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Tar Sands Pipelines: In Whose Interest?
By Gillian McEachern, Environmental Defence Canada
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Read this blog post on the originating site
The blow to TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline this week has caused some analysts to start talking about the possibility that the tar sands industry may face a “choke point” where plans to expand production could be thwarted by pipeline capacity.
This raises an important question, and one our federal government has been ducking from for years: what pace and scale of tar sands development makes sense for Canada? And by ‘Canada’, I mean for Canadian citizens like you and I, not the version of Canada defined by big oil companies many of which are headquartered in Houston, Paris and Beijing. The province of Alberta is now calling for Canadian political leaders to band together to make new tar sands pipelines a national priority, reflecting the desire of the oil companies to pump tar sands oil out of the country at a faster and faster rate.
Yet, what would a “choke point” mean for the country? To be clear, there is already enough pipeline capacity to ship the existing level of tar sands production, which is roughly 1.9 million barrels per day, plus a little extra. If no new pipelines are built, the industry could keep producing 2 million barrels of tar sands each day, or 730 million barrels each year, roughly $73 billion worth of oil at current prices.
It would mean that government revenues from tar sands would stay the same as today. It would mean the people working in the tar sands currently keep their jobs, and the over-heated labour market in Alberta gets a chance to stabilize. It would mean we, at a minimum, wouldn’t be exacerbating the impact of rising oil exports on the manufacturing sectors of Ontario and Quebec, and perhaps even that we could find a way to stop sacrificing good jobs in one part of the country to benefit another.
It would also mean that Canada might just have a fighting chance to meet the target set by the federal government to cut global warming pollution, if Environment Canada can get its numbers straight. And, we may see some sanity return to our petro-crazed state of federal politics and space open up for a real discussion about the transition away from fossil fuels altogether to the clean energy sources that Canada has an abundance of.
In short, it could give us the breathing space needed to chart a clean energy strategy that will benefit all parts of the country.
I realize this line of thinking is anathema to the oil industry and its political backers who see continual expansion as the only path to success. But, when the energy ministers from across the country gather in Kananaskis next month and Minister Liepert makes the plea for support for more pipelines, let’s hope they look at what’s in it for the rest of us.
Tagged with: keystone xl, transcanada, pipeline
