{"id":7240,"date":"2012-03-13T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T13:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=7240"},"modified":"2012-03-14T08:21:46","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T14:21:46","slug":"tar-sands-to-texas-will-heavy-crude-mean-more-pollution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/03\/13\/tar-sands-to-texas-will-heavy-crude-mean-more-pollution\/","title":{"rendered":"Tar Sands to Texas: Will Keystone XL’s Heavy Crude Mean More Pollution?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dave Fehling\/StateImpact Texas<\/p>

Patricia Gonzales at her home in Pasadena<\/p><\/div>\n

Standing outside her tidy house in Pasadena, Texas, Patricia Gonzales succinctly sums up her community’s\u00a0dilemma: “No one is saying we don’t want the jobs. It’s just that we don’t want the pollution coming with it.”<\/p>\n

Her home is just two miles from the Houston Ship Channel, which is lined with the biggest concentration of petrochemical plants and oil refineries in the nation.<\/p>\n

Gonzales was talking about her latest concern: the Keystone XL pipeline<\/a>. If completed, it will bring millions of barrels of Canadian crude to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur. But the crude, from the tar sands mined in Alberta, is a heavier, dirtier variety than “sweet crude” from places like West Texas.<\/p>\n\n

“We’re already in the highest level of the polluted [places in] the United States and you bring in more. And you want us to accept that?” Gonzales posed to StateImpact Texas.<\/p>\n

The Canadians say they found just what they need on the Texas Gulf Coast: refineries that already are built to handle the heavy crude.<\/p>\n

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Dave Fehling\/StateImpact Texas<\/p>

Pasadena, Texas<\/p><\/div>\n

“They cost billions, tens of billions of dollars to build. You have that [refining] capacity in the Gulf Coast. It just doesn’t make any sense to make the tens of billions of dollars of investment [in Canada] when you have that capacity in the Gulf Coast,” said Alex Pourbaix, President of TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone pipeline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pourbaix was speaking March 6 at the IHS CERA energy conference<\/a> in Houston. He was on a panel that touted how tar sands oil is already helping make Canada the leading country as a source of “foreign” oil<\/a> for the United States, outpacing imported crude from Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela.<\/p>\n

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