‘Every Plant And Tree Died’: Huge Alberta Pipeline Spill Raises Safety Questions As Keystone Decision Looms
As the Obama administration’s decision regarding whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline draws nearer, the latest disaster is raising serious concerns about the safety of Canada’s rapidly expanding pipeline network.
A massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp. didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres.
Members of the Dene Tha First Nation tribe are outraged that it took several days before they were informed that 9.5 million liters of salt and heavy-metal-laced wastewater had leaked onto wetlands they use for hunting and trapping.
“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha.
As the Globe and Mail reports, the Apache disaster is not an anomaly:The leak follows a pair of other major spills in the region, including 800,000 litres of an oil-water mixture from Pace Oil and Gas Ltd., and nearly 3.5 million litres of oil from a pipeline run by Plains Midstream Canada.Following initial speculation that the leak stemmed from aging infrastructure, officials from Apache Corp. revealed that the pipeline was only five years old and had been designed to last for 30.
After those accidents, the Dene Tha had asked the Energy Resources Conservation Board, Alberta’s energy regulator, to require installation of pressure and volume monitors, as well as emergency shutoff devices, on aging oil and gas infrastructure. The Apache spill has renewed calls for change.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...ecision-looms/
As we heard from BP/Alaska, etc, BigOilGas does almost no preventative maintenance/replacement, but runs everything until it stops, leaks, fails, explodes. Then payoff the dead workers' families after many years of litigation delay to screw them down, pay a handslap fine, also litigated to to nothing, etc, etc.
IOW, "Just Trust Us" to maximize profits and over anything and anybody that reduces profits.
You really think there's that much rage from the hard left? Some people (like me) call out Obama for being a middle-right winger on economic/foreign policy issues, however most "liberals" I know blindly defend the guy and have convinced themselves he's a liberal.
A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit
a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.
Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.
And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.
The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.
The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.
“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,” said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. “Nobody knew this was going to happen.” Almost 56 percent of Canada’s oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, some 2,000 miles away.
An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.
Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.
Marathon Petroleum’s plant in Detroit processes 28,000 barrels a day of the oil sands bitumen.
Residents on both sides of the Detroit River are concerned that the coke mountain is both an environmental threat and an eyesore.
“Here’s a little bit of Alberta,” said Brian Masse, one of Windsor’s Parliament members. “For those that thought they were immune from the oil sands and the consequences of them, we’re now seeing up front and center that we’re not.”
Coke, which is mainly carbon, is an essential ingredient in steelmaking as well as producing the electrical anodes used to make aluminum.
While there is high demand from both those industries, the small grains and high sulfur content of this petroleum coke make it largely unusable for those purposes
“It is worse than a byproduct,” Ms. Satterthwaite said.“It’s a waste byproduct that is costly and inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce.”
Alberta backed away from plans to use the petroleum coke as a fuel source, partly over concerns about greenhouse-gas emissions. Some of it is burned there, however, to power coking plants.
The Keystone XL pipeline will provide Gulf Coast refineries with a steady supply of diluted bitumen from the oil sands. The plants on the coast, like the coking refineries concentrated in California to deal with that state’s heavy crude oil, are positioned to ship the waste to China or Mexico, where it is burned as a fuel. California exports about 128,000 barrels of petroleum coke a day, mainly to China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/bu...anted=all&_r=0
Narrow and Flawed, Federal Pipeline Safety Study Fails to Settle Controversy
Diluted bitumen, a controversial form of heavy Canadian oil, poses no more risks to pipelines than conventional oil, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.
But environmentalists and pipeline watchdogs said the study's scope was so narrow and its methodology so flawed that it does little to settle the controversy over whether diluted bitumen, or dilbit, is more dangerous to humans and the environment than the light, conventional crude oil that most U.S. pipelines were built to handle.
Some of the challenges the academy faced in preparing the report are mentioned in the body of the report. But the study's executive summary, where the authors presented their main findings, reflects none of the uncertainties behind the data.
PHMSA hired the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct the study. But it specifically limited the scope of the report to an examination of whether pipelines carrying dilbit are more likely to leak than pipelines carrying conventional crude oil.
Mark Barteau, chair of the 12-member NAS committee that conducted the study, told reporters during a Tuesday press call that the committee did not consider the consequences of a spill — and that the committee members
didn't have the expertise to discuss that issue.
