From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15435/the_next_keystone_xl/
A new front in North America’s pipeline wars opens with TransCanada’s latest tar sands megaproject proposal.
BY Cole Stangler
August 9, 2013
The Keystone XL might be stalled for now. But that’s not getting in the way of the TransCanada Corporation’s plans to build an even bigger pipeline to transport tar sands—one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuels on the planet.
If completed, the $12 billion Energy East pipeline, which TransCanada publicly announced last Thursday, could transport about a third more oil than the company’s Keystone XL project, or about 1.1 million barrels a day. The 2,734 mile-long pipeline would transport mostly export-destined bituminous sand from the Western Canadian province of Alberta to a seaside refinery in St. John, New Brunswick. A large portion of the project involves converting an existing gas pipeline to carry the heavy tar sands that originate from deposits in Alberta. But the company will also need to build some new pipelines, including a large pipeline stretching from eastern Ontario to the refinery in St. John. TransCanada anticipates the project to be complete by 2018.
The Energy East marks the latest attempt of the North American oil industry to take advantage of new export opportunities for tar sands, a commodity currently limited to the American market. The two other important pipeline projects that would link oil production in Alberta to global export markets have stalled—the Keystone XL, which would extend through the United States to the Gulf of Mexico, and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway, which would extend from Alberta to a port in British Columbia. To date environmental groups have managed to block those projects from being completed.
Andrea Harden-Donahue is the energy and climate justice campaigner for the Council of Canadians, one of the nation’s leading environmental groups. “This pipeline is critical for the oil industry. “If they are not successful in getting this pipeline going, as well as some of the others like the Keystone XL and Enbridge’s pipeline out west, they are literally going to be landlocked with bitumen in Alberta,” she says. “There are plans for massive expansion of the tar sands in that province, and quite frankly it just needs to go somewhere. In order to do that, they need these pipelines.”
Unlike the Keystone XL, the proposed Energy East route doesn’t actually enter U.S. territory. The pipeline loops around Northern Maine en route to St. John. Some say the company is deliberately avoiding the kinds of regulatory burdens that it has faced over the Keystone XL. Since that pipeline crosses international borders, it requires the final approval of the U.S. President.
“Why would you bother going through a presidential permit approval in the U.S. if you can avoid it?” asks Steven Guilbeault, head of Equiterre, an environmental organization based in Montreal. “Why do it when you have the Canadian federal government as a cheerleader of oil development in Canada?”
Continue reading at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15435/the_next_keystone_xl/
