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In Texas City, a small port town south of Houston near the Gulf of Mexico, a hub of refineries rises through the misty January air, billowing steam from scrubber towers.
These refineries make up part of a sprawling industrial cluster in the Gulf Coast region that is better equipped than anywhere on earth to handle the gooey crude coming out of Alberta's oil sands.
In a twisting turn of geography, geology and history, Texans are hungry for Alberta oil.
As the U.S. seeks to decrease its dependence on crude from unstable regions and OPEC countries, and with the oil sands booming, Canada has supplanted Saudi Arabia as the leading supplier of crude to the U.S., claiming the No. 1 spot in 2004.
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Now, three major pipelines that would move Alberta oil all the way to Texas are under consideration, with a final decision on at least one likely within two months. A fourth pipeline is nearly approved to send almost half a million barrels a day to Illinois, Oklahoma and northern Texas — the first major extension of Canadian oil beyond the Chicago region.
The push to develop major oil pipelines over thousands of kilometres from Alberta to Texas represents a major shift in the movement of Canadian oil. Growing shipments of Alberta crude to the U.S. for refining are deepening the two countries' mutual dependence. The U.S. now buys almost 100 per cent of our oil exports, and Canadian exports to the U.S. could increase to 3 million barrels a day by 2015, from roughly 2 million barrels a day currently.
For the Americans, it can hardly flow fast enough. "The world's a more dangerous place these days; having our friend to the north getting us some crude is good," said Lane Riggs, a vice-president at Valero Energy Corp., an independent company that refines upwards of 30,000 barrels of Alberta crude a day and is hungry for more.
"We're very eager to support at least one of the pipelines," Mr. Riggs said.
American thirst for Canadian oil is fuelled in part by Canada's lack of geopolitical ambition. Despite its growing importance as a supplier to the world's biggest oil consumer, Canada is the anti-superpower: a gentle giant that doesn't wield its oil clout as a geopolitical club (think Russia or Venezuela), or set a benchmark for world prices (like Saudi Arabia). It isn't lawless or war-ravaged (Nigeria or Iraq).
On the Texas Gulf Coast, refiners look north and see "friendly Canadians with oodles of barrels," said Réal Cusson, a senior executive at leading oil producer Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
Most of the oil from Alberta flows to the U.S. through a network of pipelines that snake through Saskatchewan and Manitoba before turning south to refineries in Minneapolis and the Chicago region.
But the refineries best suited to the oil sands' sticky crude are in Texas. The type of "heavy" and "sour" oil that those refineries have long processed from Mexico and Venezuela is similar enough to Alberta's that refiners can adjust without many technical challenges.
The flow from Mexico and Venezuela that used to meet Gulf Coast demand and keep refineries busy is now dwindling. Political mismanagement in Venezuela has dampened output and in Mexico production has been hampered by aging oil fields and not enough investment.
A small river of Canadian oil — roughly 65,000 barrels a day — already moves to the massive hub of refineries around Houston through an Exxon Mobil Corp. pipeline that connects with existing infrastructure in southern Illinois.
Valero Energy, the largest oil-refining company in North America, is among those looking to boost its north-south infrastructure. At company head office in San Antonio, market analysts are assessing long-term supply and pricing of Canadian oil and drawing up plans so its refineries will be able to handle the oil sands crude. Executives at the company, which has 16 refineries and almost 6,000 gas stations, are now deciding which pipeline project to support.
The oil sands are good fit for the company, said Fred Newhouse, a Valero public affairs director, at Gus's, a ramshackle restaurant that is Texas City's hot lunch spot for everyone from managers to workers from the refinery grounds.
"Our niche is to turn the nastiest stuff into the best gasoline," Mr. Newhouse said over a steak sandwich.
Valero's Texas City refinery was started as a co-op a century ago by Virginia farmers who wanted a direct source of kerosene and diesel. The refinery began operating a few years after one of the world's first oil gushers was uncorked near a town called Beaumont. An 18-metre engraved granite obelisk marks the spot where, in 1901 in a grassy field beside a highway, "a new era in civilization began."
