The Government’s War on Pipelines Made Us Vulnerable to Attacks on Our Infrastructure

The recent fuel disruptions show the danger in the government's long war on oil pipelines

By Jon Miltimore of FEE. Excerpt:

"One answer is that we simply don’t have enough oil pipelines. The Colonial Pipeline provides nearly half—45 percent—of the fuel consumed on the East Coast. As other astute commentators have noted, “one pipeline network shouldn't be serving half of the East Coast's fuel needs.”

The reality is regulatory hurdles have made it all but impossible to build new pipelines, which has placed a great deal of pressure on existing energy infrastructure. And it’s getting worse. Indeed, politicians are now actively scrapping pipelines that are instrumental to meeting future energy needs.

One of President Biden’s first initiatives was to scrap, by executive order, the Keystone Pipeline, a 1700-mile pipeline that could have carried roughly 800k barrels of oil each day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. (Instead, the bulk of that fuel will be transported by railways, which are less environmentally friendly and more dangerous.)

Biden’s scrapping of the Keystone Pipeline received a great deal of attention, but it’s worth noting the action was part of a trend that has been largely overlooked. Across the US, pipelines are being targeted by politicians, regulators, and courts with great zeal.

A year ago, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took legal action to force the shutdown of the Line 5 Pipeline, which links Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and carries about 500,000 barrels of crude each day.

"Here in Michigan, the Great Lakes define our borders, but they also define who we are as people," said Whitmer, who gave Enbridge Energy a deadline of May 2021 to stop the oil.

As of Tuesday, with the deadline rapidly approaching, the oil was still flowing. And news reports say Enbridge Energy and the Michigan governor are likely heading for a legal showdown.

Then there is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Last year Duke Energy and Dominion Energy announced the cancelation of the 600-mile project—which would have piped gas from West Virginia to eastern North Carolina—because delays and regulatory uncertainty had threatened “the economic viability of the project.”

The 1,200 mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline, which has been flowing since 2017, currently carries hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude through the Dakotas to Iowa and Illinois. While the Biden administration has announced it will not shut down the pipeline, a US district court judge did in July 2020. That ruling was overturned by a federal appellate court, but the pipeline’s fate hangs in the balance pending an environmental review.

Reminder: Oil Is Still a Vital Resource

For many, the lesson of the recent gas shortage is that we need more cybersecurity oversight.

"This pipeline shutdown sends the message that core elements of our national infrastructure continue to be vulnerable to cyberattack,” Mike Chapple, a professor in University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, told Reuters. “Securing our energy infrastructure is a national security issue that involves several different federal agencies and requires centralized leadership.”

Anyone who understands the “knowledge problem” will be rightly skeptical of solutions based on “centralized leadership,” especially when it comes to a “national security issue that involves several different agencies,” given the track records of the NSA, the TSA, the CDC, etc. What we really need is, not more, but less government oversight getting in the way of more pipelines.

The current disruption should serve as a reminder that fossil fuels are an essential part of human prosperity.

No one has made this point better than Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, who noted that cheap, plentiful fossil fuels—when married with human ingenuity—allow humans to improve the world around them.

“Fossil fuel technology transforms nature to improve human life on an epic scale. It is the only energy technology that can currently meet the energy needs of all 7+ billion people on this planet,” wrote Epstein. “Ultimately, the moral case for fossil fuels is not about fossil fuels; it’s the moral case for using cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to amplify our abilities to make the world a better place – a better place for human beings.”

The other side of that coin is that when energy is made needlessly expensive, scarce, and unreliable—whether by cybercriminals or politicians—it makes the world a more frustrating and unhappy place for human beings"