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WATCH: Colonial Pipeline CEO Admits Most Workers Who Can Manually Operate Pipeline Retired Or Kicked The Bucket

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Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount said workers who know how to manually operate the Colonial Pipeline and other infrastructure have mostly retired or died when pressed on whether the company would be able to handle a future cyber attack.

“Do you have the capability to manually operate the pipeline in the event of an IT attack like this one?” Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked during a Tuesday hearing. “And if you don’t have that capability, should you?”

Blount said while the company is able to alleviate some of the fuel shortage manually, most workers skilled to run the pipeline manually aren’t in the workforce anymore.

“Senator, that’s a great question, we actually did operate small portions of the pipeline manually in order to alleviate some of the fuel shortage,” Blount said. “And the discussion took place … about the ability to do that, systemwide, and the response to that was: it would be quicker to get back up on our feet by correcting the corruption of the critical IT systems that we needed in order to get the pipeline system up than operate it manually.”

“But I think on a go-forward basis, there’s no question that we will look at that capability, and it’s a really interesting question because if you look at the aging workforce now, a lot of those people that did operate Colonial Pipeline and other infrastructure in America historically manually. They’re retiring or they’re gone,” he continued. (Read more from “Colonial Pipeline CEO Admits Most Workers Who Can Manually Operate Pipeline Retired Or Kicked The Bucket” HERE)

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Colonial Pipeline Restarting Operations After Cyberattack

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Colonial Pipeline has restarted operations after a cyberattack that led to gas shortages across much of the South, the company said Wednesday afternoon.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm first announced Colonial’s plans after speaking with the company’s CEO.

Minutes later, Colonial confirmed it “initiated the restart” at 5 p.m. ET. However, the company warned it will take several days for deliveries of transportation fuels to return to normal.

Some markets served by Colonial Pipeline may experience “intermittent service interruptions” during that time period. (Read more from “Colonial Pipeline Restarting Operations After Cyberattack” HERE)

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Dakota Access Pipeline Easement Marks a New Day for US Energy

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The final easement granted on Wednesday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to complete the Dakota Access pipeline project sent a clear signal to our nation: Infrastructure development is once again a priority.

Last November, America chose a president who campaigned on rebuilding America’s infrastructure, encouraging energy development, and championing job creation. Now, only weeks into his administration, President Donald Trump’s actions have matched his campaign promises.

Four days after his inauguration, the president signed an executive order for expedited approval of the Dakota Access pipeline easement. Two weeks later, the easement has been granted.

This stands in stark contrast to the actions of President Barack Obama, whose disregard for the rule of law last fall halted the completion of the legally permitted Dakota Access pipeline.

This sent a chilling message to the private industries that finance, develop, and complete all required regulatory reviews to build roads, bridges, transmission lines, pipelines, wind farms, and water lines.

The message was that when top government officials and lawless mobs decide to obstruct a legally permitted pipeline project that is more than 90 percent complete, no infrastructure project is safe.

Few people outside North Dakota can comprehend the chaos this conflict brought to my state. It became a cause célèbre, bringing thousands of political activists, anti-oil extremists, and movie stars to an area south of Bismarck where they illegally camped on federal land.

These protestors damaged bridges and construction equipment, burned tires, threatened law enforcement and area residents, and blocked progress on the pipeline’s construction.

Except for a few hundred still in the area, these protesters are mostly gone.

Yet today, the nearby Standing Rock Sioux members and state and county crews are feverishly cleaning up the mess of personal belongings, trash, and human waste they left behind—an estimated 250 truckloads that must be hauled to the Bismarck landfill.

They are hoping to beat next month’s spring thaw on the floodplain where they camped, so that the trash left behind by these “water protectors” doesn’t pollute the Missouri River.

There is a poignant and absurd irony about this situation. Those claiming to be the true protectors of land and water turned out to be the only threat to the environment.

With the easement to finish the Dakota Access pipeline now granted, it’s time to get to work and finish this $3.7 billion private project that will deliver as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to connect to existing pipelines in Illinois.

This important piece of energy infrastructure will enhance America’s energy security and put Americans back to work.

I am grateful for the president’s commitment to projects like this that are so vital to our nation.

It sends a strong signal of a new era of cooperation between the federal government and private businesses that are committed to moving our nation forward with new critical infrastructure creating greater job opportunities for Americans. (For more from the author of “Dakota Access Pipeline Easement Marks a New Day for US Energy” please click HERE)

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Violent Pipeline Protesters Are Obama-Approved. Peaceful Ranchers? Not So Much

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According to the U.S. Constitution, Americans are guaranteed equal treatment under the law. According to the Obama administration, the word “equal” has no bearing on its treatment of protesters — just their politics.

Last week, the administration said it would allow protesters of the Dakota Access oil pipeline to stay on federal lands. This decision was made despite clashes between armed activists and police authorities, and a request for assistance by a sheriff. Notably, the clashes and protests are taking place two years after the Army Corps of Engineers held nearly 400 meetings about the pipeline, and made nine requests for meetings with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that were not attended by the Tribe.

