{"id":39294,"date":"2022-07-23T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/keystone-pipeline-wont-make-gas-cheaper\/"},"modified":"2022-07-23T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-07-23T10:00:00","slug":"keystone-pipeline-wont-make-gas-cheaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/keystone-pipeline-wont-make-gas-cheaper\/","title":{"rendered":"Keystone Pipeline won\u2019t make gas cheaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ted
Ted Williams<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ever since boycotts started blocking Russian petroleum products, social media has been rife with memes that blame rising gasoline prices on \u201cthe cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Example: \u201cSooo, if shutting down Russia\u2019s pipeline(s) will hurt their economy, wouldn\u2019t shutting down ours hurt our economy? Asking for a buddy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the criticism comes from people who recycle truthiness. Former Vice President Mike Pence: \u201cGas prices have risen across the country because of this administration\u2019s war on energy \u2014 shutting down the Keystone Pipeline.\u201d Republican Rep. Jim Jordan: \u201cBiden shut off the Keystone Pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what really happened: No one shut down, canceled or shut off the Keystone Pipeline. It is fully operational, daily delivering 590,000 barrels of tar-sands oil in Canada to U.S. refineries.<\/p>\n

What some pipeline advocates think is the \u201cKeystone Pipeline\u201d is a 1,700-mile \u201cshortcut\u201d called Keystone XL or KXL. It would have sliced through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast, delivering 830,000 barrels of tar-sands oil per day. Many residents of those states fought fiercely against the pipeline cutting through their land.<\/p>\n

Now, \u201cBuild the Keystone Pipeline\u201d has become a social-media mantra, as if the United States could so decree. The Canadian firm, TC Energy, formerly TransCanada, officially terminated the project once President Biden withdrew its permits.<\/p>\n

Even if construction on the pipeline began tomorrow, KXL could not be up and running in less than five years.<\/p>\n

When President Trump re-permitted KXL in 2017, his own State Department reported that it would not lower gasoline prices. The price of oil is set by the global market and certainly not by U.S. presidents.<\/p>\n

We should also remember that rendering gasoline from tar-sands oil, the planet\u2019s dirtiest petroleum, is far more polluting and energy-intensive than conventional refining. Some carbon content is burned off in a process that belches greenhouse gases and generates toxic waste called petcoke, which is dumped around the United States in piles six stories high. Petcoke infiltrates schools and houses even when windows are shut.<\/p>\n

Bitumen, basically asphalt, continues to be strip-mined from what used to be Canada\u2019s boreal forests in Alberta. Too thick to be piped, it\u2019s spiked with volatile liquid condensate from natural gas and thus converted to a toxic tar-sands cocktail called \u201ddilbit,\u201d short for diluted bitumen. Dilbit, sent through the existing Keystone pipeline, contains chloride salts, sulfur, abrasive minerals and acids, and must be pumped under high pressure. It\u2019s murder on pipes.<\/p>\n

In addition to greenhouse gases and petcoke, tar-sands waste products include lakes, rivers, fish, wildlife and people. Between 1995 and 2006, when tar-sands extraction was accelerating, Alberta\u2019s First Nations suffered a sudden 30% increase in cancer rates.<\/p>\n

KXL, if built, also threatened the world\u2019s largest aquifer \u2013 the Ogallala. Parts of the aquifer are now depleted, and a major dilbit spill could finish those parts off.<\/p>\n

In 2011, a pipeline representative named Shawn Howard assured me that ramming a dilbit pipe through the Ogallala aquifer would be riskfree.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy,\u201d he demanded, \u201cwould we invest $13 billion in a pipeline and put a product in it that was going to destroy it like these activists are trotting out? It makes absolutely no business sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The existing Keystone pipeline has ruptured 22 times, including spills in 2017 and 2019 that fouled land and water with 404,000 gallons of dilbit. Business sense, as the oil industry consistently reminds us, is an attribute more often desired than possessed.<\/p>\n

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He writes about fish, wildlife and the environment.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Williamscca Ever since boycotts started blocking Russian petroleum products, social media has been rife with memes that blame rising gasoline prices on \u201cthe cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline.\u201d Example: \u201cSooo, if shutting down Russia\u2019s pipeline(s) will hurt their economy, wouldn\u2019t shutting down ours hurt our economy? Asking for a buddy.\u201d Most of the criticism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-39294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39294"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=39294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}