Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

[Slimprofits]

http://www.onearth.org/print/17654

By Ted Genoways

September 30, 2011

By the time Ben Gotschall rose to speak, number 67 on the list, the hearing had been going on for hours. It was after eight o’clock, and the crowd was growing restless as the session approached its second scheduled intermission to give the court reporter a chance to take a break. The State Department officials, ensconced behind a folding table on the elevated stage (under banners from the schools in the NENAC Conference -- the Creighton Bulldogs, the Crofton Warriors, the Holt County Huskies) had begun cutting time at the podium from five minutes to three and issuing repeated requests for the crowd to hold its applause in order to allow more people to speak. In a night that had begun with such tense emotion, everyone had begun to feel the repetition and tedium of a seven-hour open session.

“I am a fourth-generation rancher from here in the Sandhills of Holt County,” Ben began. “I graduated from high school in this building on that stage where you’re sitting right now, as did a lot of other people in this room. I am here because I believe that this proposed pipeline route poses a serious risk to the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer. This pipeline is not in our national interest.

“TransCanada and their supporters say that we who are opposed to this pipeline are unreasonable, extremist, fear-mongers,” he continued. “They accuse us of being misguided and of spreading half-truths. They accuse us of being emotional. Well, if we are emotional, it is because this pipeline threatens our water, our health, our homes, and our way of life. If we are misguided and spreading half-truths, it is because TransCanada has misguided us and told us only half the truth.”

The room erupted in applause, which Ben quickly waved away and continued.

“I have been to Marshall, Michigan, and have seen the damage done by the Enbridge tar sands oil spill in July 2010 that has contaminated 40 miles of the Kalamazoo watershed. Anyone who says diluted bitumen will float doesn’t know what they are talking about. Over a year later, large amounts of oil still remained on the bottoms of streams. I saw it. I smelled it. I got it on my boots, and it doesn’t wash off.

“Anyone who says diluted bitumen isn’t a threat to water is lying. There are people in Marshall who are sick. There are people in Marshall who are dying from exposure to unknown chemicals. There are people in Marshall who have seen the dumpsters full of dead birds, the semi-trailers full of dead animals that were killed by drinking the water, and have seen their neighbors, one by one, come down with rare disorders and cancers. We need to know what chemicals make up the diluent in diluted bitumen. That information is in the national interest, and suppressing it, as TransCanada has done, is a threat to our national security.”

Again, the crowed cheered its approval, and Ben waved them away again, more fiercely this time. He rejected the claim of fear-mongering by pipeline opponents, he said.

“I think it is TransCanada who is afraid. They are afraid that all the money they have spent on ad campaigns can’t buy them truth. They are afraid that all the money they have spent on lobbyists and orange T-shirts and buses can’t buy them consent. They are afraid because they can’t buy our trust and they have done nothing to earn it. They are afraid because we refuse to believe that their profits are more important than our basic human rights.”

From the stage, the State Department official leaned into her mic: “Can you please wrap up your comments?”

“Yes, I can,” Ben said -- but then, someone from the crowd shouted, “Let him speak!” And then another. And another. It became a choir.

“The water in this aquifer might be important to us,” he started, “but soon it will be important to the world ...”

Before he could go any further, a woman from the crowd reached up and slapped another number -- number 70 -- onto Ben’s chest, ceding him another three minutes of time. The crowd roared its approval, some standing to applaud. And Ben began again to speak.

Well worth reading in it's entirety...

[GRG55]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

What do these ranchers use to fuel their pick-up trucks and tractors? Probably diesel and gasoline.

How did that stuff get into their fuel tanks? Without question crude oil and finished product pipelines played a major part in that process.

As I have written before, when these folks stop using the stuff we'll stop producing it. When it comes to water, I can't help but notice the support for water and natural gas intensive corn-based ethanol coming from the Great Plains area. Completely rational from their perspective.

I am not normally an economic nationalist, but I would enjoy seeing this pipeline proposal killed by U.S. public opinion. I don't see any good reason why Canada should be exporting the upgrading and refining jobs to the USA. Canada should take a page out of the USA playbook and look after its own interests first. I have always thought that greater integration of the USA and Canadian economies, with each playing to its competitive advantages, made the most sense. However, the USA is dealing with its trade and commercial partners in an increasingly capricious way, and perhaps its time to heed that message.

