I don't know that that's so clear at all. It's an oil pipeline to import canadian oil for domestic refiners. Domestic refined petroleum consumption peaked in 2018 and has been going down (and of course has cratered during the pandemic).
There's actually no good case to be made for this thing at all from current data. You have to project an increase in demand that doesn't seem to be coming.
Bottom line: this pipeline was proposed in the middle of the post-peak-oil boom in oil prices. It made sense in an imagined world of ever rising oil prices and ever larger SUVs. The world kinda moved on.
Also:
> increased dependency on oil-fracking
This is tar sand oil. While not every drop necessarily qualifies, depending on your definition, this is process-extracted secondary petroleum. It's very much in the same category as "fracked" oil in terms of extraction efficiency.
There's actually no good case to be made for this thing at all from current data. You have to project an increase in demand that doesn't seem to be coming.
Bottom line: this pipeline was proposed in the middle of the post-peak-oil boom in oil prices. It made sense in an imagined world of ever rising oil prices and ever larger SUVs. The world kinda moved on.
Also:
> increased dependency on oil-fracking
This is tar sand oil. While not every drop necessarily qualifies, depending on your definition, this is process-extracted secondary petroleum. It's very much in the same category as "fracked" oil in terms of extraction efficiency.