Inventor wrote:
A few choices, drive a pipeline through the Canadian Rockies, to the BC coast, and build a refinery, shipping port, all that nice dirty oil along one of the best coasts on earth, trees, fish, nature.
Or send it to Hell or Texas, which lacks trees, water, fish, or interesting native cultures. Most of this path runs through poor pasture, across the Great Plains, where flat and nothing are the main attractions.
It is also Tar Sands, a crude that lacks the good stuff, and makes asphalt, and a low grade dirty oil, which is going to be sent to China, as we do not run that kind of oil fired heat.
There is a lot of it, and it all replaces West Texas Intermediate Crude, Brent, North Sea, and the better "Sweet", flavors of light oil, that make gas, diesel, and are clean to refine.low sulpher, and burn clean. We are exporting acid rain.
The part that stays here is what we make roads out of. Compared to Cement, which is gas fired limestone ground to a fine powder, which consumes a lot of energy, asphalt is just heated up and mixed with sand, small stones, which we have plenty of, and is clean low energy production.
I for one favor Texas over coming down the McKinsie River, turning Bellacoola into a refinery and oil port. I have long planned to fish the McKinsie.
Alberta has not had any real jobs since the Fur Trade ended. All of that pipe is installed by people, who will then spend many years painting it.
I gather that The Mineral Rights are government owned, so Tar Sands replace Taxes. There is enough oil to keep it flowing for hundreds of years.
Rich Canadians, wearing Trapper Hats and riding Moose, while drinking. EH!
your forgetting that the pipeline will be running over a massive aquifer and the production of tar sands involves stripping the land and consumes massive amounts of water. its almost as bad as the coal mining in west Virginia were they cut the tops off of mountains and fill in valleys. sure they reclaim the land and plant trees after they are done but it will never be the same as the virgin land. the very fact that the majority of people wont actually see the destruction for themselves that they wont care or even realize how vast it is. seeing a valley fill a few years ago really changed my views on things. on paper is does not seem bad but in person its hard to even put in words that describe what you see.
10 Jun 2013, 7:58 pm
