Salazar Takes Victory Lap for OK of Stalled Refinery 3 Weeks from Election Day
Last week, President Obama approved the first new oil refinery in more than 30 years.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the approval of a “land-into-trust” application from the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
“Today’s historic decision is another step forward in the Obama administration’s all-of-the-above energy strategy and commitment to strengthen Tribal communities and generate jobs for rural America,” Salazar said. “By working with the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people to place this land into trust status, we are supporting infrastructure that will help bring American oil and gas to market while promoting tribal economic development and self-determination regarding land and resource use.”
The tribes requested that the Bureau of Indian Affairs take 469 acres into trust, with 190 set aside for the refinery and the remaining acreage to produce feed for their buffalo herd. Salazar went to the reservation to announce the approval at a news conference.
Environmentalists panned the move as a blatant push for pump-price-weary votes three weeks out from Election Day.
Salazar pitched the creation of 800 to 1,000 construction jobs, up to 140 operations jobs, and millions in annual revenue streams to benefit the tribes and surrounding rural communities, while pitching the standard administration line that under Obama “domestic oil and gas production has increased each year, with domestic oil production currently at an eight year high, and natural gas production at its highest level ever” — that hike being attributable to increased production on private lands while federal leases are stymied.
As proposed, the 13,000 barrel-per-day facility would handle crude from the wildly successful Bakken Formation fracking effort that has been hailed by the GOP as an American renaissance in fossil fuels.
But there are a couple of tripping points in the Salazar victory lap.
The project was initiated under the Bush administration, in 2003, and has been bogged by delays under this White House. Republicans also wryly noted that the administration’s proposed fracking regulations could make the refinery useless if they can’t extract oil and gas from the area.
Tex “Red Tipped Arrow” Hall, chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, told the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in July that the federal government needs to “stop treating Indian lands as public lands” — like when it comes to lengthy permitting reviews.
Hall also noted that in his quest for the refinery approval, he was “shocked” to learn that many of the people at the Bureau of Land Management, holding sway over the fate of such projects, had actually never witnessed a hydrofracking operation.
“So I asked the BLM, I said what if our tribe wants to put our own hydrofracking rule that meets or exceeds yours. North Dakota — EPA doesn’t regulate North Dakota, North Dakota gets treated as its own state. And I said the tribes are not treated as our own separate sovereign. You need to allow our tribe — because this is our homelands. The state has no jurisdiction there — needs to be treated the same and give us that ability, give us that right and the Black Feet Nation in Montana has its own hydrofracking rule,” Hall testified.
“Our tribe passed its own environmental code. It’s a million dollar offense if any oil company dumps on our reservation. No federal agency has given that to us. Nobody held draft, we did it on our own to protect our own homelands because we live there,” he continued. “…We’re a treaty tribe. We’ve never consented to be treated as a public lands and where did you get your authority? And the answer will be either FLPMA, with is the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976 or they’ll say it’s a 1938 Indian Mineral Lease and Oil and Gas Leasing Act. Well, we haven’t found that authority in any one of those two pieces of legislation.”
“Just answer the question. Don’t tell us how many times you’ve consulted with us because you haven’t. Simply answer the question of what — where do you get your authority to treat us as public lands?”
At an April hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs, Hall testified that the Obama administration’s “actions to date have given me and other tribes the impression that tribal input is not desired or only minimally needed even though there is strong evidence that the proposed regulations will cost the MHA Nation and the surrounding community a sizable number of jobs and money.”
13,000 BPD isn’t a real refinery. It’s a toy. Real refineries start at about 100,000. This normally wouldn’t even be a story.
For a sparsely populated area such as the Dakotas, with a light sweet crude source, this is a handy sized refinery and will likely be very profitable. If I am not mistaken the local crude is around 40 API gravity so not much needs to be done with it other than a hydroskimming type refinery with nothing more than crude and reformer units.
There is not pipeline capacity to ship products to markets in other states, so this is an ideal size.
“Real” refineries, in my opinion, are not by capacity but by complexity and product streams. A 300,000 bpd crude unit really is rather simple with not many more employees than one of 1,000 bpd capacity.
The point is, this isn’t a big deal no matter how you slice it. It probably makes economic sense because they are suddenly awash in crude, but is this a big, huge expansion in national refining capacity, like Salazar is tooting? No.
Take off that cowboy hat you pansy!
Ha! Got that right, the only callouses Buckaroo Salazar has are on his pud.
I wasn’t aware that it was a medical condition.
Thanks, Dr. Frank.
I guess the pud alliance covers this, no?
Why don’t you just make your point? I take it you’re a liberal/progressive whatever. So you have to play word games.
All hat, no cattle.
(Sung to the immortal aviator’s tune: big watch, little richard.)
White Eyes Salazar plenty big liar. Thinks Red Man very dumb.
More proof that the federal government is too large, and too intrusive. First new refinery in 30 years? You can’t tell me that this is the ONLY refinery that has been proposed in the last 30 years, so what happened to the others?
It took just shy of 10 years for this one to clear all the required regulatory hurdles to be built. And according to poster 1. it’s a toy. The message to oil companies is loud and clear. If you want a new refinery don’t plan on building in the US. It will be too costly and too painful only to be denied. Build in a friendlier country and have 8 years active production before the US even gets around to denying your request.
If the leftists ever get their thumbs off’n the scales, just watch it all soar into the stratosphere.
I’m afraid it will take firepower to do that. They are immune to reason, and will defend utter stupidity to the very death.
I say, “Oblige them”.
Even threatening to oblige them should do it. They’re pussies.
Be prepared.
Nil Desparandum!
Why is he in the cabinet, when he CANNOT POSSIBLY be an actual LESBIAN?
I, as a member of the LGBTFROKJNGDFRT alliance, wish to enter my ABSOLUTE PROTEST AGAINST THIS INVASION OF MY VAGINA!
(By the way, don’t waste your time figuring out what all the letters mean. I have a day job.)
Whoa! Somebody needs to take their meds!
“that hike being attributable to increased production on private lands while federal leases are stymied.”
Mittens and Ryan need to hammer this theme. The production Bam-Bam is so proudly boasting of is the production he was not able to stop. And he would dearly love to.
Somebody’s seriously confused. Hydrofracking has zip to do with refining. Refining is what you do to the crude after it’s been fracked out of the ground.
This little toy refinery is just to process some of the copious local crude to serve the local market. In the big picture, it’s a pimple on the industry’s butt. The big story is the fracking technology making North Dakota the second largest crude oil producer in the country. None of the fracking regs have anything to do with this little refinery.
I think the writer was referring to those attempting to restrict hydrofracking, which in turn would make the refinery non-viable.
There is a general problem within the bureaucracy that those imposing the rules have limited or no direct experience in matters over which they have authority. They’re simply bureaucrats or, at best, lawyers with an ideological bent. I got into a discussion over global warming and the need for at least a modicum of skepticism when a young woman interjected the “everyone knows” assertion. Her claim to authority? “I’m an environmental lawyer.” No background in climate sciences, atmospheric physics, etc., just a law degree. And people like her are writing the rules.