TransCanada Corporation (TRP)

[Timothy Smith]

TransCanada is one of the west's largest pipeline companies with a market capitalization of about $30 billion, and 2011 sales of a little over $9 billion. It divides itself into three separate groups; oil pipeline, gas pipeline, and energy. All its tangible assets are in North America.

Transcanada's big concern is whether it will ever receive approval from the United States to construct its massive $7 billion (or likely, more) Keystone XL oil pipeline from western Canada's oil sand fields to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. It all makes some sense, until one realizes what the increased development of tar sands means not just for Canada, but for the United States as well.

Perhaps the fact that the United States as a whole just completed the warmest first half of the year in recorded history makes the point that oil sands are environmentally indefensible. Study after study has shown that the environmental impact of tar sands is far more carbon intensive than any other form of drilling, and that the energy needed to process the tar sand makes it hardly worth the effort.