Because of local opposition to new pipelines, builders are adding capacity to old pipes… Here is the Wall Street Journal:
”As environmentalists and local activists make it extraordinarily difficult to build new oil and gas lines, energy companies are working around the opposition by supersizing old pipes that already crisscross parts of the continent.”
But this caught my eye:
“And expansions haven’t eliminated gas shortages, at least in New England. This year’s winter weather has been so frigid that a spike in heating demand caused wholesale gas prices in Boston to soar to more than $400 per million BTUs during some peak hours. By comparison, the benchmark U.S. gas price at the time in Louisiana was less than $3 per million BTUs.”
And this:
”In a variation on expansion, a consortium headed by Marathon Petroleum Corp. has floated a plan to reverse the flow of crude oil on one of America’s biggest pipelines. For several decades, the Capline system carried oil pumped in the Gulf of Mexico and foreign crude imported via Louisiana north to refineries in Midwest. The amount of oil moving through the line has dwindled as frackers have drilled more and the U.S. has imported less.
If enough customers sign up for space on the reversed Capline, the pipe could start transporting U.S. and Canadian crude from an Illinois storage hub south to fuel factories and export docks along the Gulf Coast by 2022.”
Here is the link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pipeline-builders-outflank-opposition-with-expansions-1516185001
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