Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
would pass underneath the Alberta-Montana border and run clear through the heart of the
United States to the Gulf Coast, ending at a clutch of refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it is called, argue that it would pose un-
acceptable environmental risks, even leaving aside the issue of how dirty oil sands oil is.
The pipeline, three feet in diameter and buried underground, would transport diluted bitu-
men through such ecologically invaluable regions as the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides
nearly a third of all groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and is also a major
drinking water supply. The threat to the Ogallala, the argument goes, is too great a risk to
take. And then there's the question of whether the project would even be economically vi-
able.
Pipeline supporters, on the other hand, claim that Keystone XL would be reliable and
safe, and they contend that it would double the amount of oil sands oil that can be imported
to the United States.
What Keystone XL definitely has going for it, though, is irresistible
symbolic
value.
Judged by this admittedly dubious metric, a pipeline connecting northern Alberta and Port
Arthur, Texas, is almost too good to pass up. Because if the oil sands represent the future
of the oil industry, then Port Arthur represents its past, even its birth. And Keystone XL,
should it be built, would physically link the two, feeding the future to the past, and tying
the history of petroleum up in a tidy bow.
They called it folly. To most people, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that there was oil wait-
ing underneath the low hill known as Spindletop, near Beaumont, in Southeast Texas. But
Patillo Higgins had been obsessed with it for nearly a decade. A local businessman and
self-taught geologist, he had led multiple failed attempts to find oil under the hill, and still
he persisted. The quintessential example of an entrepreneur driven beyond sound judgment,
Higgins spent year after year chasing oil with nothing to show for it. He pursued his goal
with a faith matched only by his own religious dogmatism, and even ceded ownership of
his own company to attract new investors—all in an age when oil was used only for lamp
fuel and lubricants. As a business plan, it was idiotic.
On the morning of January 10, 1901, Higgins wasn't even on Spindletop. Neither was
his drilling contractor, a similarly obsessed, Croatian-born engineer called Anthony Lucas.
They had no idea what was about to happen. Not even the drilling crew, as they ground the
well deeper, past 1,100 feet, knew what they were about to unleash on Texas and the world.
No idea that by lunchtime their well would be producing more oil than every other oil well
in the country—combined.
