Saturday, February 25, 2012
Omaha World-Herald: Although approval of an application to build it was rejected, at least temporarily, things aren’t all doom-and-gloom for the Keystone XL pipeline.
The pipeline company, TransCanada Inc., says it has decided to expand the project and spend more money on it to carry more oil.
It seems that White House denial of a permit for the project last month may not be quite as critical as some of its advocates had asserted. Proponents of the project intimated that, among other bad-news scenarios, the delay would cause Alberta tar sands oil to all be rerouted and shipped to China.
But TransCanada, in its latest quarterly report, said it has decided to add an extra $600 million to the $7 billion Keystone XL project to enlarge the capacity from 700,000 barrels of bitumen crude oil to 830,000 barrels a day. With its existing pipeline capacity, that would mean TransCanada could move 1.4 million barrels every day from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
In addition, the company said shippers have shown increased interest in the project, and it has now secured long-term contracts for more than 1.1 million barrels a day.
Good news
There even has been some good news on the domestic energy front: U.S. oil production is rising. The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently forecast crude production of 6.4 million barrels per day in 2025, 1 million barrels more than was produced in 2010, the Houston Chronicle reports. The paper also said the number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quadrupled in the past three years.
Despite his election-year denial of the company’s permit application last month, President Barack Obama left the door open for TransCanada to reapply. The company recently said that it remains fully committed to the pipeline’s construction, although the projected completion date has been pushed back to 2015 if approval were to come early next year.