Peter Kiewit and A Bit of Irony -- Keystone XL

Connecting the dots, this is very, very interesting -- so much irony when you put the stories together, one could probably write a Hollywood movie script.

Two or three months ago I had not heard of Peter Kiewit, although everyone else who reads this blog had. Kiewit is to construction, what Halliburton is to oil services, or Cargill is to grain.

A subsidiary of Kiewit, Granite Peak, is developing several major projects in Williston, as part of the Bakken boom.

It turns out that that Kiewit has an engineering/information technology institute with their name at the University of Nebraska-Omaha/Lincoln, the Peter Kiewit Institute.

Recently the institute posted a paper at their website published by engineering students at the University of Nebraska regarding the Keystone XL pipeline. I would have thought the results would have been different. The results were picked by the mainstream media:

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor who analyzed the potential for accidents along the pipeline said that TransCanada had significantly underestimated the potential for leaks and spills.
John Stansbury, an associate professor of water resources engineering, said even if a Keystone XL pipeline failure leaked into a lesser tributary, that could harm a major river like the Yellowstone or the Missouri as spilled oil flowed downstream.

"If someone comes along and knocks a hole in the pipe beneath XYZ creek, it won't make much difference how deep it was beneath the Yellowstone," Stansbury said. "In my estimation, there's going to be spills and there will be some big spills, and they underestimated the frequency and underestimated the volume."

It should be noted that Nebraska has become ground zero in the nationwide effort to stop Keystone XL.

I sort of get a kick out of this. Early on, SecState Hillary Clinton supported the Keystone XL project but lately she has become more circumspect when talking about the project. I no longer know where she stands on the issue. Likewise, many Obama folks know, even if they are unwilling to admit it, that the Keystone XL is best for the nation at large. In fact my hunch is that the Pelosi crowd stands to make huge amounts of money on this project. It certainly looks like a tipping point has been reached: whether or not the project will go through. If it fails to go through, one can argue that administration folks who supported the project dithered too long and now the nationwide effort to stop it has become too big to fail.

And if the Keystone XL project fails to go through, the nationwide move to stop the project can thank the Peter Kiewit Institute for its help. The irony is that the institute is funded by a company that makes its money on these kinds of projects.

I still say TransCanada should shift the Keystone XL ninety degrees: lay it east-to-west, rather than north-to-south.

The Chinese have bought another interest in Canadian oil sands, by the way.