It’s been nearly six years now that President Obama has delayed start of the massive Keystone XL pipeline designed to bring the oil riches of western Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries. He may well never approve it; that’s certainly what the environmentalists demand.  But much like the marvel of fracking and horizontal drilling, yet another hydrocarbon technology has entered the scene, possibly mooting the whole debate while helping our economy in the process. Readers of AT have long known how crony-capitalist Warren Buffett has been making out like a bandit with his railroad, BNSF, and his tank car company, Union, to haul a lot of the oil stranded without the pipeline. Up until now, this has been an expensive proposition, as rail is generally not competitive with pipelines for big volume moves. However, railcar engineers have recently built special heater-coil cars for the super-sticky tar oil – bitumen, actually -- that comes out of Canada....(Read Full Post)