First of all, there are risks.
By the way, I want to comment on something that Mr. McGowan said, which I think is not quite correct. I believe Michael Moore was not at the NEB hearings. In fact, when Michael Moore did his paper, he worked with Stillwater Associates and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which are very distinguished organizations in the United States. We, however, also go through a very rigorous anonymous refereeing process, and the referees thought very highly of the paper.
I won't comment any further, but certainly the quality is there. We can have that kind of debate. As to whether Mr. Mansell got torn apart, all I know is that there was a very bizarre argument made by one expert witness who was trying to tear it apart. I won't go into that in detail, but we'll hear from the NEB what they think of the ultimate arguments.
With respect to the risks, they are there. One of the papers I mentioned was a recent one we put out by Michael Moore showing that Asian coal capacity is expanding. There has been a huge expansion in that capacity and planned capacity, and Mr. Moore's comment, based on work he did with Stillwater Associates, was that if we are slow in developing exports to Asia, we could eventually miss the market. There will be other suppliers that will come in.
With respect to the North American market, we don't export right now to California, which is one of the other advantages of going west. There are somewhat higher prices associated with PADD 5 in California compared with prices on the Gulf Coast. Going down south, we have an opportunity, but there are risks there. Tight oil is expanding tremendously in the United States. This doesn't mean it will displace all imports, but there is a fair amount of oil that could be brought in from offshore. If we have changes in Venezuela, there could be a good supply that will come in from there.
If we take our time in dealing with these issues, we risk missing markets. You can see the squeezing of the differences between the Brent price and the West Texas Intermediate price if you look at the recent numbers. Part of that is because a number of issues have been dealt with, including stoppages in the Enbridge line and the reversal of the Seaway Pipeline in the south. But we're going to have new pipelines going between Cushing and the Gulf Coast, and we're going to see those differences disappear quite a bit. This is why the refineries don't see their future as being very good. You're not going to lay down billions of dollars in new refining capacity when you could end up with quite low margins in the future. That has been one of the main concerns.