Basically, it looks like TransCanada may build the pipeline from Montana to the Gulf sending Montana’s Bakken Shale through the pipeline and it won’t require federal permission to do so. And then, and I’m guessing here, once we have a new administration, they apply for approval to connect the pipeline to Canada.
In the words of Hannibal, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
BLOOMBERG – TransCanada Corp. (TRP) may shorten the initial path for its rejected Keystone XL project, bringing oil from Montana’s Bakken Shale to refiners in the Gulf of Mexico and removing the need for federal approval.
“There certainly is a potential opportunity to connect the Bakken to the Gulf Coast,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president of energy and oil pipelines, said in a telephone interview today. “That is obviously something we’ll be looking into over the next few weeks.”
TransCanada’s $7 billion Keystone XL proposal to bring crude from Canada’s oil sands to the Gulf was rejected yesterday by the Obama administration. The project required U.S. approval because it crossed the border with Canada. The company may seek that approval after it builds the segment from Montana to the Gulf, Pourbaix said.
The Bakken shale-rock formation is estimated to hold as much as 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana, according to a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report. Oil production in North Dakota surged 42 percent to 510,000 barrels a day in November, exceeding the output of Ecuador.
Production in the Bakken field may reach 750,000 barrels a day this year, Edward Morse, managing director of commodities research for Citigroup Inc., said at a conference in Calgary today.
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