The Fix for Hacked Pipelines Isn’t Spare Pipelines

The Fix for Hacked Pipelines Isn’t Spare Pipelines

Former energy secretary Dan Brouillette raises a novel answer to the problem of the East Coast relying on a single, vulnerable pipeline for so much of its fuel: permits for more pipelines.

To quibble, it’s one pipeline system. Still, he’s right that the Northeast, and East Coast in general, relies on it enormously. But the idea that the solution lies in just permitting more pipelines — assuming millions of Americans in some of the country’s most densely populated states were okay with that — requires a bit more nuance. Indeed, one big reason nobody’s building a Colonial clone is something Brouillette championed: energy independence.

Three things transformed the US oil equation over the past 15 years: plateauing demand, shale supply and growing environmental concerns, especially around climate change. One result is that US refining capacity stayed pretty flat, but more of it has become concentrated where the oil is the cheapest and most plentiful: the Gulf Coast. East Coast demand for oil peaked in 2005 (on an annual basis), and refineries there have struggled to compete; capacity has fallen by more than half over the past 15 years.

Much like anything else, we like our energy to be as cheap as possible. Redundancy