Dick Durbin: “about 1 year ago I was invited to go to the southeast part of the city of Chicago. It is an area that used to be…”

“about 1 year ago I was invited to go to the southeast part of the city of Chicago. It is an area that used to be populated by steel mills and now there are a lot of struggling families. The manufacturing jobs were not replaced. These are hard-working people--many are Mexican-American people. They sustain what you might expect--great parishes and churches and a great spirit among them, but now they are in a constant struggle. They live in a part of Chicago that has seen better days. They are doing their darndest for their families. They invited me to see something. They wanted me to see what they were living next door to. I went down to that part of the city of Chicago--within the boundaries of the city of Chicago--and I could not believe what I saw. They live in little houses such as these, and across from them is a mountainous gathering of something called petcoke. What is petcoke? If you take the Canadian tar sands that will move through the Keystone XL Pipeline to a refinery and put them through a process where you can end up with a viable product, such as gasoline, jet fuel, diesel fuel or whatever it might be, you have to clean out all of this petcoke that creates the tar sands composition that they are dealing with. When it is all over with--and if the process has been successful-- there is a lot of waste. In fact, there are 61 pounds of petcoke for every barrel of oil.…”