President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline proposal on Nov. 6. The decision, while a victory for environmentalists, angered the oil industry and Republican lawmakers. Obama said the project would “neither be a silver bullet for the economy” nor “the express lane to climate disaster,” according to Financial Times.

The Daily Orange talked about the rejection and its consequences with David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and Tristan Brown, assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

The Daily Orange: Do you approve Obama’s decision to turn down the project?

David Popp: I don’t think it is a terribly bad decision but I think it was a missed opportunity … I think at the end of the day, the decision to do it or not is not going to make a big difference one way or the other. It has become much of a political symbol, but I think it could have been used and tried to be able to get something else.

Tristan Brown: Now that the Keystone XL has been shut down there are two other pipelines that are likely to be built in Canada … From an environmental perspective, there is really no impact from canceling it. From an economic perspective, it is very expensive to do and so I have a feeling that even if the Keystone XL had been built, this crude (oil) would not have been shipped, which is because the crude is too expensive and cannot compete with conventional petroleum.

The D.O.: The oil price is historically low. Why was there was a need to create the pipeline? 

D.P.: The plans for building a pipeline have been around for a number of years. They started when the price of oil was a lot higher and before the fracking reached as high a level as it has been in a couple of years. Another thing to keep in mind, though, is the point of the pipeline is not necessarily to get the oil to the U.S. markets. The pipeline would go all way down to the Gulf Coast and some of it would go to the Gulf Coast refineries but also would give Canadian firms opportunity to get oil into the global markets as well.

The D.O.: According to the State Department review, the pipeline would contribute to increase emissions of greenhouse gas but those emissions are “only one source.” What was particularly controversial about this project?

T.B.: The main reason it is so controversial is the stuff that was going to be shipped through it is not conventional petroleum. What it’s known as is tar sands or oil shale … because it is semi-solid, if you want to process it in a refinery, you first have to convert it into a liquid, and that is not just expensive to do but it’s very energy intensive. If you look at the carbon footprint of these unconventional petroleum from Alberta, Canada, it’s about 25 to 30 percent more polluting in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions than equal amount of the conventional petroleum … Environmentalists were worried that this would mean that greenhouse gas emissions would increase even further if we started processing this unconventional crude.

The D.O.: What’s your projection on U.S. energy security in the post-Keystone era?

T.B.: One thing we found is the U.S. energy security has greatly improved in the recent years, and that’s primary due to the discovery of lots of petroleum within the U.S. We thought we were running out. We were actually running out starting about in 1970; our petroleum production was falling very rapidly … It turns out that the shale petroleum — where the petroleum is kind of trapped in these shale formations — fracking releases those as well.

Published on November 16, 2015 at 8:38 pm

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