James Hansen: Tar Sands and Dirty Tricks

by James Hansen, September 13, 2013

The New Yorker just published (16 September issue) an excellent article "The President and the Pipeline" on Tom Steyer and the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, advocates for the Canadian government's position ("industry officials") were able to slip in a statement that was not fact checked with me "They note that Hansen's dire warning about Canada's unconventional oil deposits was based on the assumption that every ounce of oil in the sands would be burned.

Only a small fraction of the total estimated reserves is recoverable, and doing so will take decades." First, note that the carbon from fossil fuel burning will stay in the climate system for more than 100,000 years before it is buried on the ocean floor as carbonates. So whether it takes a few decades (or even a few centuries) to extract the fuel is pretty irrelevant -- we would be screwing up the planet for our children, grandchildren and, as Native Americans say, the seventh generation.

Second, what I said is that oil in the total tar sands resource is more than double all oil that has been burned in the history of humankind, i.e., less than half of the tar sands is sufficient to match all oil burned so far. (And note that non-tar sands oil is being burned to extract the tar sands goop and process it to make oil, and forests above the tar sands are being destroyed, making the tar sandsimpact even greater.) If we build big pipeline infrastructure, you can be sure that technology developments will allow more and more to be extracted.

There is another error in the New Yorker article, an explanation of the origin of the name of Bill McKibben's organization 350.org: "The name is a nod to Hansen's calculation that once the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds three hundred and fifty parts per million, climate change could become uncontainable."

In reality, 350 ppm is the CO2 level that, other things being unchanged, would restore Earth's energy balance.

So 350 ppm is an estimate of the CO2 level needed to stabilize global temperature. 

Temperature is now near the upper end of its range during the Holocene, the interglacial period now more than 10,000 years long, which is the climate that civilization is adapted to. It may be necessary to go somewhat lower than 350 ppm to avoid multi-meter sea level rise, so 350 ppm is only an initial estimate for a long-term target. We will know better by the time we get CO2 turned around heading toward 350 ppm. It's unlikely we will want to go back all the way to pre-industrial 280 ppm, because there are other significant climate forcings. These include human-made change of the planet's surface albedo and natural forcings, which are providing a slight push toward global cooling. 

Yet the New Yorker's "climate change could become uncontainable," unfortunately, is not science fiction. If we are so foolish as to burn all fossil fuels, including all coal and unconventional fuels, that result is nearly certain. Our paper discussing that topic, "Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide," by Hansen, Sato, Russell and Kharecha, is finally being published next week in the Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A PDF of the article will be freely available from my web site (www.columbia.edu/~jeh1) or from the journal's web site.

The attached note ("Europe Standing Tall Against a Rogue State") was written to accompany "Tar Sands Debacle and the Hama-Hama-Hama Oil and Gas Corporation," which I hope to finish soon. I include the note now because the situation in Europe is fluid. The Canadian government (not representative of Canada, as I note) is trying to work a backroom deal to avoid an open vote on unconventional fossil fuels.

Does anybody have a guess as to why the Canadian Prime Minister jumped at the chance to line up Canada in favor of Obama's plan to bomb Syria?

I'm sorry to have been so slow in writing -- I have been snowed under working on several things at the same time, including finding support for a new organization -- but I hope to catch up soon.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130913_TarSands+NewYorker.pdf

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Tom Steyer, NexGen: Keystone XL bad economics for the U.S. -- Canadian oil will travel through America not to America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3BkrAI1KqY
 
The Hill:

Billionaire climate change activist Tom Steyer is launching a four-part, $1 million ad buy that attacks the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.

The former hedge fund chief’s first ad, slated to run during today’s political talk shows, alleges Keystone wouldn’t help the U.S. because the oil would be  “refined and loaded on ships to be sold overseas to countries like China.”

“Foreign countries will get more access to more oil to make more products to sell back to us, undercutting our economy and our workers,” the ad states.

The Obama administration is weighing whether to grant a cross-border permit for TransCanada Corp.’s pipeline, which would bring oil from Canadian oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refiners.

Keystone pipeline supporters have pushed back against activists’ allegations [not really allegations, more like the facts] that Keystone would largely be an export pipeline, either for crude it carries or refined products made with it.

 http://climatecrocks.com/2013/09/09/new-ad-clobbers-keystone-economics/

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Steve Horn: The Flip Side of Obama’s Keystone XL Delay

Even as President Obama cast a veneer of caution over the Keystone pipeline’s northern half, he quietly expedited dozens of similar projects.

 

by Steve Horn, Mint Press News, September 7, 2013

While President Obama made a big deal out of delaying the northern half of the Keystone pipeline’s construction, he compensated by signing an executive order to expedite similar infrastructure projects everywhere else. (Photo/Matt Wansley via Flickr)

Large segments of the environmental movement declared a win on Jan. 18, 2012, the dawn of an election year in which partisan fervor reigned supreme.

On that day President Barack Obama kicked the can down the road for permitting TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline’s northern half until after the then-forthcoming November 2012 presidential election.

“Northern half” is the key caveat: just two months later, on March 22, 2013 – even deeper into the weeds of an election year – President Obama issued Executive Order 13604. Among other key things, the order has an accompanying memorandum calling for an expedited review of the southern half of Keystone XL stretching from Cushing, Okla., to Port Arthur, Texas.

The day before, March 21, Obama flew on Air Force One to a pipe yard in Cushing – the “pipeline crossroads of the world” – for a special stump speech and photo-op announcing the executive order and memorandum.

Dubbed the Gulf Coast Pipeline Project by TransCanada – 95% complete and “open for business” in the first quarter of 2014 – the 485-mile tube will ship 700,000 barrels of tar sands crude per day from Cushing to Port Arthur, where it will then reach Gulf Coast refineries and be exported to the global market. It will eventually have the capacity to ship 830,000 barrels per day.

The subject of a large amount of grassroots resistance from groups such as Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and the Tar Sands Blockade, the Gulf Coast Pipeline Project – when push comes to shove – is only the tip of the iceberg.

That’s because Obama’s order also called for expedited permitting and review of all domestic infrastructure projects – including but not limited to pipelines – as a reaction to the Keystone XL resistance.

A months-long Mint Press News investigation reveals the executive order wasn’t merely a symbolic gesture.

Rather, many key pipeline and oil and gas industry marketing projects are currently up for expedited review, making up for — and by far eclipsing — the capacity of Keystone XL’s northern half. The original TransCanada Keystone pipeline – as is – already directly connects to Cushing from Alberta, making XL (short for “extension line”) essentially obsolete.

Keystone XL’s northern half proposal is key for marketing oil obtained from the controversial hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale basin.

Dubbed the Bakken Marketlink Pipeline, the segment has lost its importance with the explosive freight rail boom for moving Bakken fracked oil to market and other pipeline proposals. One of those pipelines, in fact, has received fast-track approval under the March 2012 Obama Executive Order.

Feeling the pressure from protest against the Keystone XL from groups such as the Tar Sands Action, Indigenous Environmental Network and others, Obama pulled a fast one: “wait and see” for XL’s northern half – which many claimed as a victory – and expedited approval of everything else via executive order.

Breaking down the Keystone XL executive order

Obama’s Keystone XL southern half March 2012 memo reads like Big Oil talking points.

“[W]e need an energy infrastructure system that can keep pace with advances in production,” Obama states in the Memo. “To promote American energy sources, we must not only extract oil — we must also be able to transport it to our world-class refineries, and ultimately to consumers.”

A metaphorical slap in the face to environmentalists who spent months working on opposing Keystone XL, Obama argued a more efficient, less bureaucratic means of approval was compulsory.

“[A]s part of my Administration’s broader efforts to improve the performance of Federal permitting and review processes, we must make pipeline infrastructure a priority … supporting projects that can contribute to economic growth and a secure energy future,” the memo reads.

Though the order issued an expedited permitting process for Keystone XL’s southern half, it also foreshadowed that expedited permitting would become the “new normal” going forward for all domestic oil and gas pipeline projects.

“To address the existing bottleneck in Cushing, as well as other current or anticipated bottlenecks, agencies shall … coordinate and expedite their reviews … as necessary to expedite decisions related to domestic pipeline infrastructure projects that would contribute to a more efficient domestic pipeline system for the transportation of crude oil,” the memo states in closing.

