Fading Canadian pipeline ambition

The revival of Keystone XL and Canada's tricky pipeline politics doomed Energy East

Canada's hopes of becoming a global energy superpower took a significant hit in October when TransCanada, the country's largest pipeline operator, unceremoniously cancelled the proposed Energy East pipeline. The C$15.7bn ($12.32bn) pipeline would have shipped 1.1m barrels a day some 4,500km (2,800 miles) to Canada's Maritimes, making it the country's longest pipeline, and one of the largest in the world. Energy East would have backed out some 0.75m b/d of imports—mostly from Africa and the Middle East—from Canada's import-dependent eastern provinces and helped achieve a long-held goal of Canadian nationalists to make the country self-sufficient in oil. But sometimes even the best laid plans