Texas Stretch of Keystone XL Pipeline Progressing
The 485-mile Oklahoma-to-Texas leg of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is about half done, a TransCanada official told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday.
Nearly all the land along the route has been cleared, and the pipeline should be in service at the end of this year or in early 2014, according to Corey Goulet, vice president of Keystone Pipeline projects for TransCanada, the Canadian company building the pipeline. The $2.3 billion pipeline will bring crude oil from a major storage depot in Cushing, Okla., to refineries in the Nederland area of Southeast Texas. (A spur will take oil on ...
Comments (19)
Joe Estep via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Oil is necessary right now. Until battery technogy gets a lot better we are going to have to live with that fact. All the opposition to this comes from the same camp that wants to "save " humanity. Just where is your heart when a large portion of humanitg is starving, sick and cold because the price of oil goes througb the roof? Oil is good Accidents are bad. Put your efforts on prevention of accidents and your hope on better batteries.
Luisa Inez Newton via Texas Tribune on Facebook
tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil there is and most of what will go into the pipeline will end up in China. I hope the permit is declined
Steven Felfe via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Where is the Finished by-product of that OIL going too??. Will it END our dependency on Foreign Oil??. Why does our State allow any Foreign Company from taking folks Property?? Are the owners who had their property taken by eminent domain receiving perpetual royalties or did they get a just a small stipend and sent along their marry little ways??
Robbie Cooper via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Luisa, please tell me more about how you've eliminated your reliance on oil and other petroleum-based products. It sounds fascinating...
Steven Felfe via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Who the heck is Luisa? Is she that flower picker on the corner.
Cindy Rhoton Cook via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The tax loopholes need to be shifted to other forms of energy so they too can be affordable. We must harness the sun!
Philip Welsh via Texas Tribune on Facebook
This is a situation where compromise and level-heads should prevail. The pipeline was rerouted to avoid the aquifer and we should applaud that. As Joe Estep commented...we need oil and we also need jobs. No answer is perfect. I think the deal that should be struck is the GOP agree to end the subsidies and tax advantages for Big Oil and Coal and move that to solar and wind. Then, the Dems should agree to this pipeline. A win-win and more in line with progress.
Cindy Rhoton Cook via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Oh and the tribune doesn't always leave your comments... Mine are usually deleted!
K C
Thank you for finally doing a story about this.
Now if only the don't take my guns crowd would care a little about the don't take my land crowd! This is a taking and the "oil" will be leaving the good ol USA for other ports leaving Houston with a lot of sludge containing who knows what.
Just this morning Chesapeake sold half its Oklahoma properties to China!
Sharon Cooper Morgan via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Where would we be now if, a generation or two ago, we had put all our efforts into supporting alternatives forms of energy. Imagine!
Alice Mechler
Yesterday in Tyler County, an 'undetected by leak prevention apparatus' spill allowed nearly a thousand gallons of oil into a local creek. The company didn't know about it until citizens complained. With this sort of accident prevention by the oil/pipeline companies, I can only imagine what will happen when the Tar Sands oil, full of toxic chemicals to push it through the pipeline, spills into the Red River, or any of several large rivers, to say nothing of prime farmland - and it WILL happen, based on Big Oil's record of safety!
The icky Tar Sands oil is NOT destined for the USA....allowing China to manipulate oil prices as well as OPEC. Does anyone REALLY think it will lower oil prices? $2.3 BILLION pipeline could be better spent elsewhere to BENEFIT Texans and the USA! But the Texas Lege and Washington have lined their pockets with $$$ from BIG OIL, and care nothing about safety or landowners in Texas! 2014 is the time for change! Vote 'em out.
Neil Moyer via Texas Tribune on Facebook
even if crappy Canadian crude never gets in it, still usefull in moving Bakken crude to Gulf Coast...
Matthew Cowan via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Sharon, we would be about where we are now. It takes time and technology to get new innovations and those innovations are not always practical or feasible for the consumer. But we do have to live in the here and now and petroleum products is what has allowed the advances we have in alternative energy progress!
Samdavis
It's amazing how Perry and crowd are against government interference EXCEPT when they will benefit by use of eminent domain by Keystone. This is a bad idea, period. We need to look at more efficient forms of energy and not sell our souls for what is expedient at the moment.
John Hanlon via Texas Tribune on Facebook
And burn countless hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel to transport the same crude oil from Oklahoma/Texas to the gulf refineries. It saves in the long run folks, that way we can use that fuel to move and erect more wind energy.
