Over the past three years as editor of Pipeline News, Saskatchewan's petroleum monthly, combined with my previous work as a pipeliner, I have had an opportunity to visit almost every area of the Saskatchewan oilpatch. From Onion Lake in the northwest, to Dodsland in the west, Shaunavon in the southwest, Lake Alma in the south and Redvers in the southeast, I put tens of thousands of kilometres on my truck each year visiting these sites.
Over that time, I have not been shot at once.
I have not been escorted onto sites by heavily armed mercenaries, former special forces soldiers making hundreds of thousands a year to keep away the bad guys.
My tires may be balding, but they have not once come in danger of rolling over and setting off an improvised explosive device.
I have not once been stopped at a checkpoint where a dozen soldiers had their laser-sighted assault rifles trained on me.
The only soldiers I have seen were in the corner store at Wainwright, Alta., adjacent to the local army base.
No mortar bombs have landed near my hotel rooms.
As a pipeliner, I have worked on two major projects - Enbridge's 1998 Terrace B expansion, and the Alliance Pipeline in 1999-2000. I spent 2009 covering the Enbridge Alberta Clipper. At no point in time was there any concern about these pipelines being blown up by insurgents and causing mammoth spills.
The biggest threat was chemistry - where corrosion finds its way into the pipe via defects in the coating. To guard against that, you used melted epoxy, not an M-16.
Never, ever, in my time in the oilpatch, have I seen an armed guard of any type, much less an infantry platoon.
It is with this in mind that I must reflect on the absurdity of the protests in the United States against the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. Al Gore says Canadian oilsands oil is dirty oil, so it must be true. Apparently the former Lois Lane, Margot Kidder, agrees, as she was arrested at a Keystone XL protests in Washington.
Perhaps the former vice-president, one whose administration bombed the crap out of the Balkans, forgot there are other forms of dirty beyond carbon dioxide. Like blood. It doesn't wash out that easily. Out damned spot! Out, I say!
Americans have spent the last eight years coming home in body bags from Iraq, a war that had nothing to do with 9/11 and everything to do with Middle Eastern oil.
No American soldiers will come home in body bags from Fort McMurray. Nearly 4,500 have died in Iraq.
That is dirty oil.
No trillions of dollars have been spent fighting a war in Canada for oil. The cost of all the oilsands projects in Fort McMurray over the last five years likely wouldn't cover a third of U.S. military spending for one year. The Keystone XL pipeline project's total cost will be less than a week's spending for the U.S. military.
Perhaps the protesters should find some supertanker terminals to protest. It appears they would rather get their oil from Iraq, where they still have troops, or Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama Bin Laden and the majority of the 9/11 terrorists, than from Canada.
If the U.S. really wanted to clean up its act on "dirty oil", they could have spent hundreds of billions on research and development in higher efficiency vehicles, carbon capture, and coal gasification, instead of mercenaries and bombs. Not only would the outcome have been longer lasting and meaningful in a climate change aspect, it would have also reduced U.S. reliance on the truly dirty oil with blood stains on the barrel.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
