Other markets using rail transport and pipelines
1. Western Canadian crude-oil producers have found alternatives to Keystone XL. They are getting their product from landlocked Alberta and Saskatchewan to the U.S. and other markets using rail transport and pipelines that have either been expanded or built from scratch during the interminable wait for Keystone XL.
Absent Keystone XL, Canadian oil exports to the U.S. have never been higher than they are today. And Calgary oilpatch analysts expect a further doubling in Canadian heavy oil crude shipments destined for U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, to more than 400,000 barrels a day in 2015 from just over 200,000 barrels last year.
U.S. oil producers that once planned to use Keystone XL — notably shale-oil giants like Oklahoma-based Continental Resources Inc. — have shifted to other pipeline networks.
“We’re supporting other pipelines out there, we’re not waiting on Keystone, nobody is,” Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental, recently told the U.S. political insider journal Politico.
Closer to home, the CEO of Calgary-based Suncor Inc., the largest Canadian oil producer, said last fall that “an individual project like Keystone XL is not critical to our plans to get our products to market.”