Pipeline Dream

From IBD:

Posted 3/6/2006
Energy: The environmental lobby has thus far blocked tapping the oil reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Canada draws oil from a remote and frozen region and sells it in the U.S.

Already America's largest provider of oil, Canada soon will be selling even more here. Better than Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or some other potentially hostile country being our top supplier. But it's still not the same as increasing production from our domestic reserves.

Though we already get 2.1 million barrels a day from Canada, oil from northern Alberta's oil sand fields has rarely reached southward beyond Chicago. That changed last week when crude from those oil sand reserves were piped to Oklahoma, from where they will be sent to refiners that had long been getting their crude from other sources, particularly the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a landmark day when the flow of the Spearhead Pipeline, which originally streamed from Chicago to Cushing, Okla., was reversed.

The U.S. has relied on the Gulf to provide oil for decades. Now that reliance is moving north, where oil is squeezed from a mixture of sand, water and clay called tar sands or oil sands. A third of all oil produced in Canada is from these oil sands.

Because the largest known reserve of oil in the world — an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 trillion barrels, according to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, Alberta — can be found in the oil sands of that western Canadian province. And thanks to modern systems, Canada is likely to double its oil production in the next decade based on what's sitting in the northern reaches of Alberta.

Again, nothing wrong with buying more oil from Canada. But it seems wholly unnecessary when the earth is ready to bestow 12 billion barrels of precious oil — and possibly as many as 16 billion barrels — from beneath the barren ANWR landscape that is within our borders and that could be fairly easily pumped out.

Extracting oil from the tar sands is not a clean process that leaves no mark on the environment. The energy companies clean up after themselves and restore the land, but man leaves a footprint everywhere he goes, whether it's from pulling oil from the ground in a frozen tundra or building a village of lean-tos in Africa.

So why does the green movement fight drilling in ANWR so viciously while operations in Canada's oil-sand fields expand?

It can't be because drilling in ANWR would foul the environment more. It's because the environmental lobby has gotten to U.S. lawmakers and knows that by putting up an outsized fuss, it can get its way. Too many politicians, particularly those in the Northeast, quaver at the thought that environmental groups will label them as enemies of a fresh-as-a-daisy environment.

ANWR is the most important oil reserve this nation has. It's probably more crucial to the U.S. than the tar sands are to Canada. Cutting our reliance on foreign sources and keeping gasoline prices at the pump at sane levels are desired conditions that could have been achieved had production at ANWR not been blocked in the 1990s.

But lawmakers rarely see past the next election, and enough of them with this sort of myopia in years past stood in the way of development of ANWR. And they continue to do so.

In the meantime, Canada begins a new era in oil production, and it will surely benefit America. It's too bad Washington can't find a way to do the same here.