Report: Canceling Keystone Pipeline Will Actually Cause Carbon Emissions to Spike

Far from saving the planet from global warming, President Joe Biden may have actually made things much worse when he opted to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office. In addition to killing more than 11,000 good jobs, Biden’s executive order will actually be responsible for an enormous spike in CO2 emissions. This is according to a new report from the Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance (EEIA) who say that crude oil from Canada will still flow to the refineries at the Gulf of Mexico; except now, they’ll travel via diesel-fueled trains.

“We have all heard about the thousands of jobs that will be lost with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, but a little basic math reveals that President Biden’s Keystone decision will increase carbon emissions equal to putting nearly half a million more cars on the road,” said the EEIA in a press release.

In their report on Biden’s order, the EEIA calculated exactly how they came to their conclusions.

“According to the Association of American Railroads, it requires 433 gallons of locomotive diesel fuel to pull one loaded crude oil tank car from the Canadian Oil Sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, about 2,200 miles. It takes another 144 gallons to bring the empty tank car back for a refill. That’s 577 gallons total,” they report. “It takes 645 loaded tank cars per day to transport the amount of oil that Keystone XL might have carried – about 400,000 barrels per day. That’s 235,425 tank car loads per year. Multiplied by 577 gallons each, that amounts to about 136 million gallons of diesel burned per year.

“Since each gallon of diesel emits 22.44 pounds of CO2, that means the locomotives pulling those trains will emit over 1.5 million tons of CO2. That’s all net addition to CO2 emissions since Keystone XL would have been powered entirely by renewable energy,” the report continues.“1.5 million tons of CO2 is equivalent to emissions of 490,000 more cars on the road.”

The group’s CEO, Toby Mack, said that Biden’s cancelation of the project may sound good to the environmentalism crowd, but its aims didn’t match reality.

“In the real world, Canadian oil will still travel from Alberta, Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast, but by railroad. We know that jobs will be lost,” he said. “The Administration said the pipeline was cancelled to help the environment, so we ask the questions, ‘What is the real impact on our carbon footprint? What’s the impact on overall CO2 levels? It’s clear that politics, not a commitment to the environment, dictated the Biden Administration’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline.”

Is this where we say, “duh”?