Trans-Canadian East-West Pipeline Could Eliminate Need For Keystone XL 2.0 North

Link to an incredibly good and well-researched story. A big "thank you" to Don. (Also, while I'm at it, a huge "thank you" to Steve who has sent me many links over the past few days -- I've been so busy posting stories I haven't kept up with "thanks" and acknowledgements.

Here's the lede for that story and some key data points being reported by Reuters:

Keystone XL, a pipeline proposal to pump Canadian oil sands through the heart of America, has alarmed environmentalists and become one of the most contentious issues of the Obama presidency. But there is a "Plan B" to cut the United States out of the picture, and it is championed by one of Canada's wealthiest business dynasties.

Since 2012, the billionaire Irving family has been advocating a proposal called Energy East. The 2,858-mile (4,600-km) pipeline would link trillions of dollars worth of oil in land-locked fields in the western province of Alberta to an Atlantic port in the Irvings' eastern home province of New Brunswick, north of Maine, creating a gateway to new foreign markets for Canadian oil. 

The C$12 billion ($10.8 billion) line, which would pump 1.1 million barrels per day, would include about 1,865 miles of existing natural gas pipeline converted to carry oil. The rest would be new construction, most of it along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River and into New Brunswick.

The data points:

The Irvings also would be among the top beneficiaries. A study commissioned by TransCanada and prepared by Deloitte calculated that the pipeline's access to cheaper crude from the west would save as much as C$1.2 billion per year for a refinery owned by the Irvings, while creating 121 direct long-term jobs in sparsely populated New Brunswick. 

The family's industrial empire in New Brunswick, a century in the making, can help make it possible: Here in Saint John, their flagship company, Irving Oil, runs the East Coast's only ice-free, deepwater oil port capable of receiving the largest crude tankers. It also operates Canada's largest oil refinery - the source of nearly one in three tanks of gasoline imported to the East Coast of the United States.

How the company got started: 

The Irving empire got its start more than 130 years ago, in a fishing village huddled on New Brunswick's northern coast. A Scottish immigrant named James Dergavel Irving built a saw mill and a general store in the late 1800s near stands of spruce and fir. But it was J.D.'s son, Kenneth Colin, born in 1899, who drove the family's success.

In his early 20s, K.C., a car salesman, convinced his father to let him open a gas station in front of the general store to sell fuel for the Model Ts he retailed. That service station, and the hundreds that followed, became the center of a conglomerate. Though K.C. died in 1992, many here still refer to the man rather than to the business empire, a feature of the company-town feel of this Canadian province.

So much more at the link.

******************************

Flashback

Speaking of Steve, he sent me a link to a story that was first published in The WSJ -- great story; great flashback (note the by-line):

SIDNEY, Mont. -- In the mid-1990s, major oil-exploration companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Gulf Oil Co. and Texaco Co. were shutting down operations here on the remote high plains, abandoning hundreds of nonproducing wells and letting their leases to mineral rights lapse.

Federal and state agencies tracking exploration also considered the region a bust. "I thought my job was going to be turning out the lights," says Jim Halvorson, geologist for Montana's Board of Oil and Gas Conservation. In 2000, his office predicted oil production would rapidly decline toward zero.

But Richard L. Findley, a graying geologist and "wildcat" producer, thought they were all wrong. He bought up leases on the cheap and helped spark a surprising boom in one of the most heavily explored oil regions in the country.

And the rest is history. Think about that. That was in the mid-1990's. Everyone was leaving. Twenty years later, the Bakken is setting records for oil production.