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HOUSTON — TransCanada has begun moving oil into the Keystone XL pipeline’s southern leg, which runs from Oklahoma to the Texas coast, a company spokesman said Monday. “TransCanada is pleased to confirm that at approximately 10:04 am Central Time on Saturday, December 7, 2013, the company began to inject oil into the Gulf Coast Project pipeline as it moves closer to the start of commercial service,” TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard said in an email. The pipeline owner will need to fill the newly constructed line before it can begin delivering oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast, including those in...

Alexis Madrigal, a blogger for The Atlantic, asked yesterday if anyone had noticed the massive energy transformation that took place in New York City about a month ago? The transformation that Madrigal is alluding to is a clutch of natural gas pipeline expansion projects that came online in and around New York City in early November. These projects and several more like them in the previous three years have expanded the total deliverability of natural gas into New York by about one third. The cumulative impact is that natural gas future prices for January and February of 2014 are lower...

Whether or not President Barack Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline or not, oil sand in Alberta will continue to be extracted, as the president recently gave the go ahead in a new cross-border pipeline benefiting Canadian oil producers. The 1,900-mile proposed Cochin, Kinder Morgan pipeline, approved on Nov. 22, will transport natural gas liquids (NGL) produced from hydraulic fracturing in Texas, north through Illinois and eventually into Alberta. There is a demand for imports of condensate to use as a diluent for blending with heavy Canadian crude. Extracting oil sands requires a lot of energy to break down...

In the Marcellus and Utica shale regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, natural gas is being fracked and pumped from the ground at a prodigious rate. While most people are familiar with natural gas and the Marcellus Shale, there's a second, quieter revolution playing out in the gas fields. And energy companies are investing billions to get a piece of it. As it comes from the ground, natural gas isn't an homogenized, pure element. It's a mix of different compounds, more akin to a stream than anything else. Within that stream are trace elements of propane and ethane, commonly...

November 18, 2013 George W. Bush on Keystone XL: 'Build the damn thing' Zack Colman Former President George W. Bush said building the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline is a "no-brainer" for economic growth. "I think the goal of the country ought to be, 'How do we grow the private sector?' " Bush said at a Pittsburgh luncheon with energy executives, according to DeSmog Blog. "If private-sector growth is the goal and Keystone pipeline creates 20,000 new private-sector jobs, build the damn thing," Bush said. The State Department says the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline would create 42,100 direct and indirect positions...

Every day in the New Normal, it is either a mass shooting or an explosion in some pipeline or crude-carrying train. Moments ago, a pipeline in Texas exploded in a massive fireball and has prompted the evacuation of the nearby town of Milford. From Breaking911: Smoke and flames are visible for miles. There is a fear that an additional pipe may explode. Nearby schools have all been evacuated as well. NUmerous rescue teams responding; unknown if there are any injuries at this time. UPDATE 11:30AM EST: According to county officials, a 10-inch pipeline east of U.S. Highway 77 and Farm-to-Market...

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said Tuesday that she would continue to put pressure on the administration to speed up its review of the Keystone XL pipeline. "I intend to see if we can push forward the approval of the Keystone pipeline," Landrieu told reporters after a meeting the senator held with Premier Alison Redford of Alberta, Canada, to discuss a way forward on the pipeline, which, if built, would bring crude from Alberta's oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. "The ball is in our court and I hope the United States will make a decision," Landrieu said. "So I'm going...

Energy Transfer Partners and Trafigura Beheer BV announced plans for a new 82-mile crude oil and condensate pipeline from the Eagle Ford to Corpus Christi, the company said Thursday. The two companies signed an agreement for the pipeline, which will extend from McMullen County to the Gulf Coast and will include converting already existing natural gas pipelines owned by Energy Transfer. The pipeline will be able to transport about 100,000 barrels of crude oil and condensate per day and will be operational within 12 months, the companies said. It will provide access for Eagle Ford crude to Trafigura’s deep-water terminal...

A Canadian company has applied to build the largest oil pipeline yet from western North Dakota’s booming oil patch and will soon begin courting oil producers to reserve space, a key step in a $2.6 billion project that would move millions of gallons of oil to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge Energy is proposing the 612-mile Sandpiper pipeline to each day carry 225,000 barrels of oil to a hub in northern Minnesota and 375,000 barrels to one in northwestern Wisconsin. If approved by regulators, it would be the largest pipeline moving oil out of North Dakota, the nation’s second-leading...

A lightning strike may have caused a pipeline rupture that spilled more than 20,000 barrels of oil in a North Dakota wheat field, federal regulators said in a report issued Thursday. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said a preliminary investigation of the Tesoro Corp. pipeline break “points to a strong electrical discharge as the cause of the failure.” Damon Hill, a spokesman for the agency, said a final determination as to the exact cause has not been made. The agency based its initial findings on mechanical and metallurgical analysis of a section of the...

