Really the oil sands. Amd is it really charity? Owned by a Canadian company and the government to allow their oil to get to market. Is the TETCO system charity for Pennsylvanians?
Oil shmoil. Y’all need to start worrying about what really matters: https://www.espn.com/college-footba...tory-making-sarah-fuller-invited-inauguration
It isn’t like they aren’t paying for the right of way. North Dakotans benefited from DAPL - so that one cool?
wow, didn't expect that kind of twisting from you. I didn't like that particular pipeline because all of the risk is on the US, for a foreign company exploiting a deposit in ways we wouldn't here for environmental reasons. You asked if I thought another pipeline was cool. I don't think pipelines are cool. investing billions in infrastructure guarantees it will be used for many decades, which guarantees the need for a certain level of production, when I would prefer production decline as quickly as it can replaced. because I don't want to hear in 20 years how we HAVE to keep producing x amount to support these young expensive pipelines so we are locked in. I don't dislike charity, in itself. I dislike charity to fossil fuel companies, especially when they are in another nation and are environmentally throwbacks to the 50's. why are we not only helping that kind of operation, but also one that directly competes with american oil, american jobs, etc? It is a bad deal.
The US actually wants that oil because we refine heavy crude. Especially with Venezuelan crude declining as much as it had, the oil sands became a key supply of heavy crude in the Western Hemisphere. So it isn’t really a case of the US giving to just help out our brothers to the north. This pipeline is likely not critical so I think the market can work without it. I don’t love it as a first day in office because the merits of the decision aren’t great. But it has become entirely political and his team has the football. As for your concern around longevity, pipelines don’t tend to keep basins alive because of sunk capital arguments. For example, you are looking at 5-10 billion for a pipeline. In the Permian basin, we drill and complete about 400 new Wells each month at a cost of 8-10 million each. So that’s about 3.5-4 billion a month spent in the Permian of on-going costs. That’s a little over maintenance drilling levels. Let’s say you need 350 wells a month to maintain production levels 2.8-3.5 billion per month - or almost 40 billion a year, every year, in that one basin just to keep its production level flat. So it’s hard for me me to see a 5 billion dollar pipeline being the driving force to keep a 40+ billion annual spend going. But having pipelines can economically make it easier to stay alive due to. Helping operating costs and not having to rail everything out. Oil sands crude has a very low marginal cost after the initial capital investments were made. So they can afford to rail it and will if they need to. I just don’t like that and would much prefer a pipeline. I just don’t find the charity / Candad using the US to make money argument very genuine. And i Defoe itself don’t find it accurate. We want the oil and it’s business. Both sides of the market have an interest in the oil flowing and the US is one side of that market.
I have ties to Alaska. The Alaskan pipeline has absolutely been used to support further drilling and exploration on the North slope, as there needs to be a certain quantity moving through it for it to properly function and production has been declining.
Further, call me crazy but this open pit mess is not anything I want to do with (referring to Canada):
But that also isn’t a sunk capital argument. If you want oil from that pipeline you need a minimum production.
It's existence is used to justify more activity. It may not be sunk capital in the literal sense or in a direct way, but for the populace and the state that is how it is pitched. The sunk capital of all those jobs, all that infrastructure, and all the remediation dollars that it would take to shut it all down.
Well buy a Tesla - just ignore open little mining for minerals. Because the US refinery complex is completely tooled for heavy crude and you’ll be using crude from there when you fill up. We’ve been trying to eek out improvements to use light oil everywhere we can in refineries but there is only so much you can do when the units are built for heavy crude (the fluidized catalytic cracker that consumed the heavy stream is the heart of the refinery and you can’t really avoid it with that design).
Majority of Alaskans want production to stop? They’ll get their wish most likely. It’s expensive and on its last legs.
Wonder why anyone would be leery of building more infrastructure for this technology, when it will be used as an argument to continue for decades? I am well aware of the issue with rare earth metals, but the math works out a lot better with that issue than with conventional fuels.
No, the majority of Alaskans want it to continue forever. They've mortgaged much of their economic development into it. And they are going to get hurt, because that is what happens to economies overly reliant on extraction. That is frog and scorpion thing. What it means is the sort of project like the Pebble Mine that gets rejected in 2020, may be impossible to pass up in 2035. Which would be a mistake, but to people there that is what development and jobs looks like.
@TennTradition Let me be clear that I am not looking to pointlessly fight on this. I don't agree with your perspective, but I do fully acknowledge that yours is a fact-based and perfectly reasonable one that is grounded in the present. Mine is grounded in about where things go over the next 80 years. The weakness in mine is that I am arguing for more pain now to avoid pain later, rather than from a perspective of a gradual transition. So I get where you are coming from. But I would disagree that cancelling that pipeline is any more political than every other infrastructure project decision that is made. If these were not inherently political all the time, there wouldn't be massive lobbies and and the final authority wouldn't rest in political offices.
Rambling post below.... They don’t run because they cost a lot so we better keep using them. They are needed. But they can’t run on light oil. They were designed for heavy crude from Mexico and South America. They’d probably already be closed if Canadian oil sands weren’t discovered. They create demand (pipelines don’t create demand - something at the end of the pipe had to consume it). So I would agree that it is the US consumer that is the cause for Canadian oil sands. Not the pipeline. And I hate mandated supply side energy solutions. I think you have to solve them on the demand side or you end up increasing energy costs for everyone with no market driver for cost of supply improvements. One option is you regulate refining to the point that you shit them down here and import all your refined products from China. But that seems like a very bad idea. So then you are left with run what we’ve got but recognize we need heavy crude. Or find a way to close existing and build new - but that becomes mandated supply side solution because your fuel costs would go up a lot (gasoline, etc) and you’d need to tariff the hell out of product imports to keep your refineries running. It has become very expensive to build these units and meet regulatory requirements. And while we as a country rail against China for its emissions - we are basically exporting out emissions to them through our product imports.
