Keystone Pipeline

[dan_s]

From the Houston Business Journal:

T. Boone Pickens said approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline should be the easiest decision of Barack Obama’s presidency.

"There’s no strings attached," the oil tycoon and Texas billionaire told a crowd of hundreds at the DoubleTree Hotel in Dallas. "We don’t have to have the navy, the army or anything else to protect. It’s there available to us."

Pickens believes Obama will approve the final leg of the oil transmission pipeline before his term ends in January 2017.

Pickens led off the panel discussion on U.S. Global Competitiveness and National Security, part of America’s Future Series. Also speaking were Joe DePinto, CEO and president of Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc., Joe Robles, president and CEO of San Antonio-based USAA, and David Seaton, CEO and chairman of Irving-based Fluor Corp. (NYSE: FLR). Tracy Merzi, publisher of the Dallas Business Journal, moderated the discussion.

Obama faces enormous pressure from environmentalists, much of his political base, to deny the pipeline because more oil leads to increased carbon emissions, environmental disasters and climate change.

The decision to build the pipeline has been pending for several years because it crosses the Canadian/American border. It’s meant to carry oil from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in South Texas.

But Pickens warns that the Canadians won’t wait forever.

"Canadians are patient people but the way this is going to come out, unless we can make up our mind, when that thing turns west out at Fort McMurray, the pipeline does, it’s heading to China," Pickens said. "That line can go west just as easy as it can go south to us. We fool around here we lose 250 billion barrels of oil."