east, all the way to the Atlantic.

...
Its end point, a refinery in the blue-collar city of 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.

As well, Vladimir Putin's provocations in Ukraine are spurring interest in that oil from Europe and, strange as it seems, Saint John provides among the fastest shipping times to India of any oil port in North America. Indian companies, having already sampled this crude, are interested in more. That means oil-sands production for the first time would trade in more than dribs and drabs on the international markets. With the U.S. virtually its only buyer, the captive Canadians are subject to price discounts of as much as $43 a barrel that cost Canada $20 billion a year.

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.
....
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/keystone-darned-canada-finds-surprise-154936872.html

#politics