“The modernized Valero refinery [in Port Arthur, Tex.] can turn 310,000 barrels a day of some of the world’s worst-quality crude oil — such as the bitumen-laden mixture from Canadian oil sands — into gasoline and diesel fuel for cars and trucks,” Mufson wrote. “Valero, the largest U.S. oil refining company, would be one of the biggest customers of oil from the Keystone XL pipeline, buying about 150,000 barrels a day.”
Indeed, the State Department’s final environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL project specifically disputed claims that the oil “would pass through the United States and be loaded onto vessels for ultimate sale in markets such as Asia,” saying it was not economically justified. The State Department noted that the traditional sources of crude for the Gulf Coast, such as Mexico and Venezuela, are declining, and so refineries would have “significant incentive to obtain heavy crude from the oil sands.”
So then the question turns on what happens to that oil after it leaves the refinery. Oil is a global commodity, of course, and where it travels often depends on market conditions. In Obama’s telling, however, the refined Canadian oil goes “everywhere else” and “not to the United States.”
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