TransCanada could shorten pipeline to get around Obama
Bloomberg:
TransCanada Corp. (TRP) may shorten the initial path for its rejected Keystone XL project, bringing oil from Montana’s Bakken Shale to refiners in the Gulf of Mexico and removing the need for federal approval.“There certainly is a potential opportunity to connect the Bakken to theGulf Coast,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president of energy and oil pipelines, said in a telephone interview today. “That is obviously something we’ll be looking into over the next few weeks.”TransCanada’s $7 billion Keystone XL proposal to bring crude fromCanada’s oil sands to the Gulf was rejected yesterday by the Obama administration. The project required U.S. approval because it crossed the border with Canada. The company may seek that approval after it builds the segment from Montana to the Gulf, Pourbaix said.The Bakken shale-rock formation is estimated to hold as much as 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana, according to a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report. Oil production in North Dakota surged 42 percent to 510,000 barrels a day in November, exceeding the output of Ecuador.Production in the Bakken field may reach 750,000 barrels a day this year, Edward Morse, managing director of commodities research for Citigroup Inc., said at a conference in Calgary today.
...Getting the Bakken oil to market should be a top priority. It is also a move that gets the State Department out of the decision process and completes an important leg of the project. They could then quickly tie in the Canadian portion when there is a more reasonable administration in office.
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