http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=138x2484_____________________________________________________
Witchy_Dem
Donating Member (302 posts) Wed Sep-03-08 07:03 PM
Response to Original message
6. Palin and TransCanada
I'm looking for facts to back up the following comments. Further down that post there are two comments about the TransCanada Pipeline deal which in part reads:
A couple years ago, ConocoPhillips and BP proposed to build a gas pipeline with their own money to take (relatively) clean natural gas from Prudhoe Bay south, all the way to the Lower 48. What was Palin's response? She hustled the Alaska State legislature to award the license to a competitor, TransCanada Pipelines, but with a $500 million taxpayer incentive attached.
That's right, the people of Alaska gifted half a billion to get a pipeline built that another consortium was willing to build with its own nickle.
But, it gets even better. It turns out that the TransCanada Pipeline project won't be taking gas to the United States, after all. It will end at a preexisting terminal in Ft. McKenzie, Alberta. What's there? The world's largest tar sand pits. And, what might natural gas have to do with that? A billion cubic feet of the stuff is needed to cook the petroleum slury out of the sand for shipment to the U.S. for processing into motor fuels and heating oil, a much dirtier end use for the stuff. But, more profitable in an era of $150/bbl oil. So, who owns the processing plants and tar sands? If you guessed ConocoPhillips and BP, you get a cigar.
So, to wrap up, what was Sarah Plain's role as "reformer" and oil industry watchdog? She handed the oil companies $500 million taxpayer dollars to build the shorter pipeline that they really wanted to begin with.
Follow the pipeline, and you'll find the money.
What they're doing is first, an end-around of NAFTA, because the gas will come from the US (Alaska, remember?) rather than Canada, and second, getting more profit out of it because of the high price of oil and the comparatively low price of gas. The oil companies would otherwise have to tap the McKenzie gas fields to develop the Athabasca tar sands; but they can't do that because of NAFTA. With this pipeline in place, they can use the Alaskan gas instead, and basically sell it to us at five times the price by shipping synthetic crude from Athabasca made with the gas, rather than directly shipping gas from Alaska. To top it all off, they get to keep the price of gas high in the lower 48 because there's no major influx of gas from Alaska; they're burning it in Athabasca.
Joe Sixpack ain't gonna be able to follow this particular piece of legerdemain. The 500 million simoleans is seed money to get the project going to employ Alaskans. You can almost make a case for this if you ignore the global warming implications, the price of the Athabasca synthetic crude, and the price of natural gas in the lower 48.
This is one seriously slick piece of double-dealing. Palin can point to the benefits to Alaska and justify it that way; the oil companies can point to the Athabasca synthetic crude and claim they're providing what we said we wanted; and they make more profit off the gas two ways, first because they use it to make a higher-profit product, and second because they don't drive the price of the gas they're selling down by adding the Alaska gas to the market.
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