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Why was President Obama speaking at the small town of Cushing, Oklahoma this morning? Whether or not you know the answer to that questions probably predicts where you stand on energy policy. Cushing is the Pipelines Crossroads of the World—they even have a monument. The town is the central hub for American oil pipelines, feeding [...]
The proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline is the environmental issue that will not go away. More than a month after President Obama rejected the initial plan for the pipeline—which would have moved some 830,000 barrels a day of oil sands crude from Alberta across the upper Midwest—barely a day goes by without partisans on [...]
There are no shortage of reasons why the Keystone XL pipeline has become such a hot button issue for environmentalists. Many worry about the risks the project could pose to the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska, where the pipeline was originally designed to pass. Indeed, when President Obama rejected Keystone XL in January, his stated concern [...]
If there were any doubt that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline—which would bring more than 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian oils sands through the Midwest to refineries in the U.S.—has become the biggest environmental issue in America, this week should have quieted them. On Monday at 12 PM ET a coalition of major environmental [...]
Chalk a win up for the environmentalists. On Wednesday, the White House announced that it was rejecting—on the recommendation of the State Department—the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought 700,000 barrels a day of oil sands crude from western Canada into the U.S. In many ways the announcement—forced by Congressional legislation passed late [...]
Credibility is a precious thing. Oil giant ExxonMobil did not have much to begin with, but it went even deeper into its scarce reserves in the past few days when a company pipeline spilled oil into a river that runs past the homes of about 6,500 people. Wednesday brought another blow: it turns out ExxonMobil needed almost [...]
Amid the fireworks, parades, and hot dogs of this past Fourth of July weekend was that sinking feeling of déjà vu when news broke that yet another oil spill was oozing across once-clean waters. This time, it wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico, it was Montana; and it wasn’t BP, it was ExxonMobil. On Friday, 1,000 barrels [...]
The issue has been a bit under the radar until recently, but the debate over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline—which could bring up to 800,000 barrels a day of additional Canadian oil sands crude to the U.S.—is heating up. Because the proposed pipeline would cross international barriers—funneling crude from Canada’s massive Albertan oil sands developments [...]
That’s what BP reported early Wednesday morning, in what the company called a “significant milestone.” BP stopped pumping heavy mud into the blown well around eight hours after beginning on Tuesday afternoon, saying that the procedure had achieved its “desired outcome.” Here’s part of the press release from BP: The well is now being monitored, [...]
The “static kill” is so called because that’s what BP aims to create—a static situation within its blown well, one where the drilling mud the company is currently pumping into the well offsets the pressure in the reservoir itself. If BP’s Houston-based drilling engineers want some advice on how to create a static situation, however, [...]