The memo also notes all projects placed in the expedited permitting pile can have their statuses tracked on the online Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard, with 48 projects currently listed.

Little time was wasted building the XL’s southern half after Obama issued the Order and within a slim two years, TransCanada will have its first direct line from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries in southern Texas.

Muted opposition: “eco-terrorists,” SLAPP lawsuit threats

It’s not as if the Keystone XL southern half expedited permit has gone unopposed. It’s just that activists who have chosen to resist the pipeline have paid a heavy price for doing so.

A case in point: opposition to Keystone XL’s southern half has earned many activists the label – on multiple occasions – as potential “eco-terrorists,” named as such by TransCanada, the U.S. FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s Nebraska-based “fusion center” and local undercover police.

Other activists were threatened by TransCanada with a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), all of whom made an out of court settlement in January 2013.

Activists agreed to “no longer trespass or cause damage to Keystone XL property including the easements within private property boundaries,” explained FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola in a January 2013 article.

The agreement was a quintessential “lesser of two evils” choice, given activists could have found themselves bogged down in legal fees from TransCanada and may have eventually owed the corporation big bucks.

“The activists had a choice: either settle or face a lawsuit in court where TransCanada would seek $5 million for alleged financial damages … that could have much worse consequences,” Gosztola further explained.

Beyond SLAPP threats, key lawsuits aiming to fend off TransCanada have also failed.

Texas lawsuit highlights expedited permitting corruption

One of those lawsuits in particular – filed on April 25, 2013, by a Douglass, Texas-based citizen named Michael Bishop representing himself in court – paints a picture of what President Obama meant when he said he would fast-track permitting for infrastructure projects going forward.

Before filing the lawsuit, Bishop penned a four-part series for EcoWatch in February and March of 2013 on his experiences as a landowner living a mere 120-feet from pipeline construction and dealing with TransCanada in Texas.

“I am amazed by the lack of understanding about this project by the general public and even more amazed that people in other parts of the country are so focused on the ‘northern segment’ while the pipeline is actually being laid right here in Texas and will begin transporting diluted bitumen, tar sands crude oil, to Gulf Coast refineries by the end of the year,” Bishop wrote in Part III. “So many seem oblivious to this fact.”

Bishop alleges in his Complaint for Declaratory Relief and Petition for Writ of Mandamus that on-the-books bread-and-butter environmental laws were broken when fast-tracked permitting for Keystone XL’s southern half unfolded.

The permitting mechanism utilized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – following Obama’s March 2012 executive order and memorandum – was a Nationwide Permit 12.

Nationwide Permit 12 has also been chosen for fast-tracked permitting of Enbridge’s Flanagan South Pipeline. That pipeline is set to fill the gap – and then some – for Keystone XL’s northern half, bringing tar sands crude along the 600-mile-long, 600,000-barrels-per-day pipeline from Pontiac, Ill., to Cushing, Okla.

Bishop cited the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), arguing Nationwide Permit 12 as applied to Keystone XL’s southern half violated the spirit of that law because no environmental assessment was conducted and no public hearings were held.

“Given the fact that the Corps was involved in the preparation of the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline XL for the State Department … knowledgeable of the toxic nature of the material to be transported and massive public opposition to the project, public hearings should have been held in accordance with the law,” wrote Bishop.

In following the dictates of the March 2012 executive order and memorandum, Bishop argues the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acted in total disregard for long-established environmental law.

“The use of Nation Wide Permit-12 is not a substitute for following NEPA and the Corps, while having some degree of latitude, failed in its ministerial duty,” Bishop wrote. “There was a blatant disregard for established environmental law…which not only included public input, but also directed the agency to consider human health and safety.”

To date, the lawsuit has not been heard in court.

Hastening Bakken shale development

While the environmental community hones in on Keystone XL’s northern half, the business community has focused on expediting permits in the Bakken Shale and filling in the gap left behind by the lack of a TransCanada “Bakken Marketlink.”

Big Business has done so – in the main – by using pipelines to ship Bakken crude to key rail hubs.

One of the pipelines listed in the Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard is the Bakkenlink pipeline – not to be confused with the “Bakken Marketlink” – a 144-mile-long tube set to carry fracked oil from the Bakken to rail facilities that would then carry the product to strategic markets.

