Days after US President Joe Biden canceled construction plans for the Keystone XL pipeline – which is intended to transport oil from the province of Alberta in Canada – to Nebraska, reports on social media claimed that this step was due to was to Warren Buffett’s extensive political donations to Biden’s campaign. They claim that railroads owned by Buffett are now benefiting from the transportation of the oil that would carry the Keystone XL pipeline. However, Buffett did not donate to Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and oil from Canada that would have traveled through the Keystone XL pipeline is likely to use existing and other new pipeline infrastructure to enter the United States.
Viral examples of posts making this claim can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Most reports contain an image of the pipeline along with the text: “The Keystone Pipeline. Canceled by Biden on the first day. Warren Buffett owns the railroad that now transports all the oil. Warren Buffett has 58 million to the Biden campaign “Warren Buffett will lose billions in transportation costs if the pipeline is completed. See how politics works? It’s not an environmental issue, it’s a money issue …”
According to ‘Keystone Pipeline’, the reports refer to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that Biden canceled on its first day on January 21, 2021, which provided a death knell for a long-term project that would carry 830,000 barrels. per day heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska.
Environmental activists and indigenous communities welcomed the cancellation, and traders and analysts said the pipelines between the US and Canada would have more than enough capacity to carry increasing volumes of crude oil from Canada, the primary foreign oil supplier to the United States (here), to handle.
A map of the Keystone XL route along the existing Keystone pipeline system, which has been in use since 2010, can be seen here.
DID BUFFET GIFT TO PRAY?
The first allegation in these posts is that Warren Buffett, the American business magnate and billionaire, donated $ 58 million to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. According to public reports from OpenSecrets and a Buffett spokesman, this allegation is false.
Debbie Bosanek, assistant to Warren Buffett, told Reuters in an email that “Mr. Buffett gave no money to the Biden presidency campaign in 2020. He submits all submission requirements for political contributions and makes no contribution to any PAC. ”
Business Insider (here) also reported on Buffett who did not donate to Biden during this election after donating to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the last election.
OpenSecrets.org of the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit and non-partisan research group based in Washington, DC, that focuses on government transparency and the tracking of money in politics, mentions Warren Buffett’s political contributions here. While Buffett has donated to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC, the committee working to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives) and to former astronaut and junior senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), no other political recipients are listed for this 2019-2020 election cycle (this was also reported here by Yahoo!).
Buffett is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate that acquired Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp (BNSF) in 2009, which at the time was the largest acquisition ever of the billionaire investor (here). The BNSF is one of the largest freight rail networks in North America, with a ‘32,500-mile rail network in 28 states and three Canadian provinces’ (here). Its trains carry energy (such as oil and coal), agriculture and consumer products.
However, railroads like BNSF owned by Buffett (here) are not the main way oil is transported from Canada to the United States.
IMPORTING MOST US OIL FROM CANADA USE PIGLINES, NOT RAILWAY
Maps of the Keystone Pipeline System and Keystone XL Pipeline show its route: their Keystone XL would have created a “shortcut” to transport oil from Alberta to Nebraska, while the existing Keystone Pipeline System connected the Canadian source to several U.S. states ( here).
Canada is the primary supplier of foreign oil to the United States. In 2019, for example, the United States imported 3.7 million barrels per day from Canada (here), about 1.35 billion barrels for the year. During this year, 110.2 million barrels of crude oil were transported by rail from Canada to the United States (here), meaning that only 8% of annual imports from Canada traveled by rail.
Dave Smallen, director of public affairs at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, sent Reuters estimates for 2020 using figures from the Energy Information Administration in the Department of Energy (here), and calculated the oil shipped from Canada to the United States from America comes, 74.4% use pipelines compared to 3% with rail.
In short, rail infrastructure cannot compete with existing pipelines to transport oil at the rate the United States does. Here is a historical look (1982-2018) at the transportation prevalence of pipelines, seagoing vessels, rail and oil transportation truck.
Reuters reported in 2013 – when the Keystone XL was debated – that some industry officials, energy analysts and recent data have raised questions about whether the industry is really keen to use the train, mainly on economic cost to use track over. pipelines (here).
“It is expensive to transport raw materials by rail, especially over long distances,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told e- mail told Reuters. As a result, “operators prefer to use pipelines and use rail only as backup.”
HOW WILL THE KEYSTONES XL PIPELINE OIL TRAVEL?
According to the posts, Buffett’s railroad ‘now carries all the oil’ after the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. This is false because most of the oil that the Keystone XL would use is likely to pass through existing and new pipelines.
The US is also poised to import record quantities of Canadian oil in the coming years, and several of the crude oil lines are in the midst of expansions (more details on this in a Reuters report here).
Cahill told Reuters that “other pipelines will come online after the cancellation and that crude exports by rail will be a last resort.”
Tara Leigh Goode of energy consultants Wood Mackenzie sent Reuters findings from the North American crude market service report that matched this forecast. It notes that “the consequences of a [Keystone XL] the cancellation is dampened to a large extent in the medium term due to two other pipeline projects around the corner (Enbridge Line 3 Replacement (L3R) and the TransMountain Expansion project (TMX). “These pipelines” are likely to reduce rail volumes to any contractual minimums. until 2030. ”
According to Reuters reports and industry experts, the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline does not appear to mean a lucrative leap into the business world, which could benefit Berkshire Hathaway’s BNSF railway.
Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment on possible profits following the cancellation of Keystone XL.
VERDICT
Untrue. Warren Buffett did not donate $ 58 million to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. Most of the oil that would be transported through the now canceled Keystone XL pipeline would probably use existing and new pipeline infrastructure, not railroads.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to actually check social media posts.