[aaron]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

I was up in Canada last weekend. On the news, they were talking about this issue. Many people (smart sheeple) were expressing the same opinion: Why ship the jobs down to the United States? These people want regulations to be passed so that at least 50% of the bitumen must be upgraded in Alberta. I think they should do 100%.

GRG55 --> Is there any truth to their claims of health problems? Are people in Marshall sick?

[Slimprofits]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

What do these ranchers use to fuel their pick-up trucks and tractors? Probably diesel and gasoline.

How did that stuff get into their fuel tanks? Without question crude oil and finished product pipelines played a major part in that process.

I think they're saying one pipeline is enough.

Robert Jones, director of the Keystone XL pipeline project, insists that the risk of leaks is minimal. TransCanada rented the wood-paneled backroom of Baler’s, a restaurant on the main drag in Atkinson, to hold a pre-hearing press conference -- and combat what they called “fear-mongering” by pipeline opponents (though the restaurant was closed to the public and wait staff was instructed not to talk to the press). Jones sat at the head of the party room, dressed in jeans and a pressed Oxford, and he seemed weary of arguing that the pipeline would be safe. “The Platte Pipeline,” Jones pointed out, “has been operating in Nebraska -- parallels the Platte River, goes through the heart of the Ogallala Aquifer -- since 1952, safely and reliably delivering over 50 million barrels of oil each year.”

Of course, that number is partly the point. The proposed Keystone XL line would be delivering six times the flow of the Platte Pipeline through a pipe nearly twice as wide and under considerably higher pressure. The integrity of the TransCanada line, in short, would be under much greater stress. But, more to the point, the Platte Pipeline has not been operating “safely” for nearly sixty years; in 1981, a section near Glenrock, Wyoming, ruptured and spilled over 8,500 barrels of oil, contaminating nearly 70 miles of the North Platte River. Art Hovey, the reporter for the Lincoln Journal-Star who has most doggedly covered the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska, wrote a story about the thirty-year-old spill back in March, but, with Hovey sitting not ten feet in front of him at Baler’s, Jones several times invoked the Platte Pipeline as an example of safety.

Perhaps Jones discounts the 1981 spill because it was caused by what the industry calls “a third-party downage”: a construction crew hit the pipe while digging phone lines, thus it was not a structural flaw that was to blame. That’s cold comfort to the ranchers around Atkinson, who are more apt to focus on the two days it took the company to report the spill (according to the Proceedings of the American Petroleum Institute). Jones said such a spill would be unlikely -- even in the Sandhills, where blowouts would stand to easily expose shallow pipe -- because the pipe would be coated with a two- to four-inch conduit of concrete, which, he said, “helps with third-party downage.” (Pipeline opponents told me this was news to them and was not included in TransCanada’s proposal.) Jones also said that Keystone XL would have “over 16,000 sensors that send signals to a control center 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The data is refreshed every five seconds. And if there is a problem, the pipeline shuts off automatically, and the flow stops within minutes.”

[GRG55]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

I think they're saying one pipeline is enough.

As you can see from what I posted above, I agree with them. Kill the pipeline. After all the one built 60 years ago should be more than sufficient for today's needs in that part of the world :-)

[GRG55]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

I was up in Canada last weekend. On the news, they were talking about this issue. Many people (smart sheeple) were expressing the same opinion: Why ship the jobs down to the United States? These people want regulations to be passed so that at least 50% of the bitumen must be upgraded in Alberta. I think they should do 100%.

GRG55 --> Is there any truth to their claims of health problems? Are people in Marshall sick?

I have no idea if people are sick in Marshall, but it is pretty rare for an industrial accident such as a major pipeline leak to have zero effect. Wells will blow out, pipelines will rupture, nuclear plants will release radiation, people downwind from coal fired power plants will have demonstrably more respiratory diseases than the baseline. Pretty well everything mankind does has negative effects of some sort, and nothing is risk free.