“Currently, crude oil from this region of the Bakken field is transported to rail facilities via truck,” explains the Dashboard. “The proposed BakkenLink pipeline provides an opportunity to eliminate a vast amount of overland truck traffic.”

Petroleum News Bakken, an industry news publication, explains Bakkenlink was proposed when the northern half of Keystone XL was put on hold by the Obama Administration.

“Originally the BakkenLink was intended to run all the way to Baker, Mont., where it was to connect to the Keystone XL pipeline, but when the Keystone XL project was put on hold in 2011, BakkenLink LLC modified its plan and opted to terminate the pipeline at the Fryburg rail facility,” Petroleum News Bakken explained.

The Bismarck Tribune explained Great Northern Midstream LLC – which wholly owns BakkenLink LLC as a subsidiary –  has built capacity to load fracked Bakken oil onto 110-car-unit trains that can carry up to 300,000 barrels per day to market via the Fryburg rail facility.

For sake of comparison, TransCanada’s Bakken Marketlink Pipeline – aka Keystone XL – was slated to bring 100,000 barrels per day of crude to market.

The freight trains scheduled to carry this oil are owned by Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF). BNSF itself is owned by Warren Buffett, the fourth richest man on the planet and major campaign contributor to President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Another key data point: a 70-unit train carrying 51,428 barrels of fracked Bakken Oil to a Canadian east coast export terminal owned by Irving Oil derailed and exploded in a fireball on July 2013, killing 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, located in Québec province.

Coming full circle, Irving Oil and TransCanada announced a joint venture to develop and construct an export facility in St. John, Canada, on August 1, less than a month after the lethal Lac-Mégantic derailment. That facility would take tar sands crude shipped from the 1.1 million barrels per day proposed TransCanada Energy East pipeline and export it to the global market.

Bakken Federal Executives Group

Bakkenlink isn’t the only game in town for the March 2012 executive order’s impact on expedited permitting in the Bakken Shale.

Enter the Bakken Federal Executives Group – helped along by Obama’s Assistant for Energy and Climate Change Heather Zichal – the Obama White House’s industry-friendly liaison to Big Oil.

“[I]dentified by the President as one of five priority regional initiatives under Executive Order 13604 … [the] [g]roup represents a dozen federal bureaus with review and permitting responsibilities that are working collaboratively to address common development obstacles associated with the Bakken boom…,” explains an August 7 U.S. Department of Interior press release.

Newly-minted U.S. Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell – a former petroleum engineer for Mobil Oil Company – recently took a trip to the Bakken Shale oil fields to advocate for the dictates of the March 2012 Executive Order.

“The group’s August 6 itinerary began with a tour of a rig operated by Continental Resources Inc., followed in the afternoon by a tour of facilities operated by Statoil, which has invested more than $4 billion in the Bakken,” explained the Oil and Gas Journal.

Continental Resources’ CEO is Harold Hamm, who served as energy advisor to Mitt Romney, the Republican Party presidential nominee for the 2012 election.

“Interior continues to be a leader in implementing President Obama’s vision for a federal permitting process that is smarter [and] more efficient,” David Hayes, Department of Interior Deputy Secretary said in a June press release. “By coordinating across the many federal agencies involved in the Bakken region … we are able to offer a better process for industry.”

Obama May 2013 memo: Cut it in half

On May 17, 2013, President Obama issued an updated memorandum titled, “Modernizing Federal Infrastructure Review and Permitting Regulations, Policies, and Procedures.”

Citing his March 2012 executive order as precedent, this memo called for cutting the time it takes to approve major infrastructure projects – pipelines included – in half.

“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to advance the goal of cutting aggregate timelines for major infrastructure projects in half,” he states in the memo, with a final goal to “institutionalize or expand best practices or process improvements that agencies are already implementing to improve the efficiency of reviews.”

Scary math

Adding insult to injury, a recent story appearing in The Wall Street Journal explains Keystone XL’s northern half is no longer a priority for refiners, investors or the industry at large.

With a further delay in the cards due to conflicts of interest in the State Department’s environmental review process, it may start to matter less and less for Big Oil as it plans out its other options for getting its product to market going forward.

“U.S. companies that refine oil increasingly doubt that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline [northern half] will ever be built, and now they don’t particularly care,” explained the Journal.

