3-25-13

 

 

Reuters: Senate budget plan embraces Keystone XL approval – The Senate easily passed on Friday a symbolic measure approving the Canada to Texas Keystone XL oil pipeline, a move backers said showed strong support for a bill that would give Congress power to green light the project later in the year. The amendment to the budget plan, sponsored by Senator John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota, passed 62 to 37. It was symbolic because the budget is a blueprint that will not become law. But the measure was selected out of hundreds of others for a vote and was approved by a strong majority in the 100-seat chamber led by Democrats.

 

The Hill: Senate votes highlight Dem divisions over Keystone pipeline, carbon taxes – Senate votes on climate change and the Keystone XL pipeline laid bare divisions among Democrats – and underscored why the White House, not Congress, will be where the critical climate decisions reside in President Obama’s second term. Several votes during the freewheeling debate over a nonbinding budget plan provided a political barometer of where the chamber, including vulnerable Democrats, stand on the topics. Advocates of the proposed pipeline scored a symbolic victory Friday when 62 lawmakers voted for an amendment backing the project to bring oil from Canadian tar sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries. Seventeen Democrats supported Sen. John Hoeven’s (R-N.D.) amendment.

 

National Journal: Biofuels Mandate: Defend, Reform or Repeal? – The Renewable Fuels Standard, which requires increasingly large amounts of biofuels each year, was part of a comprehensive energy bill signed by President George W. Bush in 2005 and expanded two years later during a drive to make the country more energy-independent. Most of the mandate is currently met with corn-produced ethanol; advanced biofuels made from products other than corn are not coming to market as quickly as the law had originally envisioned. The mandate came under intense bipartisan scrutiny amid last summer’s historic drought, which sent corn prices soaring. Should Congress try to fix the mandate? And, if so, what are the major areas lawmakers should focus on? Should lawmakers instead try to defend the policy as it stands? Or, should lawmakers just eliminate the mandate?

 

Houston Chronicle: Ethanol law has become a mandate to nowhere – We’re squabbling about legislation that clearly hasn’t worked. Last week, the oil and ethanol industries traded barbs over the future of a 2005 law that requires blending the corn-based additive in gasoline. The American Petroleum Institute, the mouthpiece of the energy industry, released a report that found the Renewable Fuels Standard will drive up gasoline prices and shave as much as $770 billion from the country’s gross domestic product in the next two years.

 

Washington Examiner (Column): Sunday Reflection: America’s oil and gas revolution – To grasp the importance of the revolutionary change in oil and gas drilling sweeping across the United States — and its significance for our economy — just consider how far behind the rest of the world is lagging. America’s innovative use of energy technology by "petropreneurs" is rejuvenating oil and gas production. Thanks to the combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling in shale deposits, along with advances in seismic imaging that allow geologists to examine deposits more than a mile underground, energy resources long presumed to be beyond reach are now being tapped, or at least will be eventually. And it’s happening as a result of something unique about America.

 

Houston Chronicle: Barriers bottle up refinery plans – New refineries could help ease the backup created by increasing U.S. crude production, but significant economic and political barriers discourage the industry from building the facilities. “The pure economics of trying to build a refinery just doesn’t make any sense,” said Bruce Bullock, director of Southern Methodist University’s Maguire Energy Institute, at a breakfast panel last week in Houston. “Refining has only returned its cost of capital three years out of the last 15,” Bullock said. He said refineries are considered profitable only when they earn enough to cover their cost of capital, typically about a 10 percent to 15 percent return, on top of operating costs.