Airplanes crash, but we still fly. Cars crash even more often, and take even more lives. But most of us still drive. The difference is that we think we choose to take these risks, and in some ways we fool ourselves into thinking we have some control over those risks [after all every one of us is an above average driver...right :-) ]. Not so with the risks imposed on us by industrial development sponsored by a corporation, especially when that company is foreign owned [both Enbridge and TransCanada are headquartered in a city quite close to where I am as I type these words].

During the middle part of my career I spent considerable time in public meetings and as a panel lead in regulatory hearings working through the process of securing permits for natural gas developments, including drilling wells, installing pipelines and constructing processing facilities. It is impossible not to feel empathy for the people who were being subjected to some new risk if the project was approved, even though in most cases they would gain no direct personal benefit from the project. But they heat their houses with natural gas, run their farms and ranches on petroleum products, live in a place where royalties and taxes on the petroleum industry paid a major portion of their government programs including health care, and used gasoline or diesel to drive to the meetings and hearings. A good number of them had relatives working in the oil and gas industry. But understandably they still didn't want something in their back yard. Corporate executives and "expert" witnesses that claim that there cannot be any major problems, there are few risks, and everything will always be fine forever and ever, are speaking absolute rubbish [a stronger word here wouldn't be inappropriate].

The debates really should be about the risks and trade-offs, who benefits and who pays the costs - actual and potential, current and future. But my experience was anything but. Most people don't come to public meetings to learn something; they usually already have their mind made up. Company public consultation representatives, tired of being always on the defensive, don't come to public meetings with any expectation of providing any useful facts. Too often in these times the process is one of trying to manipulate perceptions and manage competing propaganda.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

It seems ludicrous not to refine the stuff as close to the source as possible, not just to reduce the environmental impact, but for a myriad of reasons. What are the Canadian politics behind the decision to pipe it south?

[GRG55]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

It seems ludicrous not to refine the stuff as close to the source as possible, not just to reduce the environmental impact, but for a myriad of reasons. What are the Canadian politics behind the decision to pipe it south?

It may seem ludicrous, but it is not. However, I would be interested to hear those "myriad of reasons"...

You will note that generally everywhere in the world the refineries are located closer to the end markets for those products than to the source of the oil. How much North Sea oil is refined in the North Sea border nations? How much Middle East oil is refined in the Middle East? How did Singapore, without a single producing oil field, end up as a significant refining and trading hub? Why is it that OPEC nations such as Nigeria and Venezuela export almost all of their crude oil production instead of refined products?

Are all these people trying to defy economic logic? Hardly.

The global oil production, transport and refining system has evolved the way it has for very good reasons. One of those reasons is that a barrel of crude oil is composed of a variety of hydrocarbon molecules of different sizes. The refining process can be thought of as "unpacking" all these molecules and sorting them into product groups from very light, high-octane aviation gasoline, to middle distillates such as diesel and heating oil, to heavier hydrocarbons such as asphalts and lubricants. All that and more comes from a barrel of crude. And because of this the volume of product leaving a refinery is measurably greater than the volume of crude oil entering it.

Another way to think of a barrel of crude oil is as a container packed with basketballs [heavier, long-chain hydrocarbons] and marbles [light hydrocarbons]. The refinery separates them and sorts them into two piles...which will occupy more volume than they do when mixed together, because the marbles fill the interstices of the basketballs.

That means it is less expensive, and more efficient to move crude oil from producing source to market region than it is to move the refined products. Once the added costs of keeping hundreds of individual refined products segregated in the transport and distribution system [so they don't cross contaminate each other] are factored in it becomes pretty clear that refining close to the end user is the most economically efficient solution.

My suggestion that Canada should refine its own heavy oil and oil sands output is NOT economically efficient and will require more total invested capital than if we export the crude oil. This type of decision is purely political, and contrary to the goal of creating an efficient, integrated, competitive North American economy. In fact what will happen is that protests against this crude oil pipeline will be replaced by USA citizens protesting against refined product pipelines that will be proposed by we Canadians so we can export those refined products to the markets south of the 49th parallel.

My suggestion goes against what I believe. I truly think that open trade between nations based on comparative advantage is beneficial for both. Canada has more than enough petroleum and enough technological capability that we could theoretically erect massive heated greenhouses and grow our own oranges through the cold Canadian winter. But it makes a lot more economic sense to trade that energy and use some of that value to import oranges from California or Florida where there is a comparative advantage of producing them much cheaper than we ever could.

