Hey, guess what? TransCanada just got final approval to build its pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta all the way to the Gulf Coast of Texas. Done and done.

I know, I know: The Keystone XL pipeline has been held up. You protested at the White House to stop it. That’s cool. But what you may not know is that Keystone XL would augment a section of pipeline that already brings tar-sands oil from Canada to Nebraska. On Friday, the Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the last permits TransCanada needed for a still-empty stretch from there to the Gulf Coast. Which means that the company will soon have a complete shunt traversing the entire height of the United States.

President Barack Obama encouraged TransCanada to move ahead with the segment that will run from a refinery in Cushing, Okla. to Texas after he rejected the broader [Keystone XL] plan, saying the pipeline needed to be rerouted around Nebraska’s sensitive Sand Hills region. For that project, TransCanada needs presidential approval because it crosses an international border. The shorter portion only requires permits from state and federal agencies. TransCanada said the final of three permits it needed from the Army Corps of Engineers had been approved. …

The line from Cushing will help relieve a bottleneck at the Oklahoma refinery, but doesn’t fulfill TransCanada’s broader goal of transporting more Canadian crude to U.S. refineries.

The key word there is “more.” Transporting more Canadian crude.

Here’s what TransCanada’s grand, oily vision for North America looks like, via Inside Climate News.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of Inside Climate News.)

That purple line is Keystone XL. If built, it would carry 830,000 barrels of tar-sands oil a day from Alberta to Steele City, Neb. — some 1,179 miles. But see that snaky yellow line? That’s Keystone I (which looks like this). It runs 2,147 miles, carrying 591,000 barrels a day. It goes to Steele City already. Then another Keystone leg connects it to Cushing. And now, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, TransCanada will soon have a route that slides on down to the Gulf Coast.

The New York Times ran an editorial this morning, suggesting that Keystone XL — now a policy zombie groaning its way through the Capitol — be killed once and for all.

[T]he climate question must be addressed, if only to give a full accounting of the range of consequences of developing the tar sands, an effort in which the United States will be complicit if it allows the pipeline. That includes the effect of destroying 740,000 acres of boreal forest (a vital sink for greenhouse gases); the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted in extracting the oil from the tar sands (a highly energy-intensive process); and the gases emitted by burning the oil. …

We hope, of course, that the State Department is rigorous in addressing all relevant questions: whether America needs this oil now or in the future; how many jobs the pipeline will actually provide. The department will also be asking about the danger of oil spills. But its report will be incomplete if it does not also consider what the oil flowing through the Keystone XL would spill into the skies — both now and in the future.

All true! There are a ton of reasons to stop the Keystone pipeline! But from TransCanada’s end, the main thing a delay on Keystone XL means is that they’re shipping less tar-sands oil than they want, and it’s taking longer. It’s like giving a getaway driver a Honda Civic instead of a Porsche. He’d really rather be going faster, but rest assured — he’s still going to get away.

Photo by Elvert Barnes.

Previously on this little soap opera: Shell arrives in the Arctic, almost losing a boat. The company’s friends back in Washington worry whether Shell will have enough time to drill before the ice closes in later this year. And now, back to our story.

I have to say, it’s kind of amazing that Shell is profitable. Beyond, you know, the fact that it sells ridiculous amounts of an artificially cheap product that is deliberately integrated tightly into the fabric of nearly every global society. You’d think that a company that made about $2 million an hour last quarter would have this drilling thing on lock.

But, no. Shell is having to scale back its drilling plans in Alaska, even as one of the state’s senators scrambles to buy it more time.

Shell had originally hoped to drill five exploratory wells this season. But what with chasing loose boats and sea ice, it’ll probably have to settle for two.

Unusually thick shorefast ice is keeping Shell from sending drillships into the Arctic waters and shortening an already brief window. Under federal regulations, Shell has to stop drilling in hydrocarbon zones by Oct. 31 in the Beaufort Sea; regulators are requiring that work to end 38 days earlier in the Chukchi Sea.

In the past five years, ice has encroached over the planned drill sites as early as Nov. 1, but this summer, the slow melt of multi-year ice at the season’s start means the water is colder and is a signal it could return even earlier.

Shell had planned to launch its Arctic drilling program in July; now, it is anticipating an early August start date, said spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh.

(There’s still ice in the Arctic? I thought Shell et al. had already taken care of that.)

Obviously one solution would be if Shell didn’t actually have to stop on Oct. 31. (N.B. for Alaskans: If an oil-drenched polar bear shows up at your door that day, it’s probably not a kid in costume.) So Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is pushing to have the window extended.

The company’s federally approved exploration plan states that in the Chukchi Sea, Shell must cease drilling into hydrocarbon-bearing zones 38 days before ice again encroaches onto the drilling areas, which means a late-September deadline because Interior estimates that ice will arrive Nov. 1 at the earliest.

