Oklahoma Will Charge Customers Who Install Their Own Solar Panels

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44. Cushings Oklahoma is the big pipeline head and storage for pumped oil. Link provided.

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/endowment/article_f0657702-a53d-11e2-b848-001a4bcf6878.html


Oil industry pumps through heart of Cushing, Okla.
By Andrew Barry and Gabriella Martinez-Garro on April 15th, 2013endowment

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CUSHING, OKLA. — Ask residents to describe life here, and their answers are the same. Cushing isn’t unlike most other small towns in the Midwest.

It has its share of restaurants, two new hotels and a downtown. High school football is a pretty big deal. Most jobs are blue-collar or at mom-and-pop businesses. In this town of more than 7,800, most everybody knows or has heard of one another.

But this town between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, in the middle of the state and the heart of Middle America, is in the middle of something much larger than just Americana.

Head in almost any direction toward the town’s perimeter and you will find a quiet and efficient part of a global controversy: oil.

Millions of barrels of crude oil stored by the hundreds in large tanks surround Cushing – about 40 million barrels to be specific, according to the Chamber of Commerce.

Cushing’s been called the “pipeline crossroads of the world.” It’s a moniker the city boasts on the pipeline sculpture on its outskirts.

Beneath the town’s feet, oil pumps constantly through a web of pipelines. Oil has created jobs, sustained businesses, built a backbone for some city services and helped the community weather the Great Recession. And with plans for the Keystone XL to pass through Cushing on its route to the Gulf of Mexico, residents of Cushing find their city at the heart of a national and global discussion, one fixated on their town’s lifeblood.