Hey, did you think that TransCanada, the company intending to extend the Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to the Free Tariff Zone refineries in Texas, was a Canadian company?
Me too. Must be something about that name. And the fact that articles about TransCanada always refer to it as “Alberta-based”.
However TransCanada’s own K-XL Know the Facts webpage begs to differ. Debunking the “Myth” that TransCanada is a foreign company operating in the US :
“Like many American companies with operations in Canada, we are incorporated and registered in both Canada and the United States. We currently have 1,631 talented employees in 33 U.S. states. Our U.S. operations are headquartered in Houston and will be responsible for the U.S. construction of Keystone XL.”
Huh.
Now as we already know via Inside Climate News, Koch exports 25% of all tarsands crude to the US.
“In 2009, Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, an Alberta-based subsidiary of Koch Industries, applied for–and won–“intervenor status” in the National Energy Board hearings that led to Canada’s 2010 approval of its 327-mile portion of the pipeline.
The company’s Flint Hills subsidiary already has an oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, the starting point of the Keystone XL. It sends about 250,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day to a heavy oil refinery it owns near St. Paul, Minn., making that refinery “among the top processors of Canadian crude in the United States,” the company website says.“
Yesterday that same National Energy Board, Canada’s presumed energy regulator, rejected the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union’s request to hold a new hearing into K-XL.
CEP, which opposes K-XL on the reasonable grounds it would rather see tarsands refineries built in Canada, maintained “the project had violated its permit by not starting construction by a March 2011 deadline”. However according to the NEB, TransCanada’s ‘earth moving’ activities in Canada apparently counts as a start.
Meanwhile, south of the border, three environmental groups filed a lawsuit against TransCanada earlier this month for mowing a 110 ft wide swath clear across the state of Nebraska prior to receiving the official US go ahead for K-XL to begin. TransCanada responded that mowing grasslands and moving endangered beetles out of the way of the proposed pipeline doesn’t count as a start.
So far, no matter which side of the border you’re on, things really do go better for Koch.
And for TransCanada, an “American company”.