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Koch brothers’ quiet play: Oil sands

Washington Post: The biggest lease owner in Canada's oil sands isn't one of the well-known international oil giants. It's a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately owned cornerstone of the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David. The Koch Industries subsidiary holds leases on 1.1 million acres -- an area nearly the size of Delaware -- in the oil sands region of Alberta, Canada, according to an activist group that studied Alberta provincial records. The Washington Post confirmed the group's...

Obama hosts climate and energy planning session at White House

Washington Post: President Obama solicited ideas on a wide variety of energy and climate issues in a meeting Thursday with more than a dozen outside experts and business executives, with an eye toward what he might accomplish in his second term through executive action and public-private partnerships, according to participants. Topics included steps to promote energy efficiency, how to modernize the nation's electrical grid to make it more resilient and "green,' as well as the need for more information about leakage...

Rail emerges as alternative to Keystone XL pipeline

Washington Post: Even if foes of the Keystone XL pipeline block it, companies seeking to get Canada's oil sands to U.S. and world markets could travel the old-fashioned way: by rail. While TransCanada has been trying to obtain a U.S. permit to build the 875-mile northern leg of its Keystone XL pipeline, Canadian and U.S. railroad companies have been busy installing new track and loading facilities to carry the oil sands crude from northern Alberta to refineries in the United States and Canada. Rail shipments...

TransCanada gets key go-ahead for final southern leg of pipeline project

Washington Post: While rejecting TransCanada's initial Keystone XL pipeline application to build the pipeline across the border from Canada, President Obama has embraced the southern leg of the project, which would ease a bottleneck that is slowing the movement of oil supplies from Canada and North Dakota to refineries on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. On March 22 in the Cushing, Okla., oil terminal and pipeline crossroads, Obama directed agencies "to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic...