As The Keystone Pipeline Inches Closer, Look At The Destructive Legacy Of Tar Sands Oil
A bird’s-eye view of the post-apocalyptic landscape that we’ve already created.
By Adele Peters, November 24, 2014
Strips mines cover an area of forest seven times larger than Manhattan. Uncovered rail cars Loading Petroleum Coke, a byproduct of tar sands refining, Pine Bend Refinery, Rosemont, MN
By a single vote, the U.S. Senate failed to fast-track the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, which would carry Canadian tar sands oil straight across the nation to the Gulf of Mexico. Lawmakers are expected to approve it in January, however, and President Obama may or may not let it squeak through.
A new photo series traces the path of the proposed pipeline, from the tar sands in Alberta to massive refineries in Texas. The photos make something clear: With or without the pipeline, huge amounts of tar sands oil are already being extracted and flowing into the U.S. Over the last four years, the amount of Canadian crude sent to Texas has increased by 83%.
Photographer Alex MacLean first flew over Alberta last winter, taking shots of a post-apocalyptic landscape that are hard to capture from the ground.
Meandering Channel of Wastewater, Suncor Mine, Alberta, Canada
Strip mines cover an area of forest seven times larger than Manhattan. Since most of the tar sands are buried deep underground, and the molasses-like bitumen is too thick to extract on its own, the oil companies have also built enormous boilers to liquefy the sludge.
“Looking at the pictures of the huge furnaces they have to use in the wells, you can see how much energy this takes to extract,” says MacLean. “If you’re driving around with this fuel, it’s 17% to 20% more carbon intense than regular gas.”
The Alberta Clipper line ships 450,000 barrels of oil to Wisconsin every day. One branch splits off to Detroit, where a refinery caused a three-day long oil spill in a river in 2010.
Steam and smoke rise from upgrading facility at Syncrude Mildred Lake Mine, Alberta, Canada
“That was a billion-dollar cleanup,” says MacLean. “It was totally overshadowed—they call it the oil spill no one ever heard of, because it happened almost simultaneously with the BP spill in the Gulf.”
Enbridge, the company responsible for that spill, managed to avoid a lengthy approval process to increase its capacity; by next year, it expects to ship 800,000 barrels of oil per day. Unlike the well-publicized Keystone project, it didn’t need a new permit, but instead connected two parallel pipelines running along the border. MacLean’s photos show new lines under construction.
In the Gulf, the photos show the refineries that Keystone may eventually connect to Alberta.
“The size of the capital investment is just staggering—hundreds of billions of dollars of refining infrastructure along the coast,” MacLean says. “It’s just incredible amounts of money. You realize that the pipeline, which is around $4 billion, is just small change in the scheme of things. They can spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to get the pipeline through.”
MacLean hopes the photos help us better understand the impact of a possible approval.
“I think if we’re really going to seriously mitigate climate change, we really need to start now and not put in infrastructure that’s going to last 30 years,” he says. “We’d be saddled with these type of investments, when we’d be better off putting both our know-how and our money towards more sustainable resources.”
[By Adele Peters. Adele Peters is a writer who focuses on sustainability and design and lives in Oakland, California. She’s worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley. All photos: Alex MacLean]
U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming
By JUSTIN GILLIS, NOV. 2, 2014
Machines digging for brown coal in front of a power plant near Grevenbroich, Germany, in April. Credit Martin Meissner/Associated Press
COPENHAGEN — The gathering risks of climate change are so profound that they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.
Despite growing efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the global situation is becoming more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.
Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.
“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report found.
In the starkest language it has ever used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any serious policy to limit global warming.
Doing so would require leaving the vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground or, alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting from their use, the group said.
If governments are to meet their own stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, the panel said. At current growth rates, that budget is likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years, possibly less.
Yet energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies continue to build coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are spending another $600 billion or so directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels.
By contrast, the report found, less than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or otherwise cope with climate change. That is a small fraction of the revenue spent on fossil fuels — it is less, for example, than the revenue of a single American oil company, ExxonMobil.
The new report comes just a month before international delegates convene in Lima, Peru, to devise a new global agreement to limit emissions, and it makes clear the urgency of their task.
Appearing Sunday morning at a news conference in Copenhagen to unveil the report, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed for strong action in Lima.
“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban said. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”
Yet there has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would confront the problem head-on, but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until 2020.
“If they choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain who helped write the new report. “They might as well not bother to turn up for these meetings.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential solutions. The group, along with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.
The new report is a 175-page synopsis of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past year. It is the final step in a five-year effort by the body to analyze a vast archive of published climate research.
It is the fifth such report from the group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming and that human activities are the primary cause.
“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report said.
A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant threat, but is being felt all over the world. “It’s here and now,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something in the future.”
The group cited mass die-offs of forests, such as those killed by heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.
The report contained the group’s most explicit warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continued unchecked.
A related finding is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened to a degree.
In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, with the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, calling it “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively in order to stem climate change and avoid its worst impacts.”
