Watershed Sentinel

As billionaires invest in the railways and oil tanker traffic skyrockets along the BC coast, it looks as though the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline may have been a ruse all along  - a classic "bait and switch" - with a number of PR payoff ....

 By autumn 2008, CN Rail approached the Alberta government with its plan to move tar sands oil.  Alberta's Energy Minister at the time, Mel Knight, told Dow Jones Newswire that CN and his government have had "very good meetings," with CN believing that it could eventually transport 400,000 barrels per day from eastern Alberta to the West Coast of Canada. 

Just six months later, CN was estimating that it could transport 2.6 million barrels per day to the West Coast if 20,000 railcars were added to its fleet.
On April 15, 2009, the Financial Post's Diane Francis reported that CN "will deliver the oil sands production through the use of insulated and heatable railcars or by reducing its viscosity by mixing it with condensates or diluents. The 'scalability' of the concept - up to millions of barrels per day - means that the railway can ramp up production cheaply and quickly to provide immediate cash flow to producers which otherwise will have to wait years for completion of upgraders and/or pipelines.