I’m either in a rut or a groove.
As a sequel to last week’s report, my current energy viewpoint can be summarized much like the demand from the inappropriately named, not so friendly, Queen of Hearts when she said, “Off with his head!”
In this country, this sentiment can be modified by saying, “Off with ITs head!”
This is because inanimate objects have no life.
Nothing could be more true!
The Keystone XL pipeline has been sent to the lost and found department. Permanently lost. Never to be found.
Its obituary is short and not sweet.
First approved by our very own government entity in 2007, this pipeline was planned to move 833,000 bpd of Western Canadian Select crude 1,947 kilometers south to our friendly, one and only customer at a cost of $9 billion.
The startup date was projected to be in 2012.
So, it was supposed to be up and running nine years ago!
What wasn’t planned was that over the 14 years since Canada ever so arrogantly approved the project, the U.S. presidential flavour of the term changed every four years.
The XL was then approved and then disapproved as the political windshield wipers moved from left to right and back again.
Meanwhile, in this country, the wiper blades stayed stuck in the middle of the windshield with no prime minister in Ottawa prepared, qualified, or motivated to fix it.
In fact, we went the other way.
With the 4th largest crude oil reserves in the world in our back yard, we turtled to the enviro activists who wanted to deactivate this country’s economic engine and shut down the oilsands.
Now they are close to doing just that with the support of our current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Energy East went Energy Least.
The gate was slammed shut by our PM on Northern Gateway.
The XL just got X’d out.
Line 5 is in limbo awaiting the upcoming federal election, which Ottawa will stall until the results are in.
The publicly owned TransMountain construction has been stalled so as not to disturb the nesting season of the ferocious Sabre-Toothed Hummingbird.
Much to the relief of the bureaucrats in Ottawa. the TransMountain may now come under the ownership of the Indigenous community who should have owned it in the first place if the goal was, in fact, to build it at all.
Looks like we just aren’t builders.
The fate of the XL should have been anticipated at the local Ottawa level. Its very own XL was, and still is, the Ottawa LRT line, which was, or still is, supposed to be only 64 kms at a planned cost of $2.1 billion.
After 10 years it is still not up and running.
Ottawa is home to a contagion.
Off with his socks. I Say!
– Roger McKnight – B.Sc., Senior Petroleum Analyst
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