Canadian oil going to China isn't as easy as it might seem

Bloomberg:  Obama’s Keystone Denial Prompts Canada to Look to China Sales  Via Drudge.  "Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a telephone call yesterday, told Obama “Canada will continue to work to diversify its energy exports,” according to details provided by Harper’s office. Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver said relying less on the U.S. would help strengthen the country’s “financial security.”

"The “decision by the Obama administration underlines the importance of diversifying and expanding our markets, including the growing Asian market,” Oliver told reporters in Ottawa." " Emphasis added.

What about that Canadian pipeline to the west coast if they sell the oil to China?  "The plan is to pump over half a million barrels a day of unrefined bitumen from the Alberta tar sands over the Rockies, through the heartland of B.C. - crossing a thousand rivers and streams in the process - to the Port of Kitimat in the Great Bear Rainforest.....

"Dubbed the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the project is of concern for three main reasons: 1. It would facilitate the expansion of the tar sands, hooking emerging Asian economies on the world's dirtiest oil; 2. the risk of leaks from the pipeline itself; 3. the danger of introducing oil supertankers for the first time to this part of the B.C. coast."  The Enbridge site.


Rick Moran in American Thinker:  Rejecting Keystone is 'insanity': Samuelson

The big winners are the Chinese. They must be celebrating their good fortune and wondering how the crazy Americans could repudiate such a huge supply of nearby energy. There's no guarantee that tar-sands oil will go to China; pipelines to the Pacific would have to be built. But it creates the possibility when the oil's natural market is the United States.

"This is the Obama we have come to know and love; piously proclaiming his priority being job creation while taking actions that directly contradict that priority. He says he wants business to thrive -- and then throws up roadblock regulations to prevent it. He says he wants the economy to grow -- and then advocates policies that stifle growth.

"And then he blames his failures on others."