Case for Keystone XL: America Witnesses Largest Day Increase in Gas Prices
Do not forget that gas prices started to rise before Russia invaded Ukraine.
I did not include anything about Ukraine and Russia in my title because the rise in gas prices began before Russia invaded last week.
The war is not helping since Russia has a huge hand in the world’s energy sector. It might even get worse if the Biden administration bans Russian oil.
I’d get on board with that if our politicians weren’t addicted to foreign oil and energy because they won’t open new oil lines here.
Keystone XL, anyone? Oh, yeah. The left has to keep up its climate-friendly image while purchasing oil and gas from countries that dig for the items without a care about the environment.
Until then we have to suffer at the pump:
Friday’s prices, up 11 cents from Thursday, marked the single largest day increase, since 2016, according to AAA data.
The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline increased to $3.84, which steadily climbed over the week from $3.61 on Monday, according to AAA data.
Prices are up $1.08 compared to this time last year, inching closer to costing $4 on average for a regular gallon of gasoline.
Oklahoma usually has cheap gas. We’re paying about $3.80 a gallon for non-ethanol gas. It’s about $3.30 for gas with ethanol.
Oil is at $113 a barrel.
The West attempted to look like it cared about Ukraine with massive sanctions on Russia. Buried in reports showed the loopholes allowing the countries to keep purchasing Russian oil and gas.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted the U.S. has “no strategic interest” in sanctioning Russia’s energy sector:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken downplayed the impact that energy sanctions on Russia would have, arguing any such sanctions would hurt America and its allies more than they would Moscow.“
The sanctions are designed … to have maximum impact on Russia and Putin while minimizing harm to us and our partners,” Blinken told reporters. “There’s no strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy.”
“The immediate effect to raise prices at the pump for Americans and to pad Russian profits with rising profits,” he argued, adding that the U.S. is working to undermine Russia’s ability to maintain a role as a leading energy provider.
U.S. lawmakers have expressed bipartisan support for cutting imports on Russian oil and gas.
That second part confuses me. You don’t want to sanction Russia’s energy sector because it would harm the American people but you want to undermine Russia’s role and potentially cut or ban imports.
You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
Leslie kept track of energy giants cutting ties with Russia, including projects in the Arctic Circle. I wonder how long that will last since a lot of their product comes from those projects. The Arctic Circle is rich in oil and gas.
We cannot ban or limit Russian oil without harming ourselves. The Biden administration and its friends in the MSM are once again trying to blame the Russian invasion of Ukraine for inflation and high gas prices.
Don’t fall for it. Demand we have the Keystone XL pipeline.
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Comments
All the NPCs I see commenting keep insisting the Keystone oil was designed to go in one end and come out the other to be shipped overseas, and none of it was ever slated to touch the US market anyway. What’s the real story here?
1) Pure progressive BS?
2) “Oil is fungible,” so oil we’re now shipping overseas can go domestic?
3) Other?
I doubt that’s true, but it doesn’t matter either way. Sending oil to other countries frees up the oil they otherwise would’ve bought, which we can buy now.
How long would it take to correct this problem? I am guessing years, restarting projects will be a major undertaking.
That depends on the project. There are already a lot of wells that are already drilled that could easily be restarted and producing within a couple of weeks. There are wells that could easily be refracked with newer technologies and producing in a couple of weeks. It takes roughly six weeks on average for your average fracked well to start producing and there are tens of thousands already drilled and simply blocked to turn them off when the price of oil went negative. All that’s really needed is the credit and capital to turn them back on and get on a paying basis.
It’s not just the credit and capital, they also need reasonable certainty that the government won’t just turn around and put the screws to them agian. Otherwise, there’s no point in undertaking the cost.
Did you mean a gesture like reauthorizing the Keystone?
I don’t think that would be sufficient, becuase it still says “You produce at our whim”.
What’s needed is something like legislation barring executive orders changing the rules.
Dead on correct. One problem is that the “big oil” companies are heavily invested in “green” alternatives and are also the biggest frackers which is what ruined their OPEC racket. They needed to get fracking under their control. So they seem to be pooh-poohing fracking while talking about how long it would take to get their deep water wells back up and running. I am confident that they would prefer re-instating the pre-fracking OPEC status quo and are heavily invested in the infrastructure to do that everywhere. The NWO benefits them greatly.