Enbridge recently proposed an expansion for its Alberta Clipper pipeline (approved by Obama’s State Department in August 2009, now known as “Line 67”) from 450,000 barrels per day to 570,000 barrels per day to the State Department in a November 2012 application.

It upped the ante since the original Clipper expansion application — a move met with activist opposition — requested 800,000 barrels of tar sands run through it per day.

That’s on top of Enbridge’s recently proposed Nationwide Permit 12 – paralleling what TransCanada did for Keystone XL’s southern half – set to bring 600,000 barrels per day of tar sands to Cushing, Okla., from Pontiac, Ill.

The reaction to pressure against building Keystone XL’s northern half has been – put simply – “build more and faster.” Simple math and geography shows – as The Wall Street Journal boasted – project permitting parameters have tilted more and more in Big Oil’s favor under President Obama’s watch.

With full-throttle expansion of the tar sands described as “game over for the climate” by now-retired NASA scientist James Hansen — and with fracked oil and gas found to be dirtier than coal when examined in its entire lifecycle according to a May 2011 Cornell University study — it makes for scary math indeed.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/obamas-keystone-xl-tradeoff-expedite-all-other-pipelines/168569/

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Flanagan South Pipeline -- who needs the Keystone XL?

Oil sands pipeline avoids Keystone XL scrutiny

by Jeffrey Thomich, St. Louis Post Dispatch, August 25, 2013

SHELBINA, Mo. • The most valuable piece of farmland in Shelby County this summer isn’t growing soybeans or corn. It’s holding a hardier crop — steel pipe.

On a field just north of this tiny farm town along Missouri Highway 15, about 60 miles of pipe is stacked neatly in four rows that stretch almost as far as the eye can see.

In the coming months, the hundreds of pieces will be strung together as part of Enbridge Energy Co.’s Flanagan South Pipeline, a new 589-mile artery that will transport heavy Canadian oil through the nation’s midsection.

The Flanagan South line will link the Flanagan oil terminal an hour and a half southwest of Chicago with a crude oil hub at Cushing, Okla. From there, other pipelines can move oil south to the nation’s refining capital on the Texas coast.

Calgary-based Enbridge says the 36-inch diameter Flanagan South Pipeline will run diagonally across 11 Missouri counties from just north of Hannibal to Bates County, about an hour south of Kansas City. For most of the route, it will run alongside the 60-year-old Spearhead Pipeline, also owned by Enbridge.

At $2.6 billion, the project is enormous in its own right. But it represents just a piece of Enbridge’s broader plans to expand capacity for moving hundreds of thousands of additional barrels of oil a day from western Canada’s tar sands and the Bakken formation in the northern Great Plains to Gulf Coast refineries where it can be made into gasoline, diesel and chemicals.

Another Enbridge expansion, the Southern Access Extension, would connect the same Flanagan terminal with a storage hub 165 miles to the south in Patoka, Ill., about 75 miles east of St. Louis. Enbridge is also working with another company to develop a separate oil pipeline from Patoka to the Louisiana coast by converting parts of an existing natural gas pipeline.

Still, as ambitious as Enbridge’s plans are, Flanagan South and the other pipeline projects in the Midwest haven’t generated a fraction of the public backlash as the contentious Keystone XL Pipeline, which has drawn massive protests and hundreds of thousands of public comments while the oil industry and environmental groups await a decision by the Obama administration.

Pipeline supporters and critics alike say a primary difference is the 600,000 barrel-a-day Flanagan South project doesn’t cross the U.S.-Canada border and doesn’t require presidential permission.

In fact, work on the Flanagan South Pipeline is already beginning, less than two years after Enbridge formally committed to the project. By contrast, the northernmost and most controversial piece of Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Steel City, Neb., has yet to move forward five years after it was proposed.

LAWSUITS FILED

Still, for all the differences between the projects, critics say the same concerns exist with both. Among them are risks that a spill could foul water supplies; the greenhouse gas contributions of producing, processing and burning the heavy oil from Canada’s tar sands; and the destruction caused by extracting the tarlike petroleum from a mix of sand and clay beneath Canada’s boreal forest.

