Mr. Romney accepted Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources has his energy advisor. Is there anything else to say. Harold Hamm has been the person behind the Keystone XL Pipeline. I'd like to know what he has on TransCanada, a hell of a binding contract probably. Hamm just won't take no and expects the USA to bend every rule in the book for it. Wow.
At any rate Hamm is all about dirty oil from Canada and a pipeline that will make him more money. He'll claim the expenses of building it while collecting subsidies at the same time. Nothing like taking money from the people of the USA with two fits. But, that is something Romney understands and admires, so why expect anything else from these two.
...Gov. Brian Schweitzer said (click title to entry - thank you) he and Hamm first met during negotiations for the Keystone XL pipeline. Producers in North Dakota were frustrated because pipeline developers didn't have much interest in transporting North Dakota crude....
These men have no respect for a healthy environment or the fact there are huge tracts of land suffering from drought. I mean what have we got here?
In the USA daily consumption is 19,150,000 barrels per day. Each barrel is 42 US gallons of crude oil. That estimate is from 2010.
Mr. Hamm's Continental Resources owes and operates the lands in North Dakota of the Bakken Fornation. It was named after the original owner of the property. The oil reserve of the entire Bakken Forrmation has a maximum assessementt of 18 billion barrels of which only 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels are accessible with state of the art technology. That available assessed capacity was at the end of 2007, so there is far less today.These men have no respect for a healthy environment or the fact there are huge tracts of land suffering from drought. I mean what have we got here?
In the USA daily consumption is 19,150,000 barrels per day. Each barrel is 42 US gallons of crude oil. That estimate is from 2010.
If there were still 4.3 billion barrels of crude oil available for the refinery today and it was all gasoline, which it isn't that would mean the entire Bakken Formation would yield enough oil for the USA for 225 days. That is it! Less than a years supply of crude oil will come out of these lands for the USA.
The Keystone XL Pipeline is not about supply oil that will bring the price of gas down. This pipeline has been a dreamscape by billionaires in the USA that simply don't care about the future of the children of this nation and the fact Earth is simply too hot to continue on this path.
The State Department Environmental Impact Statement fails (click here) to adequately analyze lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by the pipeline. Extraction and refinement of oil sands are more GHG-intensive compared to conventional oil. The EIS estimates that the additional annual GHG emissions from the proposed pipeline could range from an additional “12-23 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent… (roughly the equivalent of annual emissions from 2 to 4 coal-fired power plants)” over conventional crude oil from the Middle East. The EPA believes that the methodology used by the State Department is inaccurate and could underestimate GHG emissions by as much as 20 percent. Given that the expected lifetime of the Keystone XL pipeline is fifty years, the EPA notes that the project could yield an extra 1.15 billion tons of GHGs using the quantitative estimates in the EIS.
The energy sector have been locked into looking in all the wrong places. The fact the petroleum industry has been a complete disaster throughout its history, including the fact we have a planet on meltdown, we cannot simply allow more of the same at any cost. The Keystone XL Pipeline is an unnecessary project by a billionaire who can't get over his own dependency on crude oil. Somewhere in all this is a justification during the Bush/Cheney White House that energy independence means drilling regardless of environmental costs. It is outrageous. Never once do these men entertain the idea of peace and breaking the addiction to oil, but, only continuing the dependency and seeking only wealth as if the people of the USA can actually continue this fantasy.
Drilling for crude oil is a fantasy and we don't need it. It is not going to solve the nation's problems, but, only continues to strand American citizens for yet another generation of exploitation.
...Last year was quite a year for oil and gas disasters.(click here) In addition to the BP blowout, there was a leak on BP's TransAlaska pipeline, a million-gallon oil spill in Michigan, and a gas explosion that destroyed 37 homes and killed eight people in California. So it would seem like a lousy time for a Canadian company to propose building a pipeline, the Keystone XL, right through the middle of the continent—especially one that may be unnecessary and that even some oil companies think is overpriced....