This is the Tribe that is now protesting the pipeline, along with various environmental activists.

Compare this to another recent protest on federal land — the 2015 rancher protest in Oregon. Armed like many of the pipeline protesters, ranchers took over federal land in order to make a statement against increasing federal land grabs, in support of Cliven Bundy, who regularly trespassed on federal land laws in protest. In contrast to today’s protests, the ranchers engaged in no violence. Yet law enforcement agents began arresting them after just 24 days. The crackdown resulted in the death of one rancher, Lavoy Finicum, when he left the wildlife refuge to drive to a nearby town. Although the ranchers were armed, they were peaceful, and Finicum was killed after police fired on him despite no dangerous actions by the rancher.

Enabling Pipeline Protesters

In stark contrast to the small, low-key rancher protest, hundreds of members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and armed environmental activists have been camping out for two months on federal lands in North Dakota and Iowa, protesting the construction of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline. The protests have resulted in violence, with both sides blaming the other.

Members of the tribe say the pipeline endangers sacred sites near its reservation and endangers the tribe’s water supply, and that the construction company has already destroyed sacred sites. (The tribe’s “media backgrounder” can be found here.) However, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation, “Archaeologists inspected the 1.3-mile section along the route of the Dakota Access pipeline in southern North Dakota, and found no signs Native American tribal artifacts are present, despite what protesters argue.”

Mercer County Sheriff Dean Danzeisen of North Dakota sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressing his concerns about their guns. “They are armed, hostile, and engaged in training exercises which can only be intended to promote violence, whether on Corps property or elsewhere.” Dealing with the protesters also costs law enforcement extra money for overtime.

Yet federal agents say they have no intention of removing the trespassers, declaring they have a free speech right to be on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ land. The Corps has encouraged the protesters to move to adjacent land where they have a permit to stay, but they refuse.

North Dakota’s sole US representative, Republican Kevin Cramer, says the encampment is illegal and accuses the feds of looking the other way. “If that camp was full of people advocating for fossil fuels, they would have been removed by now,” he said. “There is some discretionary enforcement going on.”

Violent and Non-Violent Actions by Pipeline Protesters is the Norm

The protests have blocked work from progressing on parts of the pipeline. The construction in Iowa was forced to shut down briefly when protesters dismantled part of the fence around the construction site. In Missouri, twelve protesters chained themselves to construction equipment there, resulting in multiple arrests for criminal trespass.

Each weekend, more protesters arrive at the encampments. In Iowa, they are organized by the group Mississippi Stand. So far, more than 130 protesters have been arrested in Iowa and North Dakota, mostly for trespassing. Many volunteer to be arrested, knowing there will be few ramifications; law enforcement merely places the activists in plastic handcuffs, books them, then releases them immediately to go back and protest some more.

The Obama administration has stopped any building of the pipeline on federal lands, so developers are continuing the construction on private, state or local government land. The pipeline will carry oil 1,200 miles from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing South Dakota and Iowa. Pipeline officials say it will reduce energy dependence on foreign oil, and will generate $55 million annually in property taxes. There are up to 7.4 billion barrels of oil in North Dakota’s Bakken region.

The pipeline was supposed to be completed by the end of the year, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit put a halt on part of the construction while considering a lawsuit filed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The lengths to which the government has gone to appease the environmental protesters is astounding. If Native Americans can care about the land, why not ranchers? (For more from the author of “Violent Pipeline Protesters Are Obama-Approved. Peaceful Ranchers? Not So Much” please click HERE)

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Federal Government Halts Work on Part of Pipeline Project

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The federal government stepped into the fight over the Dakota Access oil pipeline Friday, ordering work to stop on one segment of the project in North Dakota and asking the Texas-based company building it to “voluntarily pause” action on a wider span that an American Indian tribe says holds sacred artifacts.

The government’s order came minutes after a judge rejected a request by the Standing Rock Sioux to halt construction of the $3.8 billion, four-state pipeline.

The tribe, whose cause has drawn thousands to join their protest, has challenged the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to grant permits for the pipeline at more than 200 water crossings. Tribal leaders allege that the project violates several federal laws and will harm water supplies. The tribe also says ancient sites have been disturbed during construction. (Read more from “Federal Government Halts Work on Part of Pipeline Project” HERE)

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STUNNER: “Islamic Refugee” Arrested in New Mexico With Gas Pipeline Plans

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Police in a U.S. town bordering Mexico have apprehended an undocumented, Middle Eastern woman in possession of the region’s gas pipeline plans, law enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch. Authorities describe the woman as an “Islamic refugee” pulled over during a traffic stop by a deputy sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico which shares a 54-mile border with Mexico. County authorities alerted the U.S. Border Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) has been deployed to the area to investigate, sources with firsthand knowledge of the probe confirm.