What’s more, environmental groups contend that the permitting process used for the Flanagan South Pipeline doesn’t require a comprehensive environmental analysis or allow for public input — a significant reason why so many who live in areas affected by the project know few details about it.

“A lot of the people we’ve talked to along the pipeline route have been pretty surprised to learn there’s a pipeline three quarters the size of Keystone XL in their backyard,” said Doug Hayes, a Sierra Club lawyer in Boulder, Colo.

Just over a week ago, the Sierra Club sued the Corps of Engineers in federal court in Washington for failing to provide access to application materials provided by Enbridge under the Freedom of Information Act. The St. Louis-based Missouri Coalition for the Environment filed a similar lawsuit a day later.

On Friday, the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation filed an amended lawsuit against the Corps of Engineers and four other federal agencies with responsibility for approving the pipeline for failing to analyze the project’s environmental impact.

Under the Clean Water Act, projects that involve dredging or filling of rivers, streams or wetlands require approval from the Corps of Engineers. In some cases, projects deemed to have minimal environmental impact qualify for general permits called nationwide permits that can be issued on an expedited basis.

The Flanagan South Pipeline has been authorized by three Corps of Engineers districts, including St. Louis, under Nationwide Permit 12, a general permit for utility projects that result in no greater than a half-acre of wetlands loss.

Hayes, the Sierra Club lawyer, said the use of Nationwide Permit 12 was improper for the Flanagan South Pipeline and violates the intent of the Clean Water Act by treating each of the pipeline’s 2,000 or so stream and river crossings as individual projects.

In Missouri alone, Flanagan South construction is estimated to “permanently and temporarily impact approximately 62,840 linear feet of stream equaling an area of 24.91 acres and approximately 38.23 acres of wetland,” the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said in a letter to Enbridge in April. The pipeline would also cross eight streams that already fail to meet federal Clean Water Act standards.

Lorin Crandall of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment said many of the water crossings in Missouri are also sources of drinking water, a reason why people across the state — not just landowners along the pipeline route — should be concerned about the Flanagan South project.

That’s especially true given that Enbridge is the same company responsible for the 2010 spill in Michigan that released 840,000 gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River. Diluted bitumen is a mix of heavy Canadian crude oil mixed with chemicals that allow it to flow through pipelines. Three years later, the cleanup from the disaster still isn’t complete.

Corps of Engineers spokesman Gene Pawlik said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation. But, he said, oil and gas pipelines in general are among the projects authorized under Nationwide Permit 12.

But Enbridge spokeswoman Katie Lange said the company has been more than forthcoming with information about the project since making initial contact with landowners and elected officials in January 2012 when the company committed to build the pipeline. The outreach efforts included eight open houses across the pipeline route in April 2012 and four more this summer.

“We’ve been out there, we’ve been open, we’ve been transparent with this project from the get-go,” she said.

Lange also said Enbridge has faced up to its role in the Kalamazoo River spill and instituted sweeping changes.

“We walked away with egg on our face, and there are definitely lessons that have been learned from that,” she said. “The improvements that we have made to the system are more than I can even list.”

Enbridge prefers to tout what it says are the benefits of the pipeline, including additional North American oil production to the Gulf Coast, home to the majority of U.S. refining capacity, millions of dollars in property and sales tax revenue and thousands of temporary construction jobs along the pipeline route.

POLITICAL SUPPORT

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt enthusiastically endorsed the pipeline. Nixon, in fact, pledged to do what he could to expedite state approval.

Local officials in rural counties where the pipeline will pass through have been equally enthusiastic.

Glenn Eagan, presiding commissioner in Shelby County, where Enbridge has staged 60 miles of pipe, said the Missouri Tax Commission estimated the pipeline will yield almost $1 million a year in new property tax revenue for the county when it’s fully operational.

That represents about a 20 percent increase from the $5 million or so the county, located about currently generates in property taxes, with 70 percent or more of the additional money going to local schools. The county’s road and bridge fund and general fund should each get an additional $60,000, money that can be used on road repairs or do work on the county courthouse.

“It’s awesome for the county, it really is,” Eagan said.