The administration is pushing for new limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in Congress and some states.
Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.
If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over the coming decades, severe effects would be avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think likely, he said.
“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”
Nebraska has emerged as ground zero in oil transport showdown
September 21, 2014, By Russell Hubbard
SARAH HOFFMAN/THE WORLD-HERALD | Oakland, Nebraska, and the tracks that carry trains through town have been together for more than 100 years. But trains hauling crude oil in tanker cars through Oakland and other parts of the state are a recent development, and concerns about safety grow. Oil pipelines such as the proposed Keystone XL have their opponents as well.
OAKLAND, Neb. — If you visit here and turn off Oakland Avenue toward the railroad tracks, you just might find Brendan Murray prowling up and down the street, cataloging the cracks in the pavement and the scars on the buildings.
SARAH HOFFMAN/THE WORLD-HERALD | Brendan Murray holds a piece of a building that fell near the tracks. He often walks Oakland Avenue cataloging cracks in the pavement and on buildings that he suspects are caused by vibrations from oil trains.
The owner of an apartment building facing the railroad tracks says problems with his 100-year-old structure accelerated with the massive increase in BNSF Railway trains hauling crude oil in tanker cars. Murray also says a derailment and crude oil fire would be deadly for Oakland, population 1,244.
“Keep it underground,” Murray says, referring to transporting crude by pipeline.
Not so fast, says Jane Kleeb. She is not a fan of crude trains either, but she is also the director of Bold Nebraska, the group opposed to construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. It would bring 1 million barrels of crude oil per day across the state.
Kleeb said her group doesn’t expect the world economy to forgo fossil fuels and survive on renewables right now. But she said the pipeline proposed to transport northern crudes to refineries presents too much environmental risk.
“Accidents are going to happen and it is Nebraska that is going to wind up paying for it,” Kleeb said.
All of which leaves a rather obvious question: If neither by train nor pipeline, just how is oil supposed to get from where it is produced to where it is refined into fuels and other materials that power the U.S. economy?
With its main modes of transport assaulted on all sides, the petroleum industry faces a major showdown, and Nebraska is shaping up to be ground zero.
Central to both major U.S. railroads hauling crude oil — Union Pacific is based in Omaha and BNSF’s parent company is based here — the Cornhusker State is also the terminus of the existing Keystone pipeline and is the proposed ending point for the much-debated and delayed Keystone XL.
“Some of the people who don’t want us to transport oil don’t want us to use oil,” said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, a group funded by oil companies. “We need to do a better job about telling our story, but we also need to be honest about the realities of energy.”
The United States last year consumed 6.89 billion barrels of petroleum products, producing 2.7 billion barrels itself, making it the global leader. Oil is everywhere — about 71 percent goes for gasoline and other fuels. Other common uses are rubber, fabrics and solvents.
There are no current replacements for oil, Felmy said, calling renewable energies promising and worthy of development but not an immediate substitute. And “choking off the supply points and the transport links would have serious implications for the economy,” Felmy said.
One of those transport links runs through Oakland. The rear of the buildings along Oakland Avenue, 20 or so brick and masonry two- and three-floor structures, face the north-south railroad tracks operated by BNSF Railway, the employer of 5,000 people in Nebraska that is owned by Omaha’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The closest buildings, such as Murray’s 12-unit apartment building, are about 45 yards away.
The tracks and the town in Burt County have been together for more than 100 years. But the oil trains are a recent development. Oil shipments from North Dakota’s recently tapped shale formations first hit 800,000 barrels a day late last year, up from fewer than 100,000 barrels a day in 2010.
BNSF is by far the largest carrier, its oil trains entering Nebraska at South Sioux City from routes in Iowa. Oil has been a growth business for BNSF: Volumes from shale formations such as those in North Dakota have risen to 620,000 barrels per day last year, from 59,000 barrels per day in 2010.
Transporting crude has been a huge boost for BNSF, bought for $26 billion in 2009 by Omaha’s Berkshire Hathaway. BNSF operating revenue, the main financial metric by which railroads are gauged, has risen almost 60 percent since 2009, to about $22 billion last year from $14 billion.
“You can feel the ground surging when they come through now,” said the 72-year-old Murray, a graduate of Omaha’s Benson High School who later owned a general contracting company. “It’s just that the railroad has always been here and people don’t pay it much attention anymore.”
A tour of Murray’s street reveals a collapsed brick wall, lots of hairline cracks and loose masonry. Murray acknowledges that most of the buildings are 100 years old or older, and that he can’t prove the cause. But he said he suspects the culprits are the heavy liquid cargo and the increased frequency of trains passing by because of sharply higher crude shipments.
BNSF says: Nonsense. “We know of no mandated statutes requiring maximum or minimum weights for trains, although there are different weight rails according to the type, size and speed of trains,” said BNSF spokeswoman Roxanne Butler.
The railroads say oil by rail, while the subject of much debate, is quite safe.