The gas pipeline plans in the woman’s possession include the Deming region, law enforcement sources say. Deming is a Luna County city situated about 35 miles north of the Mexican border and 60 miles west of Las Cruces. It has a population of about 15,000. Last year one local publication listed Deming No. 1 on a list of the “ten worst places” to live in New Mexico due to high unemployment, poverty, crime and a horrible public education system. The entire region is a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center due to the large amounts of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and marijuana smuggled through the state by Mexican traffickers. Specifically, the renowned Juárez and Sinaloa cartels operate in the area, the feds affirm in a report.

Judicial Watch has broken a number of stories in the last few years about Mexican drug traffickers smuggling Islamic terrorists into the United States through the porous southern border. Last summer high-level sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border offered alarming details about an operation in which cartels smuggle foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. Classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the U.S. government, the foreigners get transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20.

A few months ago Judicial Watch reported that members of a cell of Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks with the help of Mexican drug traffickers. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to Judicial Watch’s high-level Homeland Security sources. Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez. Khabir actually brags in a European newspaper article about how easy it is to stake out American targets because the border region is wide open. In the same story Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, Mexico’s top diplomat, says she doesn’t understand why the Obama administration and the U.S. media are “culpably neglecting this phenomenon,” adding that “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

This recent New Mexico incident brings to mind a story Judicial Watch broke less than a year ago involving five young Middle Eastern men apprehended by Border Patrol in an Arizona town (Amado) situated about 30 miles from the Mexican border. Two of the Middle Eastern men were carrying stainless steel cylinders in backpacks, alarming Border Patrol officials enough to call the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for backup. A multitude of federal agents descended on the property and the two men carrying the cylinders were believed to be taken into custody by the FBI. Only three of the men’s names were entered in the Border Patrol’s E3 reporting system, which is used by the agency to track apprehensions, detention hearings and removals of illegal immigrants. E3 also collects and transmits biographic and biometric data including fingerprints for identification and verification of individuals encountered at the border. The other two men were listed as “unknown subjects,” which is unheard of. “In all my years I’ve never seen that before,” a veteran federal law enforcement agent told Judicial Watch. (For more from the author of “STUNNER: “Islamic Refugee” Arrested in New Mexico With Gas Pipeline Plans” please click HERE)

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Insufficient Pipelines Hiked Natural Gas Price

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesNew England’s electric grid operator says a lack of pipelines is driving the price up for natural gas, and hiked wholesale electricity prices in the region by 55 percent last year.

ISO-New England said Tuesday that the average price of wholesale electric energy rose to $56.06 per megawatt hour, up from a historic low of $36.09 in 2012.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hoyer on Keystone: ‘I’m in Favor of Building It’

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Photo Credit: APDemocratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said he supports building the Keystone XL Pipeline and that he agrees with the State Department’s report that not building the pipeline would increase greenhouse gas emissions.

At a pen-and-pad briefing at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, CNSNews.com asked Hoyer, “In the State Department’s report, it said that if the Keystone Pipeline is not built, the method of delivering oil would increase greenhouse gases from 28 to 42 percent, are you in favor of not building ….”

Hoyer said, “If it was not built? Sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

CNSNews.com rephrased the question saying, “The State Department’s report, it said that not building the Keystone pipeline, the method of [delivering the] oil would increase greenhouse gases. Are you in favor of not building the pipeline, even if it means greenhouse gases will increase?”

Hoyer then said, “In favor of not building it? I’m in favor of building it. I said about a year ago, I think in this group, that I was for Keystone.”

Read more this story HERE.

Official: Alaska Looking at Equity Stake in Pipeline to Protect its Interests, Advance Project

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Photo Credit: Arthur ChapmanAn Alaska official said Monday the state is looking at taking a multibillion-dollar equity stake in a major natural gas pipeline project as a way to protect its interests and help make the long-hoped-for project a reality.

Natural Resources Commissioner Joe Balash said Gov. Sean Parnell’s administration views a potential equity stake of 20 percent to 30 percent favorably. But he said any level of participation would depend on legislative buy-in and the terms the companies pursuing the project are willing to accept.

Assuming the project costs $45 billion — a figure at the lower end of the range previously announced by the companies — the state would be looking at $9 billion to $13.5 billion for such a stake.

Balash said he’s hoping that range narrows significantly over time as the idea gets more scrutiny.

The option stems from a report commissioned by the state to see how Alaska could protect its royalty interest and ensure it receives the maximum value possible for its natural gas.

Read more from this story HERE.

Canadian Officials Make Climate Case In DC Ahead Of Keystone Pipeline Decision

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Photo Credit: rcboddenAlberta’s provincial government is trying to burnish its image on climate change as top Canadian officials make the case for U.S. approval of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.

“Even though we have had a presence here for some time, I don’t think we have really communicated as effectively as we need to on this,” Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford said in an interview at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Saturday.

Redford and her environment minister, Diana McQueen, are in D.C. this weekend for meetings during the annual National Governors Association summit, which brings together U.S. governors and Obama administration officials.

The visit arrives as green groups are pressing the White House to scuttle the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline, a demand that was the focus of a major climate change rally in Washington on Feb. 17.

Advocates of the pipeline, which would bring Canadian oil sands and oil to Gulf Coast refineries, have long made their case on economic and energy security grounds.

Read more from this story HERE.