“I think they should be open to extending it, and I believe they will if it is determined that the ice conditions are such that there will be an adequate period of time … for Shell to get out of the water,” Murkowski, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said of the September date.

I mean, look. I say, you pays yer money, you takes yer chances. Ice has literally never done any damage to any ship. So let ‘em stick around! Keep drilling! After all, as Shell CEO Peter Voser notes, “A great deal of planning has gone into this program.” I know we’d all hate for that planning not to result in new oil wells in ecologically sensitive areas resulting in even more enormous profits for an oil company.

Preview of the next episode: Locked in by ice, the crew of one Shell drilling ship resorts to a Lord of the Flies-style battle for power. Meanwhile, the same thing happens in Washington.

Mitt Romney is giving oil executives a good reason to vote for him. (Making, by our count, 465,361 such reasons.) From the Center for American Progress:

The world’s five biggest public oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—would keep special tax breaks worth $2.4 billion each year. And by cutting corporate tax rates, the Romney plan could lower the companies’ annual tax bill by another $2.3 billion, based on an analysis of the companies’ tax expense for 2011. The special tax breaks, supplemented by Gov. Romney’s lower corporate rates, could benefit the oil companies by more than $4 billion annually.

Ha ha. Perfect! Finally — finally! — oil companies will be able to make a buck or two!

Here’s CAP’s breakdown of what the five largest oil companies in the world — half of the 10 largest corporations in America — stand to get from Romney’s tax proposals.

Click to embiggen.

Take Chevron, for example: A company that earned $26.9 billion dollars in 2011 would see — if you add the right two columns together — a $1.2 billion tax break. Which is helpful, because Chevron has its eye on a new yacht.

And a new island.

And a new president.

That’s $5.3 billion a month. About $176 million a day. $7 million an hour — almost three times as much as the average college grad earns in a lifetime. The company also very likely pays less in taxes than you do.

Hopefully, CEO Rex Tillerson feels better now.

Via Bill McKibben.

What would Keystone XL look like as a human being? Probably pretty much how he’s portrayed in this video from the Post-Carbon Institute: a spectacularly douchey dudebro who can’t take no for an answer.

The only thing that would make this video better? If it ended with Keystone XL heading next door, where a man in a suit and a flag lapel pin furtively welcomed him in. Or possibly if the Enbridge guy was pissing on a duck.

Chevron made a big announcement this morning. From FuelFix:

Chevron said today it will enter Iraq and begin drilling for oil there next year after purchasing major interests in two areas of its Kurdistan region.

The company has no interests in Iraq and had previously not disclosed its pursuit of land in Kurdistan, Chevron spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said.

The Iraqi government has expressed frustration with the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government for approving oil exploration and production contracts without approval from the national government

So, congratulations are in order to Chevron. It’s no doubt pleased to have figured out a way to get around the objections of that nation’s sovereign leadership.

In a completely unrelated note, Gawker’s John Cook uncovered this Department of Defense memo [PDF] dated Sept. 12, 2002, that makes the case for the invasion of Iraq. This was the same day that President Bush spoke before the United Nations, arguing that sanctions against the country were insufficient and that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were a serious threat to the West.

The full Department of Defense memo is below.

Presentation- The Case for Action

Guys, I have some bad news. Shell’s attempts to drill exploratory wells in Alaska aren’t going that great. Cue the Shell-denfreude.

First, there was that ship that tried to escape, only to be dragged back into servitude. Then the company had to go hat-in-hand to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asking if maybe, just this once, the agency would be cool with a little more air pollution coming from their drilling rig.

“Shell was then and remains now committed to making every effort to meet the emission limits imposed by EPA,” the company said in its application, adding that its testing has “demonstrated compliance with a vast majority of limits.”

Yeah, EPA. Be cool! Shell has complied with the vast majority of rules about not polluting the air, and the all of the air pollution that results from the burning of their oil is the consumers’ fault. Oil doesn’t pollute the air, people that burn the oil pollute the air.

And now this: Shell might not get the permits it needs in time to drill all the wells it wanted.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday that a decision to grant Shell permits to drill in Arctic waters off Alaska’s coast this summer could arrive as late as Aug. 15, giving the oil giant a tight window for the project. …

[T]he timing is important because Shell’s window to drill into hydrocarbon-bearing zones in the Chukchi Sea ends Sept. 24 under the exploration plan approved by Interior Department regulators, although other activities can last longer.

The company must clear out of both the Chukchi Sea and adjoining Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s northern coast by the end of October.

OH NOES, etc. On behalf of all Americans — nay, all of humanity — I demand that the Department of the Interior move as expediently as possible to get those permits to Shell! Also, I would like to invite the entire Department of the Interior to my awesome beach condo for the next month. Free food and drink, no laptops allowed.

