This is an opinion piece in the NY Post. She is right. The US and Canada can remove Putin's trump card he holds against Europe.


By Diane Francis

Putin’s Doctrine is underpinned by Russia’s oil and natural-gas industry, which provides 70 percent of the country’s export income and 52 percent of its governments revenues. Moscow now controls half the energy market in Europe and is able to adjust prices to punish or reward countries and to keep others quiet.

This strategy has made Russia, with an economy the size of California’s, wealthier than ever but also exceedingly vulnerable. Russia is a petro-economy and little else.

Since Ukraine’s crisis, sanctions have been imposed and its stock market and currency have tanked. But a geopolitical and energy policy shift is needed to stop Putin in his tracks, and only the United States and Canada can flex enough energy muscle to impede the Russian energy juggernaut.

Together, the US and Canada have more oil and natural-gas reserves than Russia or the Middle East.

Obama has been dragging his feet on the pipeline, but now might be the right time to rethink his position.Photo: Reuters
Modal Trigger

The Keystone pipeline would add enough barrels a day into the US oil market to replace imports from Russian ally Venezuela.Photo: Reuters

Canada is the only supplier of natural gas and largest supplier of oil to the United States, at 2.5 million barrels a day. The US is nearly self-sufficient in natural gas, thanks to shale deposits, and in 2013 became the world’s second-biggest oil producer at more than 10.3 million barrels a day.

But Americans consume 19.4 million daily and, despite gains in oil production from shale, cannot become self-sufficient in oil until 2035, with 4 million barrels a day from the oil sands, according to the International Energy Agency.

Clearly, the two must gear up for battle by deploying oil and natural-gas weaponry. The most immediate retaliatory blow would be the approval of Keystone XL from Canada. This oil pipeline would add 830,000 barrels a day into the US oil market, more than enough to replace the 755,000 barrels a day of oil imports from Russia’s western hemispheric ally Venezuela.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/29/the-keyston...-on-putin/

Add fracking and the LNG terminals.

I don't understand why we have not started building this pipeline. I get we need to do an environmental study. But one was conducted and found not to be harmful. So what the hell is the hold up?

Some people think carbon is a dirty word, and want us off fossil fuels at all costs.

Seems I've heard an idea along those lines before.

http://csnbbs.com/thread-682426.html

(03-30-2014 08:42 AM)hawghiggs Wrote:  I don't understand why we have not started building this pipeline. I get we need to do an environmental study. But one was conducted and found not to be harmful. So what the hell is the hold up?

Tom Steyer.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/to...03617.html

How? The issue is natural gas for Europe. LGN is still in its infancy.

In my opinion we need to work with Europe to generate their natural gas, assuming they actually have the resource.

(03-30-2014 08:42 AM)hawghiggs Wrote:  I don't understand why we have not started building this pipeline. I get we need to do an environmental study. But one was conducted and found not to be harmful. So what the hell is the hold up?

Obama & Co. are beholding to the environmental loons. For some reason those loons think that stopping the pipeline will save the planet but all that's really happening is a pipeline gets built in another country and they benefit from it. The loons don't seem to care about environmental problems in other countries as if those are different planets. I also wonder how many of the environmental wackos would be directly impacted if something with Keystone went wrong - probably none of them because most of them probably live no where near it. So if they're true intention is to save the planet then why don't they hit up the stuff that would really make a difference, like busting the balls of China, India, and Meheeko and worry about the little things later?

(03-30-2014 10:57 AM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(03-30-2014 08:42 AM)hawghiggs Wrote:  I don't understand why we have not started building this pipeline. I get we need to do an environmental study. But one was conducted and found not to be harmful. So what the hell is the hold up?

Obama & Co. are beholding to the environmental loons. For some reason those loons think that stopping the pipeline will save the planet but all that's really happening is a pipeline gets built in another country and they benefit from it. The loons don't seem to care about environmental problems in other countries as if those are different planets. I also wonder how many of the environmental wackos would be directly impacted if something with Keystone went wrong - probably none of them because most of them probably live no where near it. So if they're true intention is to save the planet then why don't they hit up the stuff that would really make a difference, like busting the balls of China, India, and Meheeko and worry about the little things later?

The practical difference between eternal delay and canceling the thing is . . . Nothing. It's sort of like voting "present", which he has proven that he likes to do when it matters.

For economic, environmental, and military/foreign relations reasons, we need to produce every bit of domestic energy that we can from every source. And yes, that includes substantial increases in green energy--and oil and gas and everything else. The more we can produce domestically, the better off we are. Of what we have to import, the more we can import from closer and less hostile places, the better off we are.

The pipeline itself is a very low environmental risk. There are already 15,000 miles of pipelines transiting the Ogallala aquifer, almost every single one of them is riskier than this one, and we are not polluting drinking water right and left as opponents claim. The real environmental issue--and it is a legitimate one--is the process of extracting the oil. But all things considered, the process of extracting the shale oil in Canada and bringing it down the Keystone pipeline to the Gulf Coast would impose far less environmental risk than the alternative of producing oil overseas and bringing in by ship. That doesn't mean zero risk, but it does mean least risk of all the available alternatives.

There is one factor that I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions. The bitumen from the oil sands is very heavy oil. There are only a few refineries in the world that can handle such heavy oil. Most of them are on the Gulf Coast of the US. Why? Because they were placed there to refine oil primarily from Venezuela, which is the principal world producer of heavy oil. The comparison of the 830,000 barrels per day from Keystone to the 755,000 barrels per day from Venezuela is particularly apt, because that's exactly what it's going to replace. With Keystone in place, Venezuela basically has no market for its oil. The noise about exporting the products made with this oil comes about because of this. Heavy oil makes relatively more diesel and relatively less of other products than does light crude. We still don't use that much diesel. But Europe does, and a fair amount of diesel gets exported there, chasing prices. So a significant amount of products will in fact be exported, just as they are now from those same Gulf Coast refineries. Given these factors, I wonder how much of the opposition from the left comes from socialists fighting to protect their fellow travelers in Venezuela.