Quote:
Originally Posted by vintagetoppsguy
I don't have the answer, but I can speculate. Canadian oil has heavy sands. It is more time consuming to refine, it pollutes the environment (air and freshwater) 3X more than conventional crude, and it's more harsh on the process equipment because of the abrasiveness. All around, it's more costly to refine. Again, I don't know if that's the reason or not, but I imagine that has a lot to do with it.
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While that is true, the oil coming into the US and potentially from Venezuela is also heavy crude. Refineries in and around Houston, on the Gulf Coast, are currently built to process that crude. That is why heavy oil from Western Canada was to travel down through Keystone to the Gulf Coast, to be refined and shipped.
As for environmental standards, while I do not have any exact metrics, I would be shocked if oil extracted from Russia (or Saudi, for example) via a well, pumped to a loading station, loaded into tankers, loaded onto a barge, having that barge travel across the Atlantic, unloaded from the barge, transferred to a refinery in the US, and then refined is (in the end) a lower carbon footprint than shipping product directly from Western Canada to the US Gulf Coast via a pipeline.
As for environmental standards in Russia, I have known some pipeline people who have worked in Russia. A pipeline spill over there is almost fixed with duct tape, with product continually spilled onto the ground. The environmental standards are nil.