Suddenly, somehow, after years of fret over the need for imported energy, voices have arisen in the US to make oil and gas exports sound objectionable. Energy views this haywire can come only from a lawmaker like Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and a group like the Sierra Club.
At a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on legislation pushing approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, Markey faulted the bill for containing "no guarantee that even a drop of the tar-sands oil and fuels will stay in this country." A logical observer might have expected him to welcome the prospect since he earlier asserted the pipeline "would carry some of the world's dirtiest oil right through the middle of our country." But Markey never lets logic stifle a catchy sound bite. "This bill not only tries to sneak a pipeline through the country," he complained. "It also allows TransCanada to sneak the fuels from the pipeline right out of the country."
No sneaking
TransCanada, the Keystone XL sponsor, would own neither the blended bitumen the pipeline would carry from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast nor the products it yielded. The company therefore couldn't "sneak" anything beyond the end of its pipeline. To Markey, though, facts matter no more than logic.
Refiners buying the heavy oil might indeed export some of the products. They export products now, and the sun still rises every morning. Last year, in fact, the US exported more products than it imported. What's wrong with that? What, given the US trade deficit, would be wrong if the US exported even more? The answer, to Markey, lies in the quite reasonable assumption that refiners export products in order to make money.
"Make no mistake," he said in his opening statement at the Feb. 7 hearing. "This bill is not about energy security. It is not about jobs. It is about oil company profits, plain and simple."
So Markey would have Americans believe there'd be no security benefit from increasing pipeline imports of oil from friendly Canada. He argues that only 5,000-6,000 jobs would result from Keystone XL construction, not the 20,000 TransCanada has projected, pipe spread by pipe spread. And he asserts that a nation with a struggling economy should foreclose profits that would be earned by an industry he dislikes. No one has been cleverer than Markey about squandering whatever credibility he might once have possessed on energy—whenever that might have been.
The Sierra Club, too, is campaigning against exports, in its case of LNG. The possibility of US exports of LNG arises from a remarkable surge in gas production from shales, made possible partly by hydraulic fracturing, which groups like the Sierra Club demonize. On Feb. 6, the Sierra Club filed its fourth protest against a proposed export facility, claiming LNG "is not only the dirtiest and most polluting form of gas, but it also requires an increase in fracing, a process we know to be unsafe and dangerous."
New supply realm
This goes beyond exaggeration; it's outright falsehood. The Sierra Club and other activist groups desperately want to ban fracing in order to foreclose a technology-propelled step into a new realm of oil and gas supply from low-quality reservoirs. That this new realm is potentially larger, however more challenging and costly, than its conventional predecessor threatens to junk activist dreams about the demise of fossil energy. So the Sierra Club and like-minded groups join Markey in resisting commodity exports and the attendant economic benefits.
They share a base agenda, which Markey made explicit when he said Keystone XL "can't wean us off oil no matter how much tar sands are pried out of Canadian soil." It's an agenda built on antioil fantasies promising little energy and limitless cost. And it's forcing lawmakers like Markey and groups like the Sierra Club to take positions on economic ground that no one, not even a master quipster, can defend.
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