The Keystone XL project — which the Obama administration has moved to table until after the 2012 election — would move synthetic petroleum from the Canadian province of Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for conversion into gasoline. Yet even if all were to go well with the pipeline, which would be built to high safety standards, the United States might be better off without still more imported oil.
At the same time, there is a better kind of pipeline — but it is nowhere close to construction. That pipeline would bring natural gas from Alaska to the lower 48 states. Access to Alaskan natural gas would reduce greenhouse emissions, while providing an alternative to coal in electricity production and to oil in transportation. And don’t assume it’s a bad idea just because Sarah Palin favors it.
Today, natural gas is being found in tremendous quantities in the shale formations of the East Coast (owing in part to the controversial extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing), the Bakken shale field in North Dakota (where the gas is being “flared” or burned off as a waste product, because there are no pipelines to carry it to consumers), Prudhoe Bay and Cook Inlet in Alaska, the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada and elsewhere.
An opportunity exists to replace coal and oil, the most carbon-intense fossil fuels, with natural gas, which produces 30 percent less greenhouse gas per unit of energy generated than oil, and 50 percent less than coal.
