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Due to Obama and the Democrats stonewalling the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada has begun work on a pipeline from the tar sands to a port on their east coast, which is already used for shipping out oil.
The new line and port upgrades will enable shipping out a lot more oil... to the US Gulf coast refineries where the derailment/spill/fire prone trains are taking it right now.
So, thank you, Obama, for what will eventually be a much increased chance of Disaster At Sea... unless...
...the current Congress can get enough Democrats on board (who wants to get reelected?) to veto-proof Keystone. Will a for-sure gonna build it Keystone pipeline kill the Canadian one?
OPEC pushing crude oil prices down has but one goal, to scuttle BOTH of these pipeline projects by making North American oil production too expensive to need the pipelines.
What I would love to see is an act of Congress to rescind oil leases where wells have been drilled and found to have good production potential, but have been capped or plugged. Auction them off with the caveat that within one year of purchase those wells MUST have a pump installed and operating or it gets taken back and auctioned off again.
Do the same with wells that have been abandoned where the company has gone out of business and nobody bought the assets. Many of those wells may need to be re-found because they've been lost track of. On land the well hunting could be done by volunteers. It worked for surfacestations.org to locate and document the (mostly lousy) current condition of the USHCN stations.
The thousands of abandoned underwater wells are more of a problem. They would require time consuming and expensive deep diving, submarine and ROV work to locate, check for leaks and tag so they don't get re-lost. Leakers should be at the top of the list for converting to production or if the casing has gone too bad to salvage, fill the hole bottom to top and tag it permanently plugged and abandoned.
Instead of drill, baby, drill it should be pump, baby, pump!
That's what really had me steaming over the Deepwater Horizon well. Why bother drilling such a well when they weren't planning to produce from it soon as possible? There's only a thousand or two other wells full of oil in the Gulf not being tapped.
DH wouldn't have had the blowout if BP had told Obama's stupid busybodies where they could shove it and done the plugging correctly instead of cutting corners to meet the Feds' schedule. 'Course BP also is to blame for installing a blowout preventer they knew had problems, instead of using a new one or doing a full overhaul on the one they used to ensure it would work. What government agency was supposed to inspect that?
People keep repeating the same kinds of errors that lead to disaster, be it miles deep oil wells, space shuttles*, dams, high rise construction cranes... "It's always worked before, let's just pile on one more straw, should work fine."
*Challenger, another case of government pushing to keep a schedule and pressuring a contractor to go outside known performance parameters to avoid "losing face". The Thiokol people should have put their collective foot down and said "We do not recommend launching at that temperature. We have no data to know what might happen. If you launch anyway and something fails, it's all on NASA. Our products have always performed as designed *at the launch temperature range originally specified*."
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