Little-Known Pipeline Nearly as Big as Keystone Could Win Race to Gulf

A little-known pipeline could win the race to ship heavy Canadian crude oil from the Midwest to the U.S. Gulf Coast if it comes online as planned in 2015. Called the Eastern Gulf Crude Access Pipeline Project, the 774-mile line would be capable of carrying almost as much oil as the Keystone XL, the controversial pipeline mired in its fifth year of federal review. The Eastern Gulf would run from Patoka, Ill. to St. James, La., carrying oil from North Dakota's Bakken formation as well as Canadian oil sands crude. Both types of oil are creating a bottleneck in the Midwest, which doesn't have the refining or pipeline capacity to handle the large amounts of oil now being produced. The project is a joint venture between Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, Texas, and Enbridge, Inc. of Alberta, Canada. Enbridge is the company responsible for the largest inland oil pipeline spill in U.S. history—the 2010 accident in Michigan's Kalamazoo River, which is still being cleaned up today. It's also a major competitor of TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL. The 30-inch wide Eastern Gulf pipeline would carry up to 660,000 barrels per day out of Patoka, an industrial hub of the region's refineries, storage facilities and pipelines. Energy Transfer bills the project as the "first pipeline transportation option for transportation of crude oil to the eastern Gulf Coast from the midwest U.S." The Eastern Gulf is just one of many new pipelines designed to move North American oil to the Gulf Coast for refining and export...more