On Friday before Labor Day—in the form of an age-old
“Friday News Dump“—the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) handed a permit
pipeline giant, to open a tar sands-by-rail facility
in Flanagan, Illinois by early 2016.
With the capacity to accept 140,000 barrels of
tar sands product per day, the company’s rail
facility serves as another step in the direction
towards Enbridge’s quiet creation of a
“Keystone XL clone.” That is, like TransCanada’s
Keystone pipeline system sets out to do, sending
Alberta’s tar sands all the way down to the
Gulf of Mexico’s refinery row—and perhaps to
the global export market.
Flanagan sits as the starting point of Enbridge’s
Flanagan South pipeline, which will take tar sands
diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) from Flanagan to
Cushing, Okla. beginning in October,
From there, Enbridge’s Seaway Twin pipeline will
bring dilbit to Port Arthur, Texas near the Gulf.
Enbridge made the prospect of a tar sands-by-rail
terminal public for the first time during its quarter
two investor call.
“In terms of the rail facility, one of the things we’re
looking at is—and the rail facility is really in relation
to the situation in western Canada where there is
growing crude oil volumes and not enough pipeline
capacity to get it out of Alberta for a two or three
year period,” Guy Jarvis, president of liquids pipelines
for Enbridge, said on the call.
“So, one of the things we’re looking at doing is
constructing a rail unloading facility that would
allow western Canadian crudes to go by rail to
Flanagan, be offloaded, and then flow down the
Flanagan South pipeline further into Seaway
and to the Gulf.”
FERC has given Enbridge the permit it needs
to make that happen.
Enbridge “Scheme” Receives MN Permit
The announcement comes just days after the
U.S. Department of State handed Enbridge a
controversial permit to move an additional
350,000 barrels of tar sands per day across
the U.S.-Canada border without the legally
conventional Presidential Permit, public hearings
or an environmental review conducted by
the State Department.
Enbridge also received a permit from the
the day before FERC’s “Friday News Dump,”
locking in the State Department’s legal ruling
at the state-level. MPUC voted 4-1 to permit
the pipeline after a meeting lasting nearly eight hours.
The commission did so even though the staffer
analyzing comments and legal submissions
acknowledged he reviewed far more climate and
environmental concerns than vice versa,
according to MPUC staff briefing papers reviewed
by DeSmogBlog.
“Clearly there exists much public opposition to
the increased consumption of fossil fuels and
diluted bitumen sources in particular,” wrote
Michael Kaluzniak, planning director for energy
facilities permitting for MPUC.
“Additionally, the Commission received numerous
comments expressing genuine concern regarding
the potential impact of the project on water quality
and overall dissatisfaction with Enbridge’s public safety and spill response actions.”
TransCanada and Tar Sands by Rail
With the combination of its Alberta Clipper expansion
“illegal scheme” (referred to as such by the National
Wildlife Federation), Flanagan South and Seaway
Twin pipelines, as well as the FERC-approved
rail facility, Enbridge now has the capacity to
bring roughly 960,000 barrels per day of
tar sands product to the Gulf.
For sake of comparison, Keystone XL has the
capacity to bring 830,000 barrels per day of
tar sands to the Gulf. But TransCanada has also
brokered its own deals and made its own chess moves.
As reported on DeSmogBlog, TransCanada may
waits for Keystone XL’s northern leg to receive—
or not receive—a State Department permit and
accompanying Presidential Permit.
“It is something … that we can move on relatively
quickly,” TransCanada CEO Russ Girling stated on
“We’ve done a pretty substantial amount of work
at the terminal end and mostly at the receipt and
delivery points and that’s really what our key role
in here would be.”
Since that call, TransCanada has not discussed its
tar sands by rail business plans.
“Keystone? Who needs it?”
In July, Global Partners and Kansas City Southern
announced plans to develop a
with 340,000 barrels of storage capacity.
If TransCanada opens up its own tar sands by
rail facility, the combination of that and Enbridge’s
latest tar sands by rail move could feed the Global
Partners-Kansas City Southern beast.
With tar sands now “Texas Bound and Flyin” in a
major way, and both Enbridge and TransCanada
finding a way to get tar sands to the Gulf, the
seemingly hyperbolic headline published
on July 10 by the Houston Business Journal
seems to ring true more now than ever: “Keystone? Who needs it?”
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