The issue is important because dilbit behaves differently from conventional crude oil when it spills into water. A 2010 dilbit spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River is still being cleaned up nearly three years later. Unlike conventional oil, which usually floats on water, dilbit is composed of bitumen—a heavy crude oil—and light hydrocarbons used to thin the bitumen so it can flow through pipelines. During the Kalamazoo spill, the light chemicals gradually evaporated, leaving the bitumen to sink into the riverbed.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20...le-controversy
No one knows how to stop these tar-sands oil spills
Thousands of barrels of tar-sands oil have been burbling up into forest areas for at least six weeks in Cold Lake, Alberta, and it seems that nobody knows how to staunch the flow.
An underground oil blowout at a big tar-sands operation run by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has caused spills at four different sites over the past few months. (This is different from the 100-acre spill in Alberta that we told you about last month, which was caused by a ruptured pipeline.)
Media and others have been blocked from visiting the sites, but the Toronto Star obtained do ents and photographs about the ongoing disaster from a government scientist involved in the cleanup, who spoke to the reporter on condition of anonymity. The prognosis is sickening. From Friday’s article:
The do ents and photos show dozens of animals, including beavers and loons, have died, and that [nearly 34 tons] of oily vegetation has been cleared from the latest of the four spill zones. …
“Everybody (at the company and in government) is freaking out about this,” said the scientist. “We don’t understand what happened. Nobody really understands how to stop it from leaking, or if they do they haven’t put the measures into place.”
The disaster raises big, scary questions about the safety of the underground oil extraction method being used:
The company’s operations use an “in situ” or underground extraction technology called “cyclic steam stimulation,” which involves injecting thousands of gallons of superhot, high-pressure steam into deep underground reservoirs. This heats and liquefies the hard bitumen and creates cracks through which the bitumen flows and is then pumped to the surface. …
Oil companies have said in situ methods are more environmentally friendly than the open-pit mining often associated with the Alberta oil sands, but in situ is more carbon and water-intensive.
And perhaps more spill-intensive:
“This is a new kind of oil spill and there is no ‘off button,’” said Keith Stewart, an energy analyst with Greenpeace who teaches a course on energy policy and environment at the University of Toronto. “You can’t cap it like a conventional oil well or turn off a valve on a pipeline.
“You are pressurizing the oil bed so hard that it’s no wonder that it blows out. This means that the oil will continue to leak until the well is no longer pressurized,” which means the bitumen could be seeping from the ground for months.
The spills are happening on traditional territory of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation, whose members are understandably seething. From iNews 880:
[Beaver Lake Cree Nation citizen Crystal] Lameman says as a Treaty Status First Nation person she feels her rights and treaties are being violated as she is not being allowed in her ancestor’s traditional hunting ground.
“We should have free access to it as treaty status Indians and we have no access to it and we can’t trust what we’re being told now,” explains Lameman.
… The First Nation is pursuing a cons utional challenge that argues the impacts of the oil sands are infringing their treaty rights to hunt, fish and trap.
In case you’d forgotten, it’s just this kind of tar-sands oil that would be shipped down the middle of America through the Keystone XL pipeline. If the Obama administration approves the pipeline project, even more tar-sands oil extraction is likely in Alberta [PDF] — and even more spills.
http://grist.org/news/no-one-knows-h...ds-oil-spills/
Amid Pipeline Debate, Two Costly Cleanups Forever Change Towns
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/us...anted=all&_r=0
...
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-11-2013 at 09:19 AM.
Remember The Tar Sands Leaks That No One Knew How To Stop In July? They’re Still Leaking.
The first of the four ongoing leaks at the Primrose site was reported May 20, and may well have started leaking long before that. As of September 11, the leaks have spilled more than 403,900 gallons — or about 9,617 barrels — of oily bitumen into the surrounding boreal forest and muskeg, the acidic, marshy soil found in the forest. In addition, 14,491 metric tons — 31,947,188 pounds — of “impacted soils” have been removed from the site, along with 515 cubic meters — 18,151 cubic feet — of oily vegetation. Two beavers, 49 birds, 105 amphibians and 46 small mammals have been killed as a result of the spill, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.
Back in July, CNR attributed the cause of the four leaks to “mechanical failures of wellbores in the vicinity of the impacted areas,” but the Alberta Energy Regulator said in August that it was “far to early” to determine the cause of the event. CNRL said that the seepage was “now controlled to specific containment areas where it is effectively recovered as it reaches the surface” — basically, that the leaks were being monitored and the oil cleaned up, but the leaks weren’t being stopped.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...still-leaking/
You know this is just a fight between two rich people don't you?
blocking XL pipeline is BigCarbon and BigCapital vs Human-Americans and the environment
Smells like XL will be approved
http://act.credoaction.com/sign/ustr_tarsands
Big Oil scuzbags will lie about anything.[FONT=arial][SIZE=3]Amid Pipeline Debate, Two Costly Cleanups Forever Change Towns
In May, the E.P.A. found that Enbridge had drastically underestimated the amount of oil still in the river. The agency estimated that 180,000 gallons had most likely drifted to the bottom, more than 100 times Enbridge’s projection.
wrong. It's between trains and pipelines.
