Free Republic

Video at link. (CNSNews.com) – Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, says President Barack Obama is “factually incorrect” to say that the Keystone XL Pipeline will not benefit Americans. At the press conference in Washington Tuesday, CNSNews.com asked Gerard about Obama’s remarks in November about the pipeline, which, if approved, would transport crude oil from Canada and from two U.S. states to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, held a press conference with reporters on Jan. 6, 2015 following his annual State of American Energy speech in Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com/Penny...

President Barack Obama will veto the Keystone XL bill if Congress passes a measure green-lighting the oil pipeline, White House press secretary Josh Earnest announced on Tuesday. Newly minted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline project as the first of the new Congress. The bill has some bipartisan support, but environmentalists and progressives have heavily lobbied the White House to oppose the pipeline.... Earnest added that the White House reviewed the text of the bill to authorize the pipeline on Monday....

Like a lot of other dramatic bluster coming south out of Canada this winter, the Keystone XL pipeline stands poised for its big approval fight this month. Advocates claim it will put Montana in the mix for North American energy independence. Opponents say it will allow the most polluting oil on the planet to contribute to global warming while putting water supplies at risk. The U.S. Senate fell one vote short of approving Keystone during its lame-duck session last month, even though President Barack Obama threatened to veto the measure. But what if it doesn’t matter? While the Keystone project...

DULUTH, Minn. -- The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission will take public testimony next week at five hearings across the state on the all-new Enbridge Energy Sandpiper pipeline set to run from Beaver Lodge, N.D., to Superior, Wis. This round of hearings is intended to focus primarily on the "need" for the new pipeline -- both Enbridge's need to serve their customers -- oil companies -- and whether Minnesota really needs another pipeline to carry oil that will mostly go to other states. Usually the commission and an administrative law judge also would hear testimony on possible routes for the proposed...

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didnt take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to all hell breaking loose, there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.      Construction on the pipeline began in 1975, and oil first moved through it on June 20, 1977. Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton summed up its success in 2003 that Today the pipeline produces 17 percent of our domestic petroleum. It...

SOFIA, Bulgaria — Barely two weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin annexed Crimea on one side of the Black Sea, he won a different prize on the other side. In Bulgaria’s Parliament, lawmakers gave initial passage to a bill clearing the way for a mammoth gas pipeline from Russia. The pipeline, known as South Stream, was Mr. Putin’s most important European project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Europe hooked on Russian gas, and further entrenching Russian influence in fragile former Soviet satellite states as part of a broader effort to undermine European unity....

For a symbolic issue, the Keystone pipeline has sure caused a lot of damage—to Canadian-American relations, to Democrats, to President Obama. And it feeds, underscores, or reflects a variety of political divisions, some of them quite bitter. I’ll get to Keystone’s victims shortly, but first the explanation of why the issue is purely symbolic. If the pipeline is built, it will carry oil from northern Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. If it is not built, the crude oil will be transported either to Canada’s west coast or to New Brunswick, a maritime province in the east, where it...

A leak on a major Russian oil pipeline caused a spill in the Black Sea near the port of Tuapse on Wednesday where officials said stormy weather was hampering efforts to assess and respond to the mishap. "Some quantity of oil has spilled into the sea," Sergei Proskurin, first deputy captain of the port of Tuapse, told Reuters. He said the size of the spill was unclear and that emergencies services were working to deploy temporary floating barriers to contain the spill but were being delayed by the stormy conditions. Tuapse is a busy industrial and oil port but is...

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Friday that construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast would only nominally benefit American consumers and workers. "There is very little impact - nominal impact - on U.S. gas prices, what the average American consumer cares about," Obama told reporters during an end-of-year press conference. In his strongest comments on the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline to date, Obama picked apart some of the most common arguments proponents have used to urge the president to approve it: that it would create jobs, lower domestic gasoline prices and...

The CEO of TransCanada Corp. (TSX:TRP) says he doesn't see the oil industry's appetite for new pipelines faltering even though crude prices have skidded to the lowest point in more than five-years. In an interview in his downtown Calgary office, Russ Girling said he's seen ups and downs far more drastic over his career and expects the oilpatch will come out of the latest downturn in reasonably good shape. "There's a tremendous need to build irrespective of the price of the commodity right now," Girling said. "We're being pressed to get these facilities online as quickly as we possibly can."...

