Keystone pipeline would enrich Koch brothers

Reuters points out one fascinating subplot to the story of whether the Obama administration will approve completion of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast: It would help make his most prominent political adversaries even richer.

What’s been left out of the ferocious debate over the pipeline, however, is the prospect that if president Obama allows a permit for the Keystone XL to be granted, he would be handing a big victory and great financial opportunity to Charles and David Koch, his bitterest political enemies and among the most powerful opponents of his clean economy agenda…

An unknown amount of company profits — figures are unavailable as the company is privately held — come from the Pine Bend Refinery near St. Paul, Minnesota, which supplies 30 to 40 percent of Wisconsin’s transportation fuel and a large percentage of the jet fuel used at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

About 80 percent of what the Koch refinery processes is heavy crude from Alberta’s oil sands, a company spokesperson told the media last year. The oil that reaches the refinery is supplied through the Koch brothers’ Flint Hills operation in Calgary, the company’s website says.

Pine Bend is capable of refining up to 320,000 barrels per day of predominantly Canadian crude oil, most of it sourced in Alberta’s oil sands. Every day, the U.S. imports about 1 million barrels of oil from Alberta’s oil sands mines, and about 2 million barrels of Canadian oil overall.

This means that the oil sands crude which reaches the Pine Bend refinery on American soil accounts for about a quarter of the total supply reaching the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands mining operations.

Very interesting.