The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial today on the Keystone XL pipeline. Here is some from the beginning:

With 9.1% unemployment and gasoline prices in the stratosphere, President Obama must sometimes wish that some big corporation would suddenly show up and offer a shovel-ready, multibillion-dollar project to create 100,000 jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from dictatorships. Oh, wait. His Secretary of State has had that offer sitting on her desk since she was sworn in. The trouble is that the Administration can't approve it without upsetting its anti-fossil fuel constituency. And so the proposal sits.

the middle:

Today those [Gulf Coast] refineries are highly dependent on imports from Mexico and Venezuela, which have decreased output in recent years. TransCanada would help to... more »

The Interior Department isn't doing enough to prepare our nation for a secure energy future, and its policies are harming our economy and lessening the amount of revenue that our industry is producing for our government.

The administration acknowledges the importance of oil and natural gas in the nation's energy future. Its projections show they will supply most of our energy for several more decades even with strong growth in renewable energy. Yet the government's follow-through in fostering more domestic development raises questions about its commitment.

The fact is, oil and natural gas development on U.S. public lands and federal offshore waters remains on a very slow track.

Sure, the department has extended some Gulf leases, and it produced a supplemental environmental impact statemen... more »

How big is the Gulf of Mexico oil find announced last week by Exxon Mobil? BIG. As in a projected 700 million barrels and as Houston-based industry analyst John White reminds us: "Seven hundred million barrels doesn't happen very often...That's a lot of oil."

Yes, and it's also a spectacular illustration of what can happen when the energy industry is allowed to search for and develop American resources - in this case a reservoir of oil more than a mile underwater, in Exxon's Keathley Canyon blocks, about 250 miles southwest of New Orleans. The discovering well is one of only 15 new wells allowed by the federal government since a moratorium on deepwater drilling was lifted in October.

Finds like Exxon's Keathley Canyon, Shell's Cardamom field (estimated 140 million barrels) and others, on a... more »

While the administration wrestles with itself over approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, some important points to consider:

• Within a few years of its completion, Keystone XL would deliver upwards of 830,000 barrels of oil per day (b/d) from Canada's oil sands region to U.S. refiners, creating tens of thousands of U.S. jobs.
• The Energy Information Administration reports that with the additional 830,000 b/d, U.S. production and secure, reliable Canadian imports would supply 57 percent of our crude oil needs - up from 51 percent in 2010.
• In a larger context, the pipeline would be part of an access strategy that could supply 92 percent of this country's liquid fuel needs by 2035.

Given the prospect of access to that much oil from a good neighbor and ally, you'd think government approval woul... more »

"Energy security" is something that comes up all the time in Washington policy debates. It means being able to identify reliable, accessible sources of energy that will secure America's economic future as well as our way of life.

You can't really talk about long-range energy policy without clearing that threshold. The good news is energy security isn't complicated or far away. Take a look at this video on the keys to U.S. energy security:

The plan is simple:

A. Access: We can increase U.S. crude oil production by nearly 1 million barrels a day by 2020 and 4 million barrels per day by 2030 by accessing oil and natural gas reserves that are currently off-limits - a small footprint inside the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the outer continental sh... more »