How Oil Pipelines elsewhere make the Keystone pipeline and the North Dakota Access pipeline protests irrelevant.

Me, "I think if the following article, "Path of Least resistance" had been publicized back when the Keystone Pipeline was being debated, and the Dakota Access pipeline became a rallying cry for encroachment on Native American Land, (and a possible polluter of their water source) less of an outcry would have occurred. This article basically states that with or without these two oil pipeline projects, oil from North Dakota and oil from the Alberta Tar Sands are still making their way thru the U.S. to market. This article leaves me shaking my head at a huge political issue that was created, that really was a, stop the oil pipeline projects, to stop pollution of the Earth's atmosphere. It really didn't matter. All those protesters, protested a dead cause, because other pipelines are carrying the oil regardlessly. I suggest that anyone interested, for, or against, these projects, should read this article. I have taken out snippets below, but really it's a good read as to how futile the actions against Keystone and the North Dakota Pipeline actually are. "

From article, "Path of least resistance"

(Cannon Ball, N.D. – A whiff of violence lingered in the campfire smoke at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp along the Missouri River last fall, where hundreds of protesters put their bodies on the line to stop the $3.7 billion project.

Some were environmental activists worried that the line would add to atmospheric carbon levels and climate change by whisking 470,000 barrels per day of the North Dakota shale oil to market, both in the U.S. and abroad.

The protesters won that battle; the Dakota line was put on hold by the administration of President Barack Obama.

But the controversy the pipeline unleashed will not be buried anytime soon. The work on the 1,200-mile steel tube is all but complete; the big question remaining is how to finish it in a manner that will respect the tribe’s concerns over potential spills into the Missouri River and the destruction of nearby areas it considers sacred.

The conflict is, in fact, only the latest chapter in the increasingly contentious saga over how — and whether — to bring North America’s unconventional oil reserves to market.

An earlier chapter ended in late 2015 after scientists, protesters and politicians persuaded Obama to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried Alberta tar sands oil toward the Gulf of Mexico.

But there is another act in this drama that has, so far, drawn relatively scant attention.

It is one in which a pipeline route carved more than 60 years ago has continually — and quietly — grown in capacity to the point that today the pipes are bursting with oil, sometimes literally so.

...pipes capable of carrying roughly three times the volume of oil proposed for TransCanada’s Keystone XL already run down a rival company’s pipeline from Alberta into Wisconsin. And much more oil could be on the way — both from Canada and, perhaps, from the Bakken fields of North Dakota.

There is nothing on the continent like this ever-expanding pipeline network, owned by Canada’s Enbridge Inc. and its subsidiaries, and not just because it runs to the shores of the Great Lakes, a drinking water source for some 40 million people.

“The Enbridge Mainline system is the largest in the country,” said Paul Blackburn, an attorney who has represented a number of environmental groups in legal battles, including against Keystone XL. “A lot of oil goes through there. Much more than people understand.”

In fact, the system’s current capacity is equal to roughly 20% of the nation’s total oil imports. Enbridge also has plans for a new thousand-mile pipeline from Alberta to Superior that would add another 370,000 barrels per day to that flow, bringing the capacity for some 3 million barrels of oil to flow into Wisconsin each day.

That is more than all the oil the United States imports on an average daily basis from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico — combined. It is more oil than is consumed daily by Germany, Europe’s economic engine and fourth largest economy in the world.

If it sounds surprising that Wisconsin has become such a player in the booming unconventional oil economy, it’s because the state isn’t actually much of a player economically. Most of the oil simply flows through on its way to far-flung refineries.

Calumet Superior Refining, Wisconsin’s only refinery, merely sips from the Enbridge stream. It has a processing capacity of about 45,000 barrels per day — less than 2% of the pipeline system’s capacity.

The oil that doesn’t get refined in Superior moves on, with much of it first going to dozens of huge holding tanks at Enbridge’s Superior facility, a few hundred feet from the Nemadji River that flows into nearby Lake Superior. These tanks can collectively hold about 13 million barrels of oil, enough to supply more than 60% of the daily U.S. oil diet.

The oil is cycled through these tanks into an underground tangle of pipes and pumped to out-of-state refineries. It rumbles around the clock and around the calendar along a vast, invisible infrastructure as essential as the power lines, water mains, sewers, cell towers and ribbons of concrete that make modern life possible.

More than 500,000 barrels a day can flow in a pipe that runs across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It briefly splits into two pipelines lying exposed on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac that divide Lakes Michigan and Huron. On the other side of the Straits, the pipes merge back into a single tube for a final run across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to the Ontario refinery city of Sarnia, northeast of Detroit.

Most of the oil leaving Superior runs in three pipelines down the middle of Wisconsin along an 80-foot-wide corridor stretching to the Illinois border. Much of it then flows to regional refineries to be turned into gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products.

Some of it moves easterly across Indiana and lower Michigan, headed for Sarnia and beyond. Oil now also flows in an Enbridge pipe east from Sarnia to Montreal, where it can be pumped onto tankers and shipped around the globe.

This was a primary criticism of the Keystone XL — that the U.S. would be used as a conduit for Canadian tar sands oil to flow to competing markets overseas.

In the critics’ view, the U.S. increasingly assumes much of the risk of oil transport, including spills, while getting little economic reward as the fuel makes it way toward rival economies before being burned off and unleashing its carbon into the atmosphere.

The same concern now exists with North Dakota shale oil because the U.S. recently lifted a 40-year ban on exporting most domestically produced oil. The result: Last April, the first shipment of North Dakota crude left a Louisiana port for a refinery in the Netherlands.

Thanks to new fracking extraction techniques, production of North Dakota shale oil grew from less than 100,000 barrels in 2005 to more than 1 million barrels per day by 2015, even though U.S. oil consumption dropped in the same time period by about 1 million barrels per day, thanks to fuel-efficient cars and other conservation moves.

Alberta tar sands production is also booming and is now in the neighborhood of 2.5 million barrels per day. At the same time, oil prices have plummeted in recent years from over $100 per barrel to less than $30, though the price has been on an uptick lately and now sits around $50 per barrel.

Both Canadian and North Dakota leaders see the economic potential to sell more oil overseas.

“Lifting the ban on crude exports will create jobs, grow our economy and keep the price of gasoline lower at the pump for consumers,” U.S. Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, a member of the Senate Energy Committee, said when the first barrels of shale oil left for Europe.

“Importantly, it will also bolster national security by providing our allies with alternative sources of oil and free them, as well as us, from reliance on energy from unstable parts of the world. We are just beginning to see the benefits to our state and our nation.”)