But the real enemy here, as always, is that long-standing foe of the fossil fuel industry: ice.

Shell is already getting a later start than it had hoped on the costly project because it’s waiting for sea ice in the region to clear.

This is why the oil industry has no choice but to ensure that the globe is never again threatened by the specter of ice — impeding our resource extraction, sinking our luxury liners, blocking our transit through the Northwest Passage, etc. Nor would Shell think of drilling when the ice starts to reaccumulate.

“They would like to do as much of the schedule as they had hoped, but if the conditions don’t allow, they will not risk it. They have informed me that they will not risk that,” [Sen. Lisa] Murkowski [(R-Alaska)], the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told reporters in the Capitol Tuesday.

No, Senator Murkowski. Shell would not risk that. They would not risk having their ships damaged, unless they anchor them badly in high winds. Nor would they ever spill oil these days, unless it was in Nigeria. Shell is all about risk avoidance.

Or, at the very least, pushing off risk onto customers and future generations. It’s just smart business.

When TransCanada was pitching Nebraska on the stretch of the Keystone pipeline that was completed in 2010, it estimated that the state would rake in $5.5 million in taxes in the first year. (This is the already-operational Keystone 1 pipeline, not to be confused with the controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline.)

On that estimate: not quite!

State and county records indicate that TransCanada this year will pay $2.2 million in personal property and real estate taxes to eight rural counties in eastern Nebraska crossed by the 30-inch, crude-oil pipeline.

To be fair, TransCanada says the tax bill will go up for 2013 — perhaps four times as much, according to Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman who had just rolled a die that came up “four.”

To actually be fair, the head of the state’s property tax division agrees that revenues will go up, though wasn’t willing to suggest that Howard’s figure was correct. Fool me once, etc.

Anyway, TransCanada assures everyone that if the bigger Keystone XL is built, the state will get a bajillion dollars in taxes every 42 minutes and literally every human being who has ever lived will be employed for life at a salary equivalent to Albert Pujols’. (Not a baseball fan? Imagine we’d said Bill Gates.)

You can take that to the bank! (But I wouldn’t.)

The fossil fuels boom in North Dakota has meant jobs and one of the country’s better economies. It’s also meant a strain on the state’s resources and infrastructure, as we noted last month. One we left off our list: sewage.

Two firms were cited on Friday for dumping more than 100 loads of raw sewage in “fields and ditches” between late 2011 and early this year. The waste originated at drilling locations and worker camps in the Bakken oil patch.

In all, the loads added up to more than 500,000 gallons — enough to fill three-quarters of an Olympic-sized pool. (London 2012!)

Two firms were cited, Mon-Dak Water and Septic Services and Hurley Oilfield Services. Hurley’s response wasn’t, oh, you caught us, but rather, was that wrong?

Dave Gorham, a consultant with Hurley Oilfield Services, said he’s working with the department to find a way to resolve the situation with the company. Gorham said he couldn’t speak to specific instances listed in the official complaints.

“There’s going to be some human error. (But) my understanding is the state has always allowed field application,” Gorham said.

“Field application.”

The North Dakota Department of Health issued a nine-page citation to the two companies involved, which suggests that fines could be assessed at $5,000 per day. We recommend that you not read the citation during lunch; it includes phrases like, “The complainant noted that the septage contained shredded paper.” If you want a more sanitized version of the story, here’s the NBC affiliate in Bismarck.

To be completely honest with you, this story overwhelmed our ability to make jokes. Choice overload, we suppose. You’re welcome to make your own in the comments. We’ll just note that we’re pleased the oil industry is diversifying the ways in which it pollutes. Shows innovation.

New roads built to facilitate drilling in southern Texas are also facilitating the movement of something else.

Energy companies boring into the depths of South Texas in the multibillion-dollar hunt for natural gas and oil are opening a growing fissure in U.S.-Mexico border security as they build hundreds of miles of private back roads and an uncharted pipeline to America for drug traffickers.

Hefty roads running through once-remote ranchlands now enable loaded-down tractor-trailers and pickups to avoid Border Patrol highway checkpoints that have long been the last line of defense for stopping all traffic headed farther into the United States.

This is not oil. (Photo by West Midlands Police.)

The traffickers are smart enough to masquerade their shipments as ones related to the roads’ intended use.

On a weekday morning in early March, 18,665 pounds of marijuana were caught being smuggled aboard two trucks, one a flatbed, the other a tanker truck driving through the Briscoe Ranch on a road that circumvents a Border Patrol checkpoint.

They were on a private road leased to energy companies and carrying what looked like supplies typically used in oil field operations but were instead loaded with marijuana. The two trucks yielded the most pot ever caught in one day by the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector.

This will no doubt make conservative politicians reticent to approve further drilling in the region, while at the same time making certain elements of the left more sympathetic to the practice.