Kim Feil
Bitumen bites lives...the kalamzoo spill flowed near a mobile home park that wasn’t evacuated soon enough...there has been a claim that in that one mobile home par, that 11 deaths ensued of which only one was a senior citizen. Sure getting off of fossil fuels would put us in a fix...but sooner or later people will die either from lack of food or poisoned food....we’ll die from lack of jobs due to lack of clean air too as folks will move to breathable areas-just to live....poisoned water from tar sands and fracking is a reality we will eventually have to face (Read the article Trillion Gallon Loophole). If we focus on getting wind an solar to be our main energy source, and all use less energy-which we are, that is the way to move to...feeding ourselves should be our jobs when jobs go away from the results of no water for manufacturing, bizare storms.... I read that if each household farms 10% of what they eat-we can feed the world. Surviving in a poisoned environment with crazy weather is what we have to look forward to...I want to live on an island and grow my own food...but that is not possible for all of us to do now is it? Real leadership will acknolwege great change is needed NOW to save mankind from its fossil fuel addiction and self destruction. Folks whose jobs depend on fossil fuels need to "get that" and actually care about their own family’s future in trying to have a livable planet.... not job-able, but live-able...what part of that isn’t clear? Jobs mean nothing if at the expense of (food/air/water) everything.
audrey fisher
The State Department report is out. The problem with it is that it asked the wrong question.
It never ceases to amaze me that people here have failed to read that the processed oil will be sent overseas. It is funny that Canada buys most of it's gasoline from Venezuela and then wants to promote selling it's polluted process to US.
Why some will not care about the emissions from the processing - when their own personal water supply is decreased as it will be diverted to process this oil - it will be too late. Don't say that you haven't been alerted, now please return to the head in the sand.
Kim Feil
Dr Riky Ott responded to my email trying to find out more about the 11 dead people in one mobile home park near the Kalamazoo spill in 2010......"The source for this is Michelle BarlondSmith who lived in the trailer court until last week. The 11 who died lived in the same trailer court. While we can’t say the 11 died b/c of the tar sands oil spill, which flowed right past their doorsteps and yards, the people who died included some whose cancer was in remission or had other chronic illnesses that worsened after the spill. Michelle is co-founding a new group, Shout Out!, to share these stories and other similar ones with activists like yourselves. Shout Out is planning a “wall” of names and brief descriptions of lives truncated by the Enbridge disaster.Hope this helps."
RIki
Rhonda Warmack Houston
Arkansas Oil Spill Raises Scrutiny of Pipeline Network - a MUST READ
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-01/exxon-arkansas-spill-raises-scrutiny-of-keystone-pipeline.html by Jim Snyder & Bradley Olson - Apr 1, 2013 An oil spill that fouled an Arkansas town is raising questions about the U.S. pipeline network and the safety of importing Canadian heavy crude, as President Barack Obama weighs whether to approve the Keystone XL project. Last year, there were 364 spills from pipelines in the U.S. that released about 54,000 barrels of oil and refined products, according to the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a division within the Department of Transportation. Any incident in which more than five gallons of fuel leaked is counted as a spill.
Each year, about 11.9 billion barrels of oil, gasoline and other refined products are pumped across the network of pipelines, said John Stoody, director of government and public relations for the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, a Washington- based group whose members own about 85 percent of the liquid pipelines in the U.S.
“Incidents do happen, but they’re rare,” Stoody said in an interview. There are 119,000 miles of pipelines carrying crude oil and refined products in the U.S., Stoody said.
“The properties of Canadian oil sands crude are similar to other heavy crudes from California, Venezuela and other places and transported safely across the U.S. for decades,” Stoody said in an e-mail.
In Arkansas, Exxon has said it collected about 12,000 barrels of oil and water from the spill, according to a statement yesterday from the Mayflower Incident Unified Command Joint Information Center. The town recommended that 22 homes be evacuated, it said. Exxon (XOM) said no oil had reached nearby Lake Conway. This pipeline STILL ISN'T IN THE BAG. THOSE WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM THIS PIPELINE ARE THE ONLY ONES 'FOR IT' AND 'CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT' which means they must have made a monumental contribution to it, but know they won't be living next to it, nor 'have any of their heritage land spilled on', if a spill takes place, which we all know that spills happen.' The only 'clean up' technology composed of using paper towels with which to soak up the oil and white flour bags filled with fluff to hold back the crude from traveling further... and then, later in the day all the children and family members have to go to the hospital because their ability to breath has been impared. But later on though the week, those with cancer that has been declared as 'having gone into remission' mysteriously die two days later, leaving all those happy to have heard that this cancer won't take their onesome special away;...all this happening after the gigantic oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas....do you think it could have been that oil which took so much from one community?