Jeffrey Tomich covers energy and the environment for the Post-Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @jefftomich.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/oil-sands-pipeline-avoids-keystone-xl-scrutiny/article_5a80dcef-44aa-5272-8451-fb4511a33522.html

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Enbridge pipelines still at too great a risk of rupturing

A "complete breakdown of safety" in 2010 has not been sufficiently addressed, a neglect that may spell trouble for its other aging lines, the report says.

by David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News

August 22, 2013

Demonstrators in Sarnia, Ontario, protest against Enbridge's Line 6B, the pipeline that burst in Michigan in 2010. A new report says the stress corrosion cracking and general corrosion conditions that beset 6B plague some of the company's other pipelines. Credit: Toban Black

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Pipeline regulators in Canada and the United States are being cautioned that claims by Enbridge Inc. that it improved its safety procedures and adopted sophisticated inspection practices are exaggerated and that pipeline ruptures as catastrophic as the company's 2010 accident in Marshall, Michigan, are still possible.

The warning came in a report filed this month with the Canadian National Energy Board, which is considering Enbridge's request to reverse the flow of an oil pipeline in Eastern Canada and to use the line to carry diluted bitumen, or dilbit. The report was subsequently lodged with the U.S. Department of State.

"Enbridge is still not heeding pipeline investigators/regulators in integrity management," said the report by Richard Kuprewicz, president of the engineering consulting company Accufacts Inc. and an adviser to the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. 

"Enbridge has a culture where safety management seems not to be a critical component of their operation."

The report recommends that the Energy Board require Enbridge to improve its leak detection policies and strengthen its emergency response plans for densely populated areas and critical water sources. Before the reversal is approved, Enbridge should also be required to check the line with a hydrotest, an expensive procedure in which a pipe is shut down and filled with water under high pressure to expose cracks and other faults, the report said.

Kuprewicz said he based his conclusions on documents Enbridge submitted with its application to the Energy Board and on records made public after the Michigan spill, including a scathing U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report that cited Enbridge for "a complete breakdown of safety." Enbridge's Michigan accident is now considered the largest inland oil spill in North American history.

The report was commissioned by Équiterre, a Montreal-based nonprofit that promotes environmental responsibility. After being filed in Canada, it was forwarded to the State Department by the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation organization that is seeking stricter scrutiny of U.S. pipelines.  

Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog organization based in Bellingham, Wash., said the report is important because it highlights the need for more specific standards for pipeline safety. The responsibility for spill prevention lies not only with pipeline operators like Enbridge, he said, but with federal regulators who give pipeline companies too much leeway in deciding which safety practices they will use.

"In a broader sense, this shows how decisions are left up to the companies, and the companies aren't making the right decisions," Weimer said.

An Enbridge spokesman declined to comment on the Kuprewicz report andreferred InsideClimate News to the Canadian Energy Board website and the 49 documents the company has filed in response to various questions and comments about the pipeline reversal project. None of those documents directly addresses the report.

John Stoody, director of Government and Public Relations for the Association of Pipe Lines, a Washington D.C.-based organization representing the pipeline industry, said he couldn't address the report's findings about Enbridge, but he defended the industry's overall safety record.

"From an industry-wide perspective—and I know is the case for Enbridge as well—pipeline integrity management is a top priority," he said.

Pipeline operators spent more than $1.1 billion on safety last year, he said, including evaluating, inspecting and maintaining their pipelines. He said the number of spills declined 60 percent between 1999 and 2012.

Safety Management Lacking

Enbridge is Canada's leading transporter of crude oil. It is also one of the largest pipeline operators in the United States, with plans to construct a network of new and expanded pipelines that would carry more oil than the controversial Keystone XL project, which would run from Alberta, Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast if it is approved.

The State Department is currently reviewing Enbridge's request to increase the capacity of the Alberta Clipper, a pipeline that crosses into the United States from Canada near Neche, N.D., and has become part of the national debate over environmental safeguards versus energy needs.

Enbridge also is facing fierce resistance to a pipeline it is building in Michigan and Indiana to replace the line that ruptured in 2010. Environmental organizations are concerned about the pipeline's proximity to Lake Michigan, one of the region's most important drinking water sources. Some people who live along the route are outraged because the pipeline will run within feet of their homes.   

