In this afternoon's discussion of the Minnesota House bill to provide $20 million emergency energy assistance to low income Minnesotans hit by high propane costs, several Republicans rose to urge a green-lighting of the Keystone XL pipeline.
This struck Bluestem as a bit curious, since TransCanada is building the pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, NE to carry diluted bitumen oil from the Canadian tar sands region, with about 100,000 barrels a day of crude from the Bakken formation in Montana and North Dakota coming onto the pipeline through a upload link in Baker, Montana.
It's not going through Minnesota and it's not carrying propane, and the pipeline would haul about one-tenth of Bakken's current production of 1 million barrels a day.
Fortunately, American Legislative Exchange state co-chair Rep. Pat Garofalo (R-Farmington) jumped in to help.
The Uptake posted both the video and a summary:
Rep. Pat Garofalo says the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline would help solve some of Minnesota's energy problems. The state has seen a long string of subzero weather and spikes in propane prices many times over the normal price. He says the pipeline make energy supplies move faster and have the added benefit of reducing oil tanker traffic through Minnesota by 60% to 70%.
Garofalo seems to have drawn his statistics from a Star Tribune editorial that he shared on his Facebook page on February 2. In Toughen safeguards for moving oil by rail, the editorial board wrote:
Building the Keystone Pipeline could decrease rail shipments out of the Bakken by as much as 60 to 70 percent, according to Brookings Institution expert Charles Ebinger — but pipelines are not without risks, either, and the political stalemate over Keystone suggests that oil will continue to roll through Minnesota well into the future.
Following the links to the Brookings Institution, Bluestem wasn't able to find that statement by Ebinger, though perhaps it's there somewhere.
And while 100,000 BPD isa tidy amount of the Bakken shale oil that isn't refined in North Dakota at the refinery in Mandan, it's not 60-70 percent of the tanker train traffic from the Bakken going through Minnesota. MN 2020 Transportation Fellow Conrad deFiebre reported:
.. . According to the Association of American Railroads, major U.S. railroads moved an estimated 400,000 carloads of crude oil last year, up 40-fold from as recently as 2008.
About 80 percent of the total carloads pass through Minnesota, and 60 percent through the highly populated Twin Cities, before fanning out into many other states. In return, we’ve lost about one coal train passing through the state for every two oil trains gained, Christianson said.
Most of that crude oil is from the Bakken and we're talking tank car loads, not barrels. Global Research reported in December 2013:
Less than four years later, railroads have shipped as much as 600,000 barrels a day from the Bakken and are transporting crude not just from North Dakota but from oil-fracking sites in Montana, Texas, Utah, Ohio, Wyoming, Colorado, and southern Canada.
A 100,000 barrel per day reduction from that isn't 60-70 percent.
Another set of figures comes up from the Duluth News Tribune, via DeSmog Blog (and yes, Bluestem read the original article in Nexis):
. . . But few could argue the fact that rail reigns supreme for bringing Bakken fracked oil to market.
"Last November, rail shipped 71 percent — nearly 800,000 barrels of oil a day — of the Bakken’s oil, much of it on lines across Minnesota and Wisconsin, while pipelines shipped just 22 percent, according to estimates from the North Dakota Pipeline Authority," explains the Duluth News Tribune.
So once again, building the Keystone line wouldn't liberate 60-70 percent of Minnesota's rail lines for shipping propane and other products.
It's possible that Garofalo meant future shipments of tar sands crude if the pipeline wasn't developed, but Bluestem suspects that he merely cited the figure in the Star Tribune editorial without really looking into matters.
Or considering other paths for energy policy, like the solar furnaces that Representative John Persell (DFL-Bemidji) said were being used with great success in his district.
Garofalo repeated the claim (without the 60-70 percent figure) in a statement on his official webpage later in the afternoon:
"This bill will give peace of mind to the thousands of Minnesota families who rely on this program to heat their homes during this unusually harsh winter. However, this is a short-term fix to a long-term problem of our own making. By building widely-supported pipeline projects like Keystone XL, we can alleviate much of the oil tanker traffic on our rail lines that caused key delays on emergency propane shipments during the propane shortage last month.
No surprise that he didn't dig deeper on the claim in the Strib editorial, since the energy-corporation bill factory that is ALEC has offered the Resolution in Support of the Keystone XL Pipeline. In Minnesota, five senators introduced the resolution in the upper chamber, while five representatives led by non-ALEC member Mary Franson threw the bill in the hopper in 2013.
Photo: Pat Garofalo and a cute pup, via Facebook: "I dont care if you agree with me. Just vote for me because I'm nice to this puppy."
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