Friday, June 08, 2012

Koch brothers to divest oil sands assets, are evil

The Kochs
Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the shadowy billionaire libertarian Koch brothers, has put stakes in some of its oil sands assets up for sale. The properties are in Cold Lake, Mackay, Fire-bag, Muskwa, Namur and Pelican Lake. 

Only one of the properties, Cold Lake, has regulatory approval for development, including 10,000 barrel per day commercial project and 1,200 barrel per day demonstration project. They claim it could do 55,000 barrels per day. The Herald doesn't say what percent of the assets will be sold, but other sources say it'll be around 50% of their oil sands holdings. A FirstEnergy analyst says they'd be worth the most to nearby projects, which sounds about right. They join Shell and ConocoPhillips, who have recently put some of their oil sands assets up for sale as well. 

The Koch brothers have attracted a fair amount of criticism over the years. Here's a Reuters article and the original New Yorker exposé that detail accusations of bribery, selling things (illegally) to Iran, lying to regulators, the wrongful deaths of two Texas teenagers in a pipeline explosion, benzene emissions, price fixing, document falsification and "stealing" millions of barrels of oil in India. Now I'm generally pretty pro-industry, but these guys seem like total yahoos. Maybe it's best they're reducing their footprint here.

UPDATE: Apparently they're not twins. Not sure why I thought they were. Post updated.

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