Tim Pawlenty supports Keystone pipeline, importing Canadian oil

In this video posted to YouTube by Iowa Energy Forum, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty expresses support for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and importing Canadian tar sands oil.

Transcript of Tim Pawlenty's comments on energy:

Now as to your question specifically, we talk a lot about importation of foreign oil and we should.

I don’t want to have our country and this much of our future economically or from a security standpoint hooked to people and places and organizations that don’t like us, want to hurt us. And the oil markets can fluctuate depending on what some leader in the Middle East had for breakfast in a given week.

Now the good news is a lot of that foreign oil doesn’t come from the Middle East. It comes from Canada and Mexico. In Canada a lot of the oil is what’s called tar sands oil. It’s a heavier, thicker form of oil and you’ve got to have special refining capacity to process it.

 Fortunately, most of the Mid-West has that capacity. Refineries in Minnesota for example, have that capacity. So we get a lot of our oil, most of our oil from Canada. And that’s a good thing. They’re friendly. It’s nearby. And it’s pretty reliable and dependable.

But many of the other refineries in the country don’t have that, either access to the oil because of an infrastructure problem or a refining problem. So there’s a proposal to run a pipeline basically from Western Canada down to either Louisiana or Texas. I forget the name of it, but it has to be approved by the federal government because it runs across international boundaries.

And Hillary Clinton’s saying, “Eh, maybe. I’ll let you know later.”

Approve it! It’s a good idea. We need all the energy we can get. And if Canada is willing to sell it on a stable, dependable basis let’s bring it here. And Hillary Clinton should approve that and we should get on with it.

By the way, more broadly Canada is a good partner. We have some differences with them obviously, but it terms of energy supply they’re a good partner. We should leverage that up.