Benjamin Culkin

Tuesday February 10th

ENGL 102

Dr. Barko

Undecided Title

When you think of oil, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Probably “black gold”

isn’t it? Well, considering it’s about 48 and a half dollars at the time of writing for a 42 gallon

barrel, with gas going at about $2 a gallon, thats about $84 a barrel (OilPrice n.pag.). Even

assuming they have to eat some percentage of that as markup, that’s still quite a bit of profit.

Taking into account the fact that the US produced about 2.7 million thousand-barrel units (EIA

n.pag) in 2013, that is a very large number (113.4B dollars at today’s prices, higher then), and

that is a fairly decent sized chunk of our GDP from simply raw oil alone. To further strengthen

our economy, and provide for our own needs, we should build the Keystone XL pipeline.

First off, why do we need to get more oil domestically? Well, because we import more

than 250 million barrels of oil monthly, and that’s expensive. Doing some back-of-the box

calculations, in full flow the Keystone XL pipeline would carry slightly less than 350 fifty

million gallons, or about 8 million barrels. That may not seem like much compared to our

imports, but imports are trending down, and anything we can do to accelerate that trend helps.

Secondly, this would provide a much needed infusion of cash to our fading

manufacturing sectors with the ridiculous amount of steel the pipeline would need (About 3

times the size of Monacco!)

Works Cited

http://www.oil-price.net 2/10/15

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_crdsnd_k_a.htm 2/10/15