Finally: A Pipeline For The Rest of Us! -- Not About The Bakken

Finally, someone is taking my advice and metaphorically rotating TransCanada's XL 1.0/2.0 ninety degrees, proposing to take Canadian heavy oil to Asia via the west coast.

The story is in the Wall Street Journal, this date (print media; no link).

Data points:

• Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP
• $5 billion expansion of its TransMountain pipeline
• to be completed in 2017
• will nearly triple the capacity of the crude oil it can ship to Canada's west coast
• currently, almost ALL Canadian oil crude exports are to the US -- "almost all"
• currently the pipeline ships a small amount (from Alberta to Vancouver)
• the "small amount" currently: 300,000 bopd
• expansion: up to 850,000 bopd
• will compete with Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Albert to a small, northern port in British Columbia; $5.5 billion; also to be completed in 2017; faces strong resistance from Native Americans
• Kinder Morgan proposed expansion may have an easier time; the current pipeline has been there for 60 years

Wow: "small amount" is defined as 300,000 bopd. The Alaskan pipeline is flirting with 600,000 bopd; the current total North Dakota production is about 550,000 bopd.

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Several people in the past have written to tell me that I am wrong to say that the president killed the Keystone XL 1.0. From the article:

That effort [to add more capacity going west to Asia] accelerated after the White House earlier this year rejected a big pipeline-expansion project, TransCanada Corp.s' Keystone XL, which would have sent more Alberta crude south of the border.

Following the Clinton presidency I have learned to parse statements well. The sentence says the "White House" not the President, so it's possible someone else in the White House (one wife, two daughters, staff) killed the project.

TransCanada has not yet submitted a new application for the "White House" to review.