They will have to be forced to eat their deep water well investments that don’t benefit the US and to divest their fracking investments to more domestically-based oil companies. Devon Energy protested this week for being ignored in the reported White House “suggestions” to producers to get ready to increase domestic production. Is the White House going to place energy the way they keep out Tesla in their vision of electric cars?
And then there is that devious little rat Pete Butt Edge Edge argueing that “we don’t need long term solutions to fix short term problems”. Re-opening the already drilled fracking well, especially in the Permian Basin, would produce a gusher in 2-3 weeks. That is a short-term solution to was is a LONG-TERM problem. Building the XL and lifting the restrictions on domestic production is how we restore our energy independence in a few months PERMANENTLY.
Another thing we must do, and I know it is problematic for Mary to grasp this, is to immediately stop Russian oil and gas imports. Very painful but it would collapse the Russian economy RIGHT NOW! It’s the kick in the butt we need in this country to grow up and face reality.
Brandon isn’t negotiating with Putin to end Ukraine but to close the Iran Nuke deal so we can import oil from Iran! How stupid is that? End this now! Let’s be grown ups, do what has to be done and live with the short term pain, however painful, that will get us where we need to be. We have these domestic globalists, who are openly going all out to kill our economy, over the barrel. Let’s finish the job! Either prolong our certain death march out of fear of nuclear war and unwillingness to accept short term pain, or deal with it!
We cannot wait until 2024 to vote our way out of this mess. We have several options to address this RIGHT NOW but once again, we just can’t seem to find the spine to act. If America is going to be strong, WE have to be strong. I am not hearing it or feeling it. It just may be that we deserve to be free.
That’s not how futures markets work. Restarting Keystone XL and drilling on federal leases would have almost immediate effects on fuel prices.
And the bottom line is that while it may take years to complete Keystone XL, it will take decades if ever to see a return on “green energy.”
it will take decades if ever to see a return on “green energy.”
You are more likely to see WW3 before you see a return on green energy.
I disagree only in the sense that with this current Klown Kar administration we may only be hours away from WWIII.
Keystone XL will never be restarted, and neither will any other long-term energy project. Eventually a Democrat will be elected, and there’s too much risk that they will copy Biden and make your investment worthless.
You are probably correct unless the companies can get contracts for delivery that are guaranteed by the govt v future policy adjustment. These companies have a huge amount of sunk cost so might be willing to try again under favorable conditions that, in essence, guarantee a return even if some future Judge or Admin decides to halt it.
At least I have bunch of white oak and dead ash trees:)
Me too
About 100 of them
Keystone reauthorization would send a big “GAME ON” signal to the oil companies to start operations without having to worry about the government f*cking them over.
Who would trust a reauthorization from Biden? More to the point, it’s too late. The alternative to Keystone XL is already under way, so reauthorization would be a PR stunt, as everybody knows that it’s meaningless.
I’m still at a loss to understand how an administration can “commit” to a project, and the follow-on administration can repudiate it, and it doesn’t constitute breach of contract.
I must admit, the graphic gives me a certain amount of pleasure. It’s not often that stupid Democrat voters are promptly and directly punished for stupid Democrat votes. Usually we get punished, while they walk away with the cake.
We are being punished, not just high fuel costs, runaway inflation.
Major oil companies are removing hand sanitizer from their stations since the covid scare is over and is installing KY Jelly dispensers ease the screwing being done at the pump.
It will take an Act of Congress to permanently repeal all Biden Administration EO’s around fossil fuel energy
Look at it this way that Russia and Ukraine have no bearing on gas price, Russia by accounts is still shipping one way or another and most likely to the US.
Gas jumped $.20 here in se Pa looking like $4.20
Occupy the coastlines, install the wind turbines, develop toxic lithium and rare earth baths for sustainable development, here, not there, and don’t spare the birds. Spread the Green blight.
The largest stockholders of every major oil company is two financial firms, Blackrock and Vanguard. They are both run by leftist swine. They don’t care about actual capitalism or limited government.
Yes and no. The mutual funds and ETF they manage have those stock holdings. Individual investors and pension funds actually own the stock. This is where the globalist folks demonstrate the difference between ownership and control.
Because most folks don’t vote their shares or instead grant a proxy to the fund companies, the activists who run the stock fund companies, like Mr Fink at Blackrock exercise enormous influence on the polices of these corporations. They don’t own them but they control them to a growing degree.
You know, I also take pleasure in the graphic, if only because the family I had on the West Coast are safely out, and the gas prices may make it impossible for the Leftists to leave.