Upgrading and refining oil sands output in Canada would be a political decision...driven almost entirely by USA politics, which seem to be a complete and permanent mess when it comes to energy policy in particular.

The good citizens of Nebraska, and everywhere else in the USA, have every right to decide not to have our pipelines running across their land. However, the consequence is that Canadians will find other ways to access the USA markets, and failing that we will find alternative global markets. If the latter occurs it means that the USA will import crude oil from other sources, most likely less politically secure than Canada, and less friendly to USA foreign interests than Canada tends to be. Venezuela comes immediately to mind.

[flintlock]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

What do these ranchers use to fuel their pick-up trucks and tractors? Probably diesel and gasoline.

How did that stuff get into their fuel tanks? Without question crude oil and finished product pipelines played a major part in that process.

As I have written before, when these folks stop using the stuff we'll stop producing it. When it comes to water, I can't help but notice the support for water and natural gas intensive corn-based ethanol coming from the Great Plains area. Completely rational from their perspective.

I am not normally an economic nationalist, but I would enjoy seeing this pipeline proposal killed by U.S. public opinion. I don't see any good reason why Canada should be exporting the upgrading and refining jobs to the USA. Canada should take a page out of the USA playbook and look after its own interests first. I have always thought that greater integration of the USA and Canadian economies, with each playing to its competitive advantages, made the most sense. However, the USA is dealing with its trade and commercial partners in an increasingly capricious way, and perhaps its time to heed that message.

Agree. Why shouldn't nations look out for their own best interests? Isn't that what their governments exist for? Canada and the USA are natural trade partners. I think the key to the future of the US economy lies with selecting the right nations to conduct trade with. Wide open laissez-faire trade is partly responsible for the situation the US is in now. It's all great in theory until you realize you've put half your work force on the dole. Nations should seek out trade with partners who share similar standards and complement each other.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

Worse than the Repukes in the U.S. are the eco-frauds:

a.) They opposed the Alaska pipeline because the caribou herds would die-off.... And after the pipeline was constructed, the caribou herds thrived, jumped over the pipeline, and even gathered next to the warm pipeline to warm-up in winter.

b.) They opposed taconite-tailings being dumped into Lake Superior because of the risk of stomach and intestinal cancer.... And no-one has died from such dumping because taconite-tailings have nothing to do with gastro-intestinal cancer. One can drink water right out of the lake, as before.

c.) They said that California had no more oil left..... And California is now enjoying another oil boom from side-a-ways drilling in Kern County. They still have ignored all of the oil seeping onto beaches in southern California from a gigantic oil deposit just off-shore and still all but untapped.

d.) They said that the Gulf of Mexico was one big dead-zone from oil drilling..... And two weeks after BP capped its ocean-floor well, the Gulf water was as clear and clean as ever. Bacteria and micro-organisms in the warm Gulf water ate the oil.

e.) They said there was no more fresh water left in California to drink..... And they ignored the fact that the state's largest river, the Eel River, flows into the sea, still unused. They also ignored the fact that sea water can be filtered and pumped to nearby cities at competitive cost with fresh water from on-land sources.

f.) They claimed that glaciers were melting and that the sea-level was rising; London would be submerged by the sea.... And upon closer examination, no such evidence was validated. Greenland's ice cap was mis-mapped; its 500 metre contour of ice thickness was used as the eastern extent of the ice cap.

g.) They claimed that low levels of radiation cause cancer.... And they have ignored the fact that cells of living-things repair damage done by radiation. And they have further ignored the fact that all of the Earth has had natural radiation, so life on Earth has evolved with a tolerance to radiation.

i.) They have claimed that melt-downs at nuclear power plants would cause thousands of deaths; the hot core of the reactor might melt through the entire Earth..... After several melt-downs, no-one outside of the atomic power plants has died or suffered any ill health. At Fukushima, Japan no-one inside nor outside of the power plant died from radiation. At Chernobyl in Russia, the so-called "dead zone" around the plant exhibits no death. The entire dead zone, if it ever did exist, is now gone. The eco-system around Chernobyl is thriving.

