One way or another, that landlocked oil in Alberta will make its way to market.
If the US doesn't want it, it will get pipelined to the Pacific coast and tankered to Asia or sent by rail within North America or to the Pacific.
I think Keystone XL's real detractors are US oil producers. It's real proponents are oil consumers that (clearly!) could not care less about where the oil comes from.
> One way or another, that landlocked oil in Alberta will make its way to market.
That's not necessarily true. The point of the capital investment in the pipeline is that the overall cost will be lower than shipping it from the pacific. If the pipeline doesn't exist, it may not be economic to mine the tar sands (this is especially true for tar sands oil which is very expensive (== itself consumes a lot of energy) to extract, so is only viable when oil prices are quite high.
> I think Keystone XL's real detractors are US oil producers.
Some of them, but the majors are integrated and having an alternative supplier to feed their refineries is good for them.
The other source of opposition is people who don't want to deal with the externalities: the pipleline itself, of course but more importantly leaks. Keystone's other pipelines leak and there's no reason to believe this one should be any different.
> The point of the capital investment in the pipeline is that the overall cost will be lower than shipping it from the pacific.
Lower, maybe. But transoceanic shipping is cheap and gives you far more flexibility in sending to whichever customer will pay the most.
> If the pipeline doesn't exist, it may not be economic to mine the tar sands
The current problem is that the capital investments in the extraction infrastructure have already been made. It's cheaper to continue operating them at a loss than to shutdown entirely. If the operations go bankrupt, they'll continue operating when a buyer can take over without any of the previous debts.
It's at the point where it's taking government intervention to get the extractors to reduce production. The most economical decision for them is still to flood the market with production.
It's like the Worldcom fibre infrastructure constructed in the 1990s. It was a terrible investment, but once it's built, it's not worth turning off.
> the majors are integrated and having an alternative supplier to feed their refineries is good for them.
If they're integrated and have a balanced production and consumption, a pipeline from somewhere else throws a wrench into that.
> externalities: the pipleline itself, of course but more importantly leaks. Keystone's other pipelines leak and there's no reason to believe this one should be any different.
Pipelines will always be the best way to move bulk liquids from A to B. There are also externalities to oil-trains and more expensive oil.
If the US doesn't want it, it will get pipelined to the Pacific coast and tankered to Asia or sent by rail within North America or to the Pacific.
I think Keystone XL's real detractors are US oil producers. It's real proponents are oil consumers that (clearly!) could not care less about where the oil comes from.