However, there is another step coming. Y’all know that the California legislature will pass a state gas tax increase “for the environment” and the governor will sign it. And the locals will be proud of being so ripped off.
Subotai Bahadur
I think it’s cute you think demanding FUCK joe biden* restart drilling and building pipelines would make him change his fascist ways.
He doesn’t give a damn about Americans, truth be told he’d probably like to have the camps set up to take out his critics.
He was a ten percenter, with his inflation I’ll bet he’s raised his take to 25%.
One more time. Logic dictates that the left has no problem at all with oil shortages and high pump prices, for the simple reason that it all makes their preferred electric cars, windmills and solar panels seem more cost effective.
logic dictates that the left has no problem artificially creating oil/natural gas shortages for the simple reason they can turn us into slaves by promising us vaporware.
There aren’t enough voters out there buying electric cars (or affording the up front costs and other obstacles) for that to matter.
If they make the forms of transportation preferred by the lower middle class unaffordable then they lose a ton of votes. This and the general inflation are one of the big killers they are staring at in the next election.
Even if they were to offer some crazy sweetheart deal to subsidize electric vehicles for everyone, it would still fail miserably because other costs would inflate immensely.
We don’t have the capability to support the electrical grid sans fossil fuels. 80-90% of our energy supply is powered by fossil fuels (varies slightly by region). So, we’d be driving a bunch of cars that are powered by fossil fuels on an electrical grid and the consumption of oil would not decrease.
This means the price of oil remains high and someone has to pay for it. As soon as the pump prices go down, electric bills would skyrocket. Meanwhile, your taxes and general inflation would be higher because someone had to pay for all those electric car deals. Plus, the gas pump taxes that typically pay for road maintenance would have to be replaced somewhere else.
The whole thing is a rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic scam…except the Titanic isn’t leaving port and they are charging you for a first class ticket around the world for the chance to pretend to be a VIP on a giant piece of dock furniture.
No there aren’t enough and aren’t likely to be enough. Thing is the globalist greens don’t get it because everyone they know shares their worldview. And why not? These folks largely reside in affluent coastal metro areas with heavily subsidized mass transit options. They certainly don’t drive themselves unless for amusement.
When they can generate votes at will on election day, it removes the threat of losing the “elections”.
Subotai Bahadur
This is not about politics. This is economic warfare. If you apply that framework, everything the Democrats are doing (the power at the top, not the useful idiots at the lower levels) is to serve the WEF. See this in the global context of Ukraine, Canada, et al.
The Dems and RINOs cannot be persuaded. They must be defeated. They have no intention of letting that happen.
Actions reveal motives. Words are meaningless. That should be obvious, especially after a dishonest (when it wasn’t pure nonsense) SOTU.
It’s not just Keystone, it’s the ban on new drilling on federal lands. It’s also the under the radar initiatives to keep banks from financing oil and gas operations. Keep your eyes on the multiple bouncing balls.
The last time we had gas prices this high was the last time we had a Democrat administration.
Most oil pipelines operate a “quality bank” which results in a delivery of an average product that gets fed into refineries at the destinatin. The original Keystone pipeline is an example of that.
However, the Keystone XL Pipeline was designed to carry an oil / sand slurry from the tar sands of Canada to specialized refineries designed to handle oil that has a lot of sand mixed into it. If you have crude oil in Canada today, you can ship it down to Oklahoma or Louisiana on the existing Keystone pipeline. However, as a long-term alternative, one could set up tar sand mining operations, the parallel Keystone XL pipeline as well as specialized refineries. That is not a viable quick response to the Ukraine situation.
If we need to increase Canadian crude oil production today, we could just pump more oil from wells without setting up tar sands mining. Tar sands become economically viable only when oil prices skyrocket. What we want is for oil prices to come down, not for them to remain high for a long enough period to make the Keystone XL pipeline to be economically viable.
The break even price on Canadian tar sand oil development is anywhere from low $40 to $60 a barrel. Even if the break even price was $75 a barrel it would make strategic sense to develop it and the pipeline infrastructure. It would act to create a price ceiling to a very large extent; at least in N America.
Continuing to pushing of some version of the ‘keystone pipeline wouldn’t be developed in time to help today’ or ‘that’s a long term solution to a short term problem’ arguments ignores the price ceiling effect and the strategic energy security benefits of becoming more energy independent. It’s short sighted and incorrect.