Gulf Refineries Don't Care About the Keystone XL Pipeline, but Here's Why It Still Matters

US refineries on the Gulf that had been anticipating a boom from Canada's Alberta tar sands via the planned Keystone XL pipeline are becoming apathetic about the mired pipeline's future, according to Wednesday's Wall Street Journal.  As the domestic US oil boom has kept refineries busy and rail and new pipelines have filled the shipping gap that Keystone would have filled, the refineries on the Gulf that had been waiting to process the Canadian heavy crude "increasingly doubt that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline expansion will ever be built" and "don't particularly care."

But does that mean that the 830,000 barrels of heavy crude that would have streamed through the XL pipeline have become irrelevant?  Not quite.  The pipeline is still the best hope for Canadian tar sands to make it to refineries.  Without it, Alberta's surging industry might find itself choked with no way to move all the oil it produces.

Gulf Refineries Don't Care About the Keystone XL Pipeline, but Here's Why It Still Matters