Turkey’s Zorlu Energy is in talks with Israeli firms over the potential for a pipeline to carry Israeli gas to Turkey, industry sources say, but the political rift between the two former allies is holding up progress. Israel is set to become a gas exporter by the end of the decade after the discovery of two major offshore fields off its Mediterranean coast - Leviathan and Tamar. Turkey, dependent on imports for almost all of its energy, is looking to diversify away from expensive Russian gas and could become a customer as well as providing a transit route to other...

Koch Industries says International Forum on Globalization report has glaring errorsA new report claiming to demonstrate a large Koch Industries stake in the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline is riddled with factual inaccuracies, the company said on Tuesday.The report says that Koch stands to make $100 billion from the pipeline, which is widely supported by the American public but has been delayed as the State Department weighs its approval.State must approve oil pipeline projects that cross international borders. Keystone’s proposed pipeline would transport crude from Northwestern Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast.A report released on Monday by the International...

Pipeline transport of oil is so much safer than other modes that resistance to it is raising risks, concludes a study published by the Fraser Institute, Calgary. The risk of a spill in road transport is almost 20 incidents per billion ton-miles, according to US data cited in the study by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Kenneth P. Green, senior director, natural resource policy studies at the Fraser Institute. For rail, the risk is slightly more than two incidents per billion ton-miles. For pipelines, the risk is less than 0.6 incident per billion ton-miles. Citing US...

There are believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters. Many of the groups are small and operate on a local level, but a number have emerged as powerful forces with affiliates across the country or formed alliances with other groups that share a similar agenda. The BBC News website looks at the most prominent. Big snip

When it comes to transporting oil, pipelines are the safest option, trumping trains and trucks, according to a new report from Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study is just the latest to make the safety case for greater reliance on pipelines, coming while the Obama administration weighs whether Keystone XL is in the national interest and even as Tesoro starts cleaning up a seven-acre oil spill in a North Dakota wheat field. U.S. data on incidents from 2005 to 2009 “show that road and rail have higher rates of serious incidents, injuries and fatalities than pipelines, even though more road and...

Here’s a little-known fact: The Keystone pipeline system has been transporting oil sands from Canada to U.S. refineries in the Midwest for three years — with no major leaks and, more importantly, no major complaints from environmentalists. The Keystone pipeline project includes four phases. The Keystone XL that has received so much media attention is only the last phase. Phase 1 has been operating since 2010, carrying oil from Alberta across three Canadian provinces and six states to refineries in Illinois. Phase 2 put a link connecting the Phase 1 pipeline from Steele City, Nebraska, to Cushing, Oklahoma, a major...

The proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. would make "OPEC obsolete," billionaire energy entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens told CNBC on Wednesday. "Canadians say they have 250 billion barrels [of oil]. That's exactly what the Saudis claim they have," he said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "You're sitting there with the same amount of oil available to the United States from Canada … as Saudi Arabia." "But when you move the oil through the Strait of Hormuz everyday, it's 17 million barrels," Pickens said. "The Navy is shepherding a cartel daily through the Strait of Hormuz. And...

A natural gas pipeline fire in rural northwest Oklahoma was extinguished on Wednesday morning with no injuries reported, and the company that owns it, Northern Natural Gas, is working to determine the cause of the blast, a company spokesman said. The fire occurred at 11 p.m. CST on Tuesday (0400 GMT Wednesday) in a remote and rural area in Oklahoma's panhandle, and could be seen up to 50 miles away, according to local media reports. No injuries were reported. About "a half dozen" area volunteer fire departments responded to Tuesday night's blaze, said Mike Loeffler, spokesman for Northern Natural Gas....

Kinder Morgan Energy Partners is tacking on 18 miles of lateral pipeline in the Eagle Ford Shale to carry crude and condensate from its DeWitt County, Texas station to a new facility it will build northwest in Gonzales County. The company’s $74 million pipeline addition would allow it to reach markets along the Houston Ship Channel and a pipeline that services a Phillips 66 refinery in Brazoria County. Kinder Morgan said Wednesday it struck a deal with a large producer in the Eagle Ford to extend the 178-mile pipeline in the South Texas shale play, but did not disclose the...

The August LPS Mortgage Monitor was released this morning. It shows good news and bad news. The good news (if you are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The GSE mortgage share (blue line) has risen since 2011. mtgmktshare The bad news? The percentage of mortgages that are “out of the money” for refinancing has topped 50%. Again. %inmoney The good news? The mortgage pipeline is shrinking rapidly, particularly in judicial foreclosure states. forecpipecl The bad news? Judicial foreclosure states like New York, New Jersey and Hawaii have stubbornly high foreclosure pipeline ratios. For non-judicial foreclosure states, Massachusetts leads the nation....