Two more pages here:  http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130822/catastrophic-pipeline-ruptures-still-too-big-risk-enbridge-report-warns

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Cold Lake Spill: “There is No Control on this Incident,” says Energy Regulator

by Carol Linnitt, DeSmog Canada, July 29, 2013

Canadian Natural Resource Limited (CNRL), the company responsible for a massive ongoing spill on the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range southeast of Fort McMurray released a public notice last week claiming the release was “secured” and that “clean-up, recovery and reclamation activities are well under way.”

Cara Tobin, Office of Public Affairs spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator, said that CNRL has yet to bring the release under control. 

The spill, caused by a rare underground spring of bitumen emulsion, is the result of High-Pressure Cyclic Steam Stimulation (HPCSS) technology that forces steam into underlying bitumen reservoirs at temperatures and pressures high enough to fracture underlying formations.

“I don’t want to presume what they mean by [secure] but I can tell you a few things that might help clarify,” she said.

Under usual circumstances with HPCSS heavy bitumen is softened by steam injected under the surface, allowing the resulting water and oil mixture – called bitumen emulsion – to surface up a wellbore. In this instance the high pressures underground are creating multiple bitumen springs, forcing the oil mixture to the surface in numerous locations including under a body of water.

“With any incident the company would go to the site and identify the outer boundaries of the affected area,” Tobin said.

“There’s two things – one is control and one is containment. What they have done, to the best of my knowledge, is that they have identified the outer extent of the impacted area, which is generally called delineation. I think they were finishing that process [Friday]. And so they are getting to know and rope off the outer extent of the impacted area.”

“So that’s one thing. And that’s basically containment…In this case, this is still an ongoing incident. There is no control on this incident.”

According to CNRL the area of initial impact is 20.7 hectares, or just over 51 acres. The spill volume to date, initially reported at 28 cubic metres, was updated to 950 cubic metres, or nearly 6000 barrels of oil, over the weekend.

“In this case because the incident is ongoing there will continue to be more volume of product coming up to the surface but it’s not going to be impacting any vegetation [other] than what’s already impacted…There will still be more volume of product but it’s not going to be spreading further,” she said.

She added that although this spill is “relatively unique,” an incident of its kind occurred previously on the same CNRL site.

“It’s not like it hasn’t happened before though. We have information on our website, about a similar incident that happened in 2009 and it was the same sort of thing where pressure pushed bitumen to surface and until that pressure was naturally able to recede underground the product continued to – very slowly – come to surface.”

Much like the 2009 incident, the cause of the current spill remains unknown and it is not expected to stop until underground pressure subsides.

“What we’re seeing in this one is that pressure has built up underground and is finding ways to come to surface and we don’t know what the cause of that might be. That will come out in our investigation report. But regardless, it is coming to the surface, very slowly, and it won’t stop until that pressure has gone down underground,” Tobin said.

The rate of the spill remains unreported at this time.

According to documents from the former Alberta Energy Conservation Board (ERCB), now the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), the 2009 release prompted the shut down of the site after bitumen emulsion was seen flowing out from the ground and pooling on the company’s Primrose East site.

A report on the incident says the bitumen emulsion could be observed seeping out of the ground to the south and the east of the well pad, as well as from surface fissures in the area.

The company initiated “emergency flowback to depressurize the formation” in an attempt to stem the release.

“Approximately 11,380 tonnes of solids (including snow, organic material, soil, and bitumen) was ultimately removed from the site for landfill disposal, and 904 cubic metres of bitumen was recovered from the surface of Pad 74 and transported to CNRL’s Wolf Lake Plant,” states the report.

Multiple investigations into the incident over the span of one year were inconclusive and could not ultimately determine how the bitumen emulsion made its way to the surface. The ERCB cited pre-existing unground fractures or a wellbore breach as possible explanations.

In its final summary the ERCB stated “a contributing factor in the release may have been geological weaknesses in combination with stresses induced by high-pressure steam injection.”

HPCSS creates fractures in underground formations to separate bitumen from sand. An AER incident report on the current CNRL release in Cold Lake describes HPCSS as a high-pressure steam injection method that fractures the reservoir to “create cracks and openings through which the bitumen can flow back into the steam-injector wells.”

Image Credit: Emma Pullman/CNRL

http://www.desmog.ca/2013/07/29/cold-lake-spill-no-control-incident-says-energy-regulator

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