Keystone Pipeline Pros And Cons

Keystone Pipeline Project
The United States is a fossil fuel hungry nation whose economy, markets, and transportation is highly dependent on the abundance of crude oil and petroleum. Although there is roughly 85.9 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable crude oil currently in the form of oil shale located beneath our soil, we still rely on imports from foreign countries. With a crude oil and petroleum product net import of 7,270 thousand barrels per day the United States is one of the top importers of foreign oil (Petroleum & Other Liquids, 2013). According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA, the United States receives its leading imports of oil from Canada at a rate of 2,815 thousand barrels per day, Saudi
These arguments in favor of construction and operation of the pipeline are decreased gas prices, stronger national security through reduced foreign oil import dependence, and creation of jobs. In the United States, oil supplies 36 percent of our energy sources and is all so the principal fuel for transportation around the world. Oil in particular fuels around ninety-four percent of our nation’s transportation sector (Petroleum & Other Liquids, 2013). This makes oil an important commodity to many nations including our own and the market for oil very competitive between nations as they seek to compete over oil exporters and nations with convenient access to oil reap the economic benefits. Therefore, the pricing of crude oil is controlled by multiple factors; supply, demand, markets, accessibility, and physical balancing. Although the United States holds position as a major consumer of oil, our nation solely alone as minute effects on crude oil cost, even for refineries in our own country. According to an academic journal by Edwin Slade titled, The Keystone Pipeline Addition: Assessing the Potential Benefits of Reduced Gasoline Prices and Increased National Security, U.S. refineries’ crude acquisition cost change with geopolitical events, such as increasing oil demands in foreign countries such as China and those in the Middle East. Keystone supporters argue that by making oil transports more available to our country and to the global market, we impact the cost of crude oil in a more effective way that depends heavily on Keystone exports. Benefits of oil availability can be viewed on a local scale primarily in Midwest. Prior to Keystone operation, Canadian oil imports accumulated in Cushing, Oklahoma, since oil refineries and pipelines are centralized in this area, and resulted in an abundance of excess oil known as the Cushing glut. This resulted in increased