j.) They claimed that alpine glaciers have disappeared..... But all of North America's alpine glaciers are back, and doing just fine, thank you. There was snow skiing around Lake Tahoe in July.

k.) They claimed that the summer of 2011 was the warmest ever in North America..... But here on the west coast of North America, at least in California, the summer of 2011 was the coldest on record. The summer on the east coast of North America was cool.

l.) They have claimed that sea-levels are rising 36 inches per century on Earth..... But upon closer examination, the sea-level is rising at 6 or 7 inches per century, if even that much. And sea-level change on Earth is normal, not to mention that sea-level is also affected by isostatic effects ( rises of land, or sea-floor, or both ) due to the Ice Age and other causes. Isostatic effects ( isostacy ) which is the areal rising or sinking of land on Earth is still poorly understood, especially how isostatic effects influence sea-level.

m.) Models of climate change have been calibrated incorrectly both by outright fraud and also by ignoring the effects of urbanization around climate stations. Any building or pavement constructed adjacent to a climate station influences the climate measured at the climate station.... So generalizations about global warming have been impossible. Temperature data most likely has been biased by micro-climatic effects (pavements, buildings, etc.) to indicate long-term warming, a purely micro-climatic effect that does not exist over broad areas of the Earth.

n.) The Greenland ice cap and the ice cap in Antarctica have always calved ( lost ice by break-up ) around their margins because glaciers on Earth have had a net-positive increase in ice inland toward their centres. Dr. Mario Giovinetto, my undergraduate advisor in geography at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, did the ice budget studies by direct ice-core measurement in Antarctica and Greenland. Giovinetto discovered that ice flows ( in plasma flow ) from the interiors of these ice caps to their margins.... So movies aired on television of polar bears or penguins floating off into the sea on ice flows calved from adjacent glaciers is not evidence of global warming. And then the public is told that these polar bears and penguins might drown!

Not to be outdone, the WWF ( the World Wildlife Federation ) solicits the public on television to adopt a polar bear at risk of drowning due to global warming. The public is asked to send a donation to the WWF in order to adopt a drowning polar bear.

o.) We were told by the eco-frauds that the North Sea oil field was played-out. We were also told that there were no hydro-carbons under the British Isles..... But now, Stat Oil has drilled another oil gusher to yield 500,000 to 1,000,000 barrels of oil under the North Sea. Also, natural gas has been discovered locked under the shale rock of the British Isles. Litterally, the UK and Ireland are floating on natural gas, just as North America is.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

It may seem ludicrous, but it is not. However, I would be interested to hear those "myriad of reasons"...

You will note that generally everywhere in the world the refineries are located closer to the end markets for those products than to the source of the oil. How much North Sea oil is refined in the North Sea border nations? How much Middle East oil is refined in the Middle East? How did Singapore, without a single producing oil field, end up as a significant refining and trading hub? Why is it that OPEC nations such as Nigeria and Venezuela export almost all of their crude oil production instead of refined products?

Are all these people trying to defy economic logic? Hardly.

The global oil production, transport and refining system has evolved the way it has for very good reasons. One of those reasons is that a barrel of crude oil is composed of a variety of hydrocarbon molecules of different sizes. The refining process can be thought of as "unpacking" all these molecules and sorting them into product groups from very light, high-octane aviation gasoline, to middle distillates such as diesel and heating oil, to heavier hydrocarbons such as asphalts and lubricants. All that and more comes from a barrel of crude. And because of this the volume of product leaving a refinery is measurably greater than the volume of crude oil entering it.

Another way to think of a barrel of crude oil is as a container packed with basketballs [heavier, long-chain hydrocarbons] and marbles [light hydrocarbons]. The refinery separates them and sorts them into two piles...which will occupy more volume than they do when mixed together, because the marbles fill the interstices of the basketballs.

That means it is less expensive, and more efficient to move crude oil from producing source to market region than it is to move the refined products. Once the added costs of keeping hundreds of individual refined products segregated in the transport and distribution system [so they don't cross contaminate each other] are factored in it becomes pretty clear that refining close to the end user is the most economically efficient solution.