I'm RIGHT, as always.
XL, no matter how transported, is BigCarbon vs Human-Americans and the environment.
And now the North Dakota fields get Big Oils spill scuz.
Or was this the 1st spill?
ND farmer finds oil spill while harvesting wheat
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota farmer who discovered an oil spill the size of seven football fields while out harvesting wheat says that when he found it, crude was bubbling up out of the ground.
Farmer Steve Jensen says he smelled the crude for days before the tires on his combines were coated in it. At the apparent break in the Tesoro Corp.'s underground pipeline, the oil was "spewing and bubbling 6 inches high," he said in a telephone interview Thursday.
What Jensen had found on Sept. 29 turned out it was one of the largest spills recorded in the state. At 20,600 barrels it was four times the size of a pipeline rupture in late March that forced the evacuation of more than 20 homes in Arkansas.
But it was 12 days after Jensen reported the spill before state officials told the public what had happened, raising questions about how North Dakota, which is in the midst of an oil boom, reports such incidents.
The spill happened in a remote area in the northwest corner of the state. The nearest home is a half-mile away, and Tesoro says no water sources were contaminated, no wildlife was hurt and no one was injured.
The release of oil has been stopped, state environment geologist Kris Roberts said Thursday. And the spill — spread out over 7.3 acres, or about the size of seven football fields, — has been contained.
Jacob Wiedmer, who was helping Jensen harvest his wheat crop, likened the Sept. 29 discovery to the theme song from "The Beverly Hillbillies" television show.
"It was just like Jed Clampett shooting at some food ..." he said of the oil coming from the ground. "Except we weren't hunting, we were harvesting."
Gov. Jack Dalrymple, who says he wasn't even told about what happened until Wednesday night, said the state is now investigating its procedures for reporting spills.
(Fabbs here. As if that wasn't gone over before the whole idea of a pipeline here was brought up.)
"There are many questions to be answered on how it occurred and how it was detected and if there was anything that could have been done that could have made a difference," Dalrymple said Thursday, when questioned at a news conference on a separate topic.
"Initially, it was felt that the spill was not overly large," Dalrymple said. "When they realized it was a fairly sizable spill, they began to contact more people about it."
Jensen said he had harvested most of his wheat before the spill, but the land is no longer usable for planting.
"We expect not to be able to farm that ground for several years," he said.
Tesoro Logistics, a subsidiary of the San Antonio, Texas-based company that owns and operates parts of Tesoro's oil infrastructure, said in a statement that the affected portion of the pipeline has been shut down.
"Protection and care of the environment are fundamental to our core values, and we deeply regret any impact to the landowner," Tesoro CEO Greg Goff said in a statement. "We will continue to work tirelessly to fully remediate the release area."
Wayde Schafer, a North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, said the spill is an example of the lack of oversight in a state that has exploded with oil development in recent years.
"We need more inspectors and more transparency," Schafer said. "Not only is the public not informed, but agencies don't appear to be aware of what's going on and that's not good."
Eric Haugstad, Tesoro's director of contingency planning and emergency response, said the hole in the 20-year-old pipeline was a quarter-inch in diameter. Tesoro officials were investigating what caused the hole in the 6-inch-diameter steel pipeline that runs underground about 35 miles from Tioga to a rail facility outside of Columbus, near the Canadian border.
Roberts said state and federal regulators are monitoring the cleanup, and Tesoro estimated it would cost $4 million.
A natural layer of clay more than 40 feet thick underlies the spill site and has "held the oil up" so that it does not spread to underground water sources, Roberts said.
"It is completely contained and under control," Roberts said Thursday. "They got very lucky."
___
Follow James MacPherson on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/macphersonja
^^^ Gregory Goff, CEO of Tesoro Logistics LP of San Antonio which owns and operates the broken pipleline.
Prior to joining us, Mr. Goff served as Senior Vice President, Commercial for ConocoPhillips Corporation.
$10 million a year. That is simply what is reported. Who knows how much he really makes.
I'm sure he is really concerned with the spills damaging effects.
up the fine to $1M/gallon spilled and let's see if they start to do preventative maintenance/replacement on pipelines.
