nestork wrote:

Speaking of that pipeline, that's another thing. Everyone except
the environmentalists agree that it's a no-brainer, and even the
environmentalists agree that a pipeline is safer then shipping that
oil by sea.

Right now, and for the past X months, Marathon oil company in Detroit
has been refining Alberta Tar Sands oil that it gets via existing
pipelines. The byproduct of that refining - a mountain of "pet-coke",
is sitting on a vacant lot right beside the Detroit river on the US
side, down-river some distance from the Ambassador Bridge.

There appears to be no plans as to what will become of this looming pile
of ****, it's an environmental distaster happening in slow motion as
rain water runoff carries it into the river.

I've read estimates that up to 30% of a barrel of tar-sands crude is
actually this pet-coke ****.

Extracting oil from the Alberta Tar sands is actually one big massive
environmental cleanup when you think about it. If this low-quality
crude was left somewhere in a shallow pit by a previous industrial
process or company, then what you'd do with it now to remediate the land
and detoxify it is pretty much the same thing that is going on in the
tar sands.

Canada has enough oil to last us over 400 years, as much oil
as Saudi Arabia, but

but it is low quality, high sulphur ****.

The most efficient way to deal with it is to process it on-site, and use
steam generated by small nuclear reactors to do it, instead of burning
massive amounts of natural gas.

You want to know the real reason why the XL pipeline wasn't approved by
the US gov't?

The real reason - because Canada is probably not going to play along
with being a partner in the multi-billion-dollar Lockheed Martin F-35
fiasco.

We've realized that the F-35 is a money-sucking excuse for a fighter
jet, and we've pulled our plans to buy some of these planes at
ridiculous prices as the entire project cost over-runs goes into orbit.

The US doesn't like it when Canada doesn't buy it's "fair share" of
military hardware from US vendors, and retaliation like the XL pipeline
veto is one of the consequences.