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The Middle East oil independence “fairy tale”
By Andrew Ottoson
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
A report commissioned by the Department of Energy and carried out by consulting firm Ensys Energy said with certainty:
“In all scenarios considered, increases of Canadian crude oil imports into the U.S. correspondingly reduce U.S. imports of foreign oil from sources outside of North America and the scale of “wealth transfers” to those sources for the import costs of the crude oils.”
And:
“Under any given pipeline scenario, reducing U.S. oil demand would result in reduction of oil imports from non-Canadian foreign sources, especially the Middle East, with no material reduction in imports of WCSB crude.”
And:
“Together, growing Canadian oil sands imports and U.S. demand reduction have the potential to very substantially reduce U.S. dependency on non-Canadian foreign oil, including from the Middle East.”
And:
“KXL would provide increased redundancy for WCSB supply routes into the USA. Potentially, it could also add capacity to bring U.S. Bakken crudes to market and/or to reduce congestion at Cushing by increasing capability to take domestic U.S. crudes to the Gulf Coast.”
Whether one accepts it or not, that is the rough shape of the strongest argument DOE can make in favor of Keystone XL; Ensys reported many other findings in support of this argument, but did not suggest that Keystone XL would accomplish what the last eight presidents have promised but failed to deliver.
The notion that Keystone XL would completely relieve our decades-long dependence on Middle East oil is a twist on the last lines of the report in an article published by Reuters. It was republished unchallenged —indeed, with only mild changes in phrasing — by many PostMedia Network newspapers and has circulated in a variety of forms ever since.
The mistake Reuters made was in attributing to Keystone XL the substance of the findings which were limited, quite obviously, to “a combination of increased Canadian crude imports and reduced U.S. product demand.” This mistake has traveled as far and as fast as the misattribution of Spurgeon’s “old proverb” to Mark Twain.
(Ensys has since challenged the Reuters article and, to their credit, the PostMedia outlets have replaced the mistaken version with an original report.)
An important step in reporting on the Ensys study has not yet been taken. Various bloggers and reporters continue to conflate the Keystone XL pipeline project with an increase in imports from Canada, but the truth is that expansion offers only redundancy—it would give our nation an “excess cross-border pipeline capacity” that will persist until after 2020. There may be a kind of security in redundancy, but redundancy does not justify the urgency being presented by Heritage Foundation which claims “the EPA is also denying approval of the Keystone pipeline which would increase the amount of oil the U.S. receives from our friendly neighbor Canada by over a million barrels per day.”
Heritage’s claim is inaccurate on two counts. First, XL caps out at 900,000 barrels per day according to its regulatory filings. Second, if it intends to suggest that the mere act of approving the pipeline will cause oil to move in time to reduce gas prices this summer, Heritage is fantasizing; the failure to distinguish between XL’s maximal and commercial capacities is also causing confusion outside of the spheres of supposed expertise.
Sadly, as is suggested by the famous saying at the top of this article, inaccurate information will probably continue to circulate faster than it can be countered. Apart from making good faith efforts to report accurately and to correct mistakes quickly, it would help everyone who follows this issue for the pipeline’s proponents to be transparent about how they form their truth-claims and specific about the kind of “security” they think Keystone XL may actually provide.
Tagged with: keystone xl