The strategy is "run it all until it breaks, blows up, etc, bury the victims, cleanup, pay the families, pay the handslap fines" and carry on as before.
New Report Reveals Koch Brothers Could Make $100B Profit if Keystone XL Pipeline is Built
“The Kochs have repeatedly claimed that they have no interest in the Keystone XL pipeline, this report shows that is false,” said Victor Menotti, executive director of IFG.
“We noticed Koch Funded Tea Party members and think tanks pushing for the pipeline. We dug deeper and found $100 billion in profits, $50 million sent to organizations supporting the pipeline, and perhaps 2 million acres of land. That sounds like an interest.”
Other findings in the report include:
- The Kochs will earn 1 million times more than the average worker of the pipeline.
- The Kochs alone own more than 19 billion metric tons of carbon emissions in their tar sands holdings.
- Think tanks funded by the Kochs have released nearly 1,000 pro-Keystone XL reports or statements.
- Kochs have already made billions from insider trading and stand to do that again with tar sands.
- Koch Industries has a history of violence against people and the environment.
- The Koch Brothers seek to alter the public debate and control the policy debates in Washington.
“The past two weeks of the government shutdown brought to light the irresponsible influence of Koch-funded groups,” said Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska.
“Rewarding the Koch Brothers with Keystone XL, who at every turn fund campaigns to mislead Americans on everything from climate to gas prices, is like the President advocating for Sen. Cruz to be the Majority Leader. It makes no sense. Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska are depending on President Obama to see our national interest is not served with a pipeline that lines the pockets of climate deniers and foreign oil.”
http://ecowatch.com/2013/10/20/koch-...ipeline-built/
Yeah, the Kock Bros say they have no interest in XL, like they said the didn't support Cruz' govt shutdown.
Report Questions Keystone XL Pipeline's Integrity
A consumer advocacy group says it has do ented more than 100 excavations of potential construction problems across a 250-mile stretch of the Keystone XL pipeline’s Texas portion, raising questions about the integrity of one of the the most controversial crude oil transportation projects in recent history, which stretches below more than 600 rivers and streams in the state.
The segment of the Keystone XL pipeline that will pipe crude oil from Cushing, Okla., to the oil refineries in Texas’ Gulf Coast is nearly complete, and the Canadian energy company Transcanada says the extension will come online this year or early next. Unlike the hotly contested northern segment of the pipeline, which connects Oklahoma to the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, the southern section doesn’t require federal approval because it does not cross any international boundaries.
But with its report, the group, Public Citizen, is calling for more scrutiny over the southern leg's construction. On top of calls for more testing of the pipeline, the report asks federal regulators to review TransCanada’s construction records, and to strengthen inspection requirements. Public Citizen also says that Congress should hold oversight hearings to make sure regulators follow recommendations.
“This is one of those instances in which we can’t afford to be wrong,” said Tom "Smitty" Smith, who directs the group’s Texas chapter. “The consequences of a failure could be enormous.”
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/...0Subscriptions
Looks like the WH is rigging the XL environmental review, asking a fox to guard the hen house.
Politico reported this week that Energy Resources Management (ERM) - the contractor hired by the State Department to conduct the crucial environmental analysis of Keystone XL - is a member of no fewer than five oil-industry trade groups that are pushing for approval of Keystone XL.1
It is simply fantasy to expect that a company with such deep ties to the oil-industry would be capable of an impartial decision on a project that the industry has been so desperately demanding.
Researchers find 7,300-sq-mile ring of mercury around tar sands in Canada
Scientists have found a more than 7,300-square-mile ring of land and water contaminated by mercury surrounding the tar sands in Alberta, where energy companies are producing oil and shipping it throughout Canada and the U.S.
Government scientists are preparing to publish a report that found levels of mercury are up to 16 times higher around the tar-sand operations — principally due to the excavation and transportation of bitumen in the sands by oil and gas companies, according to Postmedia-owned Canadian newspapers like The Vancouver Sun.
Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk recently presented the findings at a toxicology conference in Nashville, Tenn.
The revelations add to growing concerns over the environmental impact of mining the tar sands. Many environmentalists charge that extracting oil from the sands will lead to an increase in carbon emissions, the destruction of the land, water contamination and health problems for Canadians. The debate over the tar sands crossed over into the United States when energy company TransCanada proposed building the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil to the southeastern U.S. for refining and distribution.
Kirk and her colleagues' research shows that the development of the tar sands may be responsible for spreading mercury — which can cause nervous-system damage — far beyond the areas where drilling and transportation are taking place.