The new Republican-controlled Senate's first act in January will be approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday. McConnell told reporters that the bill would be based on a measure that failed in the Senate last month that was co-sponsored by North Dakota Republican John Hoeven and Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu. "It'll be open for amendment," McConnell said. "I will hope that senators on both sides will offer energy-related amendments but there'll be no effort to try to micromanage the amendment process." Landrieu pushed for a Keystone vote in November in a last-ditch effort to...

Stand on the sea wall next to the port in Varna and you can see the bits and pieces of South Stream piled up in front of you. Hundreds of long black sections of piping - some on the dockside, and others still stacked on cargo ships. They were supposed to have been laid beneath the gloomy waters of the Black Sea, bypassing Ukraine and bringing Russian gas directly to south-eastern Europe. But - suddenly and unilaterally - Vladimir Putin has declared the project dead. Gas, he said, will be sent to Turkey instead. "It's really not clear what's going...

The latest, spectacular “Exit South Stream, Enter Turk Stream” Pipelinistan gambit will be sending big geopolitical shockwaves all across Eurasia for quite some time. This is what the New Great Game in Eurasia is all about. In a nutshell, a few years ago Russia devised North Stream – fully operational – and South Stream – still a project – to bypass unreliable Ukraine as a gas transit nation. Now Russia devises a new sweet deal with Turkey to bypass the “non-constructive” (Putin’s words) approach of the European Commission (EC) concerning the European “Third Energy Package”, which prohibits one company from...

North Dakota is poised to impose the strictest oil standards in its history on Tuesday, requiring every barrel of crude to be filtered for dangerous types of natural gas in an effort to make crude-by-rail transport safer. The new requirements come as federal, state and local officials grapple with how best to ensure the safe transport of North Dakota's crude oil, which has been linked to a string of fiery crude-by-rail explosions, including one last year in Quebec that killed 47 people. Governor Jack Dalrymple and the two other members of the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) are taking the...

Research firm Genscape says that after a year-and-a-half of delay, Kinder Morgan's Texas-to-California Freedom Pipeline project has been revived, with changes that the company hopes will attract shippers. The 250,000 bpd pipeline proposal was shelved in mid-2013 following its failure to receive enough interest from shippers, who said they wanted to transport oil by rail into California, rather than inking long-term pipeline contracts. However, many of these West Coast companies have confronted crude-by-rail permitting delays amid heightening environment impact scrutiny. But now the modified pipeline plan is much more attractive, Tom Dobson, project director of Kinder Morgan Pipelines, said during...

Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) said Dec. 5 its capital budget for 2015 is $4.6 billion, up 18 percent from what it spent in 2014. Including spending for joint ventures DCP Midstream, Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. and WRB Refining, Phillips 66 expects its total capital program to be $6.8 billion next year. Last year, Phillips 66 announced its 2014 capital budget of $2.7 billion, not including joint ventures, in December and increased that to $3.9 billion in July. Here's a basic breakdown of the company's 2015 budget: Midstream:$3.16 billion, plus $550 million for its share of DCP's expenditures Chemicals:$1.45 billion for...

The Environmental Protection Ministry called the oil spill from the Tran-Israel pipeline in southern Israel one of the worst pollution events in the history of Israel on Thursday and said the clean up will cause landscape damage and could take many months. ...

The most important thing to understand about an environmental concern is that it is infinitely malleable. It has Play-Doh’s or putty’s wonderful power of accommodation, to take whatever shape, for the moment, might be called for. Because the environment is, by definition or tautology, everything that is around us — there will always be something “in” the environment on which to hang an objection, mount a protest or, as Samuel Johnson, ever elegant, put it, “to point a moral, or adorn a tale.”

The Keystone XL Pipeline project is almost certainly dead. No, not because a bill that would have finally given the go-ahead to begin construction fell one vote short in the lame duck Senate last month. Sure, that halted the legislative approval process in its tracks, but only until January, when a new Congress arrives and is sworn in. Republicans, who will have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have pledged to bring it back for another vote in the next session. The next vote may well bring a different result, but will the pipeline ever...

HUIMANGUILLO, Mexico — The big-time gasoline thieves had already come and gone during the wee hours, filling their tanker trucks with stolen fuel and then fleeing. Then dawn broke, and word spread that a crime gang had again tapped into a gasoline pipeline, and it was spewing fuel into a ditch. At first, only a few farmers showed up, carrying plastic jerry cans. Then dozens. Then even more. All were eager to collect what spilled fuel they could. (...) Mexico is plagued by rampant energy theft. In the first eight months of this year, 7.5 million barrels went missing, a...