So, here in Canada pipelines have boiled up again with the usa going nutso on trade. And if we could get oil and natural gas to our east coast we could open up a bunch more markets and not sell it on the super cheap to the usa. Obviously that means piping it across the land to eventually fill up ships.
Now quebec is out right refusing to allow a pipeline through their province. Which is their right. But if the goal is to just get it to a waterway with access to the Atlantic why not bring the pipelines down to a point on east lake ontario. Setup a new deep water harbour and terminals/oil storage and ship the oil from there by ship out the st Lawrence and over seas? Why wouldn’t Doug fords advocate for that as a way to bring more jobs to ontario? Maybe look at setting up some Canadian refineries in the same spot? Like I know it’s not cheap but is their other reasons it’s not even being mentioned?
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The endpoint for most of that oil, I think, is the refinery in Saint John NB. Makes the most sense to run the pipeline there.
Most oil tankers couldn’t make it through the St Lawrence seaway. They’re too large.
Spill risk in the Great lakes would be too great.
Tankers wouldn’t be able to pick up from like December until March.
To do this would require small tankers or barges, which increases relative costs overall.
The primary reason is, as you identify, that it is not cheap.
More than just the cost of building a pipeline, building a pipeline to a river port that requires further shipping on water to reach a sea port is prohibitively expensive.
Pipelines have an enormous upfront cost per mile, but once constructed, transport costs scale roughly with the volume of goods transported. Port costs, labor on the water, and other costs introduce significant recurring overhead costs. If you can’t avoid those costs at the end of the pipeline, there is much less value in building it.
The simple answer is that the majority of refineries that can actually process the type of oil coming out of Alberta are all on the US gulf coast and the oil is already piped there directly via Keystone.
The St John, NB refinery and east coat refineries in general, US included, are built for processing light, sweet crude from places like Texas and Saudi Arabia. Most of those refineries imported crude is of Texan and Saudi origin. They are not equipped to process the Alberta tar sand bitumen, heavy, sour crude. That type of crude is much more expensive to process. It would cost a whole lot of $$$(billions) to retool those refineries to process the heavy crude from Alberta or build new refineries.
Any pipeline to the east coast would be for export only. But it would be exported to heavy crude processing refineries in the gulf coast US states like Texas and Louisiana. In those cases, there are already pipelines(Keystone) from Alberta to Texas where the refineries are tooled to process the Alberta heavy crude.
Why build a new, insanely expensive pipeline to the St Lawrence, transfer to a ship, sail to Houston, TX and unload when you can already send it straight from Alberta to Houston via the Keystone pipeline? The ROI just isn’t there for an east coast pipeline despite the current trade issues because it’ll just end up on the US gulf coast anyway where it can be processed.
Lots of Texans in Alberta and vice versa because of this.
Another fun fact is that Texas refineries can’t process their own light, sweet crude. Most of the Texas crude gets exported to places like St John, NB for processing!
If I recall correctly, one of the main reasons that Quebec refused a pipeline through the province in the past was that the pipeline would end up passing through prime agricultural lands and cross the St. Lawrence to get to the east coast.
Their concern was environmental damage and cleanup costs in the event of a spill. They didn’t want to be responsible for all the cost, the companies running oil through the pipes didn’t want to be liable for the spills, the pipe operators didn’t want to be liable because they were transport, not product, and the federal government believed that the oil and pipeline are private industries/consortiums and should be responsible for their own actions. So everyone was at loggerheads.
Should the feds make a west-east pipeline a national security project, it would be easier to greenlight. Quebec would still resist though. The only two solutions I can think of to get around this would be:
A pipeline is doable. It’s getting everyone on the same page that’s the hard part.