The Woodrow Wilson Institute based at the Smithsonian in Washington is an honoured institution recognizing the only American President to have earned a PhD. It seems a shame that its name is being besmirched by the cant of the tar sands exploiters and the sham of Prime Minister Harper’s energy policy. This commentary is instigated by a Toronto Star opinion piece on July 17 saying Canada must diversify its energy pitch to the U.S. It is by Andrew Finn program associate at the Canada Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Institute.
The first (complex) sentence of the article is all you need to read to question the writer’s veracity. He refers to the United States decision to “deny Gulf Coast refineries the heavy crude they so desperately need.” This is not only a flat out lie but it uses the wrong words to describe the Canadian goods planned to be shipped through the Keystone XL pipeline.
The facts are that the Texas Gulf Coast refineries have no need for the Canadian bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands. Utah has lots of tar sands type bitumen it can ship south. The refineries around the Texas Gulf oil ports have little interest in bitumen because of the additional and highly polluting processing required. They certainly do not need it.
And Canadian bitumen is not by any stretch of the imagination “heavy crude oil.” Bitumen is one of the oldest materials used by man. It provided the waterproofing pitch for the boats that plied the Mediterranean before the pyramids were built. It supplied the mortar for the bricks of Babylon. Bitumen might be available in the largest quantity in Alberta but it is found around the world.
But if you wash out the sands and add polymers to the mix, bitumen can be heated and pushed at high pressure through a pipeline. It is the most efficient way to move the stuff. And if you are ecologically minded, you leave the stuff where it lies. It can be refined into synthetic crude oil at great expense to the environment when our dying planet is desperate for oil resources.
But this does not justify the confused and inaccurate story from Mr. Finn and the Canada Institute. He uses Canada’s hydro power electrical generation as a counterpoint to the bitumen. He says the United States should buy more electrical power from Canada’s renewable resources while agreeing to move our bitumen to the oil ports for export.
Frankly nothing much is achieved by propaganda such as this. It makes life even more complex when you cannot trust the Smithsonian or the Woodrow Wilson International Institute. And worse, why is the Toronto Star running such garbage?
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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