The vote was one part economics, one part environment, and one part politics. Senate Democrats agreed to hold the vote to save Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who is in a difficult re-election battle that will not be decided until a run-off next month. Landrieu has long favored construction of the pipeline.
But it also pitted environmentalists against backers of increased oil production. The environmentalists mounted a fierce challenge to the pipeline, warning that it would increase greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change.
“The last thing this country should be doing is encouraging development of a huge new greenhouse gas,” said David Scott, president of the Sierra Club and a Columbus resident, who calls the oil from Canada’s oil sands an “energy intensive, dirty, inefficient source of energy. This is a giant leap in the wrong direction.”
Ohio’s two senators split on the bill, with Democrat Sherrod Brown opposing it and Republican Rob Portman supporting it. The House approved a virtually identical bill last week 252-161, with all Ohio Republicans supporting it and all Ohio Democrats opposing it.
Brown said he feared the pipeline would ultimately cause higher energy prices in Ohio “by bypassing Midwestern refineries. I see no reason to circumvent the process in place because of politics.”
But Portman said passage of the pipeline “should be a no-brainer,” adding that he looks “forward to its passage when Republicans control the Senate.”
The vote was also the latest development in a battle as old as Obama’s presidency – whether to build a 1,644-mile pipeline from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
The project is pared into two parts – one, running from the tar sand oil fields of Alberta through the Dakotas and Nebraska, that would run 1,179 miles, and the 485-mile southern portion, which runs between Steele City, Neb., and Port Arthur, Texas. The latter leg is finished; the former is the source of the current battle.
Alberta is home to some of the largest deposits of oil sands in the world, and are a mixture of sediment — sand — and heavy crude oil. Companies mine the sand in open pits, and transport it to processing plants, where the crude oil and sand are separated.
Crude oil from tar sands is heavier than the oil that from shale formations under eastern Ohio, and typically has to be mixed with a lighter oil in order for it to be used.
When the pipeline is completed, Canadian producers could ship more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil every day through the pipeline to U.S. refineries in Texas where the crude would be refined into gasoline.
Building the pipeline would create about 40,000 jobs during a two-year span, but once the pipeline is open, the number of permanent jobs would fall to just a handful – perhaps no more than 40.
The real debate has less to do with the pipeline itself than with the type of oil produced in Canada. Greenhouse gasses are generated when producers extract the oil from the sands.
Obama, speaking in Australia last week, said that “one major determinant” of whether the administration should approve the pipeline would be “does it contribute to the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.”
(Laura Arenschield is a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch)
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