Why not refine the crude oil in Canada rather than moving it to texas in a pipeline?

The United States uses much of the world's crude oil, not only for making gasoline and other fuels, but for may other products as well, including makeup, plastics and many other products. If it were refined in Alaska, they would still have to transport it down here where it's used!

There are a lot of refineries in and around Montana, refining oil from that area, and a LOT more around the Texas coast. It can be carried in huge ships, (remember the Exxon-Valdez oil spill many years ago?) It's a LONG way for a ship to go from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico - Through the Panama Canal! ! Even if it were refined in Alaska, it's still cheaper to get the products here via pipeline than any other mode.

There are a number of refineries in Canada and, as I understand it, they already refine product from the oil field for local use, that will be the source for the proposed pipeline to Texas. But it is less costly to pipe crude through a single pipe to a refinery or refineries located relatively close to the point where the various products will be distributed. The crude is refined into numerous different products and then trucked or rail hauled to distribution centers. If we purchased refined product from Canada, it would have to be containerized in Canada and then hauled by truck or rail; a more costly prospect.

There is controversy that the crude from Canada may be more costly to deliver than the present cost of crude from other sources, but tapping into Canada crude may still make economic sense. Cost of Canadian crude could remain stable under long-term contract and provide a hedge against crude from other sources, the price of which will likely inflate significantly in the immediate future. It also helps support a friendly neighbor rather than a foreign cabal who tend to hold us hostage over their fossil fuel resource.

Because the oil comes from Canada, and it's bought by American companies. It would be efficient if they already had refineries of their own in Canada, but since they don't, they're not going to pay someone else to refine it when that's their business. Refineries in America buy oil, refine it, and sell it off again.

Edit - oh, and maybe it's cheaper to build a pipe than to build a refinery and a pipe.

They care because of the fact that is not a secure or sturdy thank you to transport an exceptionally environmentally poisonous substance. i ought to work out your argument a pair of fee-income diagnosis exhibiting that the fee reductions on oil coming from closer might outweigh the hazards of a pipeline failure and the decreased virgin land alongside the path of the pipeline. the difficulty with that argument is that it assumes the oil marketplace behaves in accordance to textbook grant-and-call for economics. The previous 40 years have shown that the oil marketplace does not stick to user-friendly financial kinds, and consequently making an investment billions of greenbacks and risking significant environmental failures (which additionally fee billions) does not even produce a workable hazard that the fee of oil will drop in any respect, not to point even quickly.

Because Canada is a country without heavy industry. It was a country to sell its own resources to the world for a living. And it is also a heavy taxed and owed a lot of debt country.