My suggestion that Canada should refine its own heavy oil and oil sands output is NOT economically efficient and will require more total invested capital than if we export the crude oil. This type of decision is purely political, and contrary to the goal of creating an efficient, integrated, competitive North American economy. In fact what will happen is that protests against this crude oil pipeline will be replaced by USA citizens protesting against refined product pipelines that will be proposed by we Canadians so we can export those refined products to the markets south of the 49th parallel.

My suggestion goes against what I believe. I truly think that open trade between nations based on comparative advantage is beneficial for both. Canada has more than enough petroleum and enough technological capability that we could theoretically erect massive heated greenhouses and grow our own oranges through the cold Canadian winter. But it makes a lot more economic sense to trade that energy and use some of that value to import oranges from California or Florida where there is a comparative advantage of producing them much cheaper than we ever could.

Upgrading and refining oil sands output in Canada would be a political decision...driven almost entirely by USA politics, which seem to be a complete and permanent mess when it comes to energy policy in particular.

The good citizens of Nebraska, and everywhere else in the USA, have every right to decide not to have our pipelines running across their land. However, the consequence is that Canadians will find other ways to access the USA markets, and failing that we will find alternative global markets. If the latter occurs it means that the USA will import crude oil from other sources, most likely less politically secure than Canada, and less friendly to USA foreign interests than Canada tends to be. Venezuela comes immediately to mind.

Thanks for the education. I had gathered some of it from this article..

http://www.albertaoilmagazine.com/20...de-in-alberta/

I'll confess I have only surface knowledge of the situation, and am more focused on the “complete and permanent mess” within the US, and the increasingly unstable world economy. No doubt it would be more expensive and less efficient to refine the products in Canada, but many Canadian politicians cheering on the pipelines were once adamant raw bitumen would not leave Alberta along with requisite refining jobs. It's an never ending debate: how do you divide the spoils when a country exports its raw materials and shouldn't that country's workers first be adding value and earning good wages?

[flintlock]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

It's an never ending debate: how do you divide the spoils when a country exports its raw materials and shouldn't that country's workers first be adding value and earning good wages?

What makes you think anyone cares about workers? Obviously they don't feel the worker has any claim to the nations resources whatsoever. The myth of goverment for the people shows itself a little more every day. People will get what they are due the moment they demand it, not a second sooner. They have more power than they think.

[c1ue]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

My suggestion goes against what I believe. I truly think that open trade between nations based on comparative advantage is beneficial for both. Canada has more than enough petroleum and enough technological capability that we could theoretically erect massive heated greenhouses and grow our own oranges through the cold Canadian winter. But it makes a lot more economic sense to trade that energy and use some of that value to import oranges from California or Florida where there is a comparative advantage of producing them much cheaper than we ever could.

I'd just note that comparative advantage works in the 2nd and 3rd order as well.

Just look at natural gas in the ex-Soviet nations.

Fortunately (for the US) Canada is simply too small to really stop the US 'comparative advantage'.

[GRG55]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

I'd just note that comparative advantage works in the 2nd and 3rd order as well.

Just look at natural gas in the ex-Soviet nations.

Fortunately (for the US) Canada is simply too small to really stop the US 'comparative advantage'.

National boundaries are a completely artificial construct. Are you suggesting that all nations on earth should develop an entirely internal economy with impermeable barriers at their perimeters?

If not, perhaps you would like to suggest an alternative to trading based on comparative advantage that you might use to persuade me?

[oddlots]

Re: Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills

Well said. Anyone who knows how tiresome the workings of a democracy really are would have given a similar gloss... and still supported it. You get the Atticus Finch award in my books.

Talking of efficiencies, however, I have a question: the biggest objection I have to the tar sands is that it seems to sacrifice a lot of fresh water (irreplaceable resource) and natgas (irreplaceable resource) to retrieve the bitumen just to create a convenient "form" of energy - gasoline / diesel etc...

That seems kinda crazy, like a historical artifact of the "cheap oil" age that's staggering onward from sheer momentum...

Wouldn't it make more sense to just use the natgas input for transportation instead and forego digging up a massive area of Alberta and polluting massive amounts of water?