The research suggests that the tar-sand development has created a ring of mercury contamination, with areas close to the sands showing much higher levels of mercury than before development.
The researchers collected samples of dirt, snow, birds eggs and other materials from more than 100 sites to perform their analysis.
While the mercury levels found around the sands are still lower than in other parts of Canada (notably around coal plants and incinerators), mercury is particularly worrisome to environmentalists because it can bioac ulate, meaning it becomes more concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.
In a report published in October, another Canadian researcher found elevated levels of mercury in bird eggs downstream from the tar sands.
Kirk and her team also found traces of methylmercury, a more toxic form of mercury, in snow for the first time in the area.
http://america.aljazeera.com/article...starsands.html
BigCarbon, polluting the planet.
Bluegrass Uprising
As American energy production booms, thousands face pipelines in their backyards.
By the end of the summer, distressed property owners and other Kentucky residents had united in an uprising against the pipeline. The project hasn’t aroused much public outcry in the other seven states it would cross. But in Kentucky, the proposed route traverses hallowed terrain: the eponymous Bluegrass Region, where the Kentucky Derby’s prizewinning horses graze; rolling hills pocked by springs, rivers, and aquifers that flow through the limestone soils and give Kentucky bourbon its characteristic taste. Opponents say a pipeline spill could destroy Kentucky’s traditional economies. Signs saying No Proposed Bluegrass Pipeline now line many of the rural roads; one sits at the edge of Reed’s yard. Officials in several counties and one city have passed resolutions protesting the pipeline or pleading with the state or federal government to consider the potential impact on property rights and the environment. Since at least October, land agents hired by the pipeline developers have been privately making deals with property owners—but some, like Reed, say they won’t budge.
* * *It’s becoming a familiar battle for the fossil-fuel industry, as it scrambles to build new infrastructure to move the massive quan ies of oil and gas that it’s producing in the Northeast, Southwest, Rockies and Great Plains. As technology has made it easier and more cost-effective to extract natural gas and oil trapped in rock formations, fossil-fuel production has boomed in the United States, reversing a decades-long decline in domestic fuel production. (The International Energy Agency predicts that the United States will be the world’s number-one producer of oil and gas by the end of 2015.) But despite President Obama’s brag in 2012 that he’s overseen enough new pipelines to “encircle the Earth and then some,” the United States is fracking and drilling so enthusiastically that the builders of pipelines can barely keep up. “Developing new pipeline capacity…will not be without difficulties,” the Brookings Ins ution wrote in a 2013 report. “Landowner rights…pose potential obstacles that can slow down the construction process.”
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20967-bluegrass-uprising
(red state) Na'vi putting up a good fight, but SkyPeople always win.
Canadian Support Of Keystone XL Pipeline Is Falling, New Poll Says
Canadian support for the Keystone XL pipeline has begun to drop off, according to a new poll.
The poll, released Thursday by Nanos Research Group, surveyed 1,000 Canadians in mid-December and found that 52 percent of them supported building Keystone XL, a result that’s down 16 percentage points from 68 percent in April. The poll also found opposition for the pipeline grew to 40 percent, up from 28 percent in April. Canadians’ views of Keystone XL have also soured, according to the poll: 48 percent said they have a positive or somewhat positive impression of the pipeline, down from 60 percent in April.
Nik Nanos, president of Nanos Research and Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told Bloomberg he thinks the poll’s results could make the Canadian government concerned for the future of the project.
“This has implications for the anti-Keystone movement in both countries,” he said.
The new poll brings the Canadian support level on par with the most recent U.S. polls on Keystone XL. A December Bloomberg National Poll found 56 percent of American respondents supported the project, but that 58 percent also supported requirements that Canada reduced carbon dioxide emissions of the project.
The poll also comes as Canadian government projections predict that emissions in the country will increase by 38 percent by 2030, largely due to expanding extraction of the tar sands. Emissions from the tar sands are predicted to quadruple between 2005 and 2030, reaching levels of 137 million Metric tons — more, according to Tar Sands Solutions, than the combined emissions of every Canadian province east of Ontario.
“Who’d have imagined that digging up the tar sands would somehow add carbon to the atmosphere?” 350.org founder Bill McKibben told the Guardian. “That Canada watched the Arctic melt and then responded like this will be remembered by history.”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...-support-poll/
Looking for a Way Around Keystone XL, Canadian Oil Hits the Rails
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/business/energy-environment/looking-for-a-way-around-keystone-xl-canadian-oil-hits-the-rails.html
I think we are only beginning to learn about the damage that is, and will be, done.
Seems like an extremely risky endeavor, with limited payback.
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