In 2012, according to the Association of American Railroads, the incident rate for release of hazardous materials from rail cars was 0.013 per thousand carloads, down from 0.14 in 1980. That means, the association says, that 99.99 percent of hazardous rail cargo shipments are incident-free.
It is a highly regulated industry. Federal regulators set the standards for hauling crude and other hazardous materials, from the route selection and track inspections to train speeds and personnel training, the railroad association says.
“According to the Federal Railroad Administration, 2013 was the safest year in history for the rail industry,” said BNSF’s Butler. “In 2013, BNSF experienced the fewest number of mainline derailments in its history. Rail is the safest mode of land transportation for freight in general and is one of the safest ways to transport crude oil and hazardous materials.”
Butler said BNSF considers all accidents preventable, and is spending $5 billion this year on capital improvements. The Fort Worth, Texas-based company, about tied with Union Pacific as largest U.S. railroad in 2013 operating revenue, also inspects track more frequently than required by regulators, Butler said.
Union Pacific is spending $4.1 billion on capital improvements this year, much of that related to track safety.
U.P. Chief Executive Jack Koraleski said the industry also is working with the Department of Transportation to make existing crude tank cars safer, and to develop a new and stronger one.
There has never been a fatal U.S. oil-train incident, though 47 people were killed last year when one derailed and blew up in Quebec, Canada.
Koraleski, whose company employs about 8,000 people in Nebraska, said the probabilities of such accidents are small and the trade-offs worth it.
“We have been hauling crude by rail for a long time,” said Koraleski, whose oil shipments rose 20 percent last year. “If the pipelines don’t, and the railroads don’t, the alternatives are fully negative for the U.S. economy.”
As for the Keystone XL pipeline proposed by pipeline operator TransCanada, it is on hold pending permit approval by President Barack Obama.
It should not be approved, said Kleeb, the director of Bold Nebraska. She said the pipeline endangers the Ogallala Aquifer and only encourages oil companies to spend additional money chasing harder-to-get deposits, such as shale formations in the northern United States and southern Canada. Those require rocks underground to be broken up under high pressure to release the petroleum.
Kleeb says she and her group are not against fossil fuels, acknowledging that it would be impractical to go 100 percent renewable immediately. She also said ceasing production from hard-to-get deposits in North Dakota’s Bakken region isn’t going to send the economy into a malaise. The Bakken produces about a million barrels a day out of the 19 million consumed each day in the country.
“What we need to do is slow down,” Kleeb said. “The oil isn’t going anywhere. You can make all the money you need to make.”
Mark Johnson, the Nebraska spokesman for TransCanada, said pipelines are the most efficient method of transporting oil between distant points, passing along the lowest costs to consumers.
“The bottom line is that the United States needs oil and it is going to get to market one way or another,” Johnson said.
The Keystone pipeline, now about four years old, runs from the southern Canadian province of Alberta and terminates in southern Nebraska at Steele City, the proposed endpoint for the Keystone XL.
Johnson said danger to the Ogallala is low, with nature having provided the aquifer with a deep and effective filtering system of sand and rock. Pipelines and oil wells already dot the Ogallala landscape, Johnson said, and the existing Keystone pipeline has operated without serious incident.
Like oil-train accidents, pipeline incidents tend to be attention-grabbing, such as the one in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2010, when an oil pipeline broke and spilled almost 1 million gallons. Cleanup costs have approached $1 billion.
From 1994 through 2013, there were 2,715 significant pipeline incidents, according to the federal Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. That is an average of 136 a year, defined as causing death or hospitalization, incurring costs of more than $50,000, or erupting in fire or explosion. The incidents have caused 40 deaths and 132 injuries.
Joseph Schwieterman, a professor at Chicago’s DePaul University specializing in transportation, said perfect safety in the U.S. economy’s supply chain — train or pipeline or any other mode — is an unreasonable expectation.
“The accidents that happen are headline makers, but the risks are manageable,” he said. “The hype is out of proportion.”
Schwieterman also said there is a generational component to opinions on oil production and the transportation of its products.
“Oil invokes a negative, visceral reaction among young people,” Schwieterman said, acknowledging that high-profile troubles such as the 2010 BP Gulf Coast oil rig blowout has had the same effect on some people as the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989.
“People tend to forget about the value of energy independence,” he said, “and that such independence will come at a certain price.”
The Omaha World-Herald Co. is owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Repost from Reuters [Editor: The bill is AB380. For text, analysis and votes on the bill, see leginfo.ca.gov. – RS]
Oil train regulation passes in California
By Jennifer Chaussee, Aug 29, 2014
(Reuters) – California lawmakers on Friday passed legislation requiring railroad companies to tell emergency officials when crude oil trains will chug through the state.
The bill would require railroads to notify the state’s Office of Emergency Services when trains carrying crude oil from Canada and North Dakota are headed to refineries in the most populous U.S. state.
It passed its final vote in the Assembly 61-1, with strong bipartisan support within the state legislature in Sacramento. The bill now goes to Democratic Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.
“We have a spotlight on this issue because of the seriousness of the risk to public safety that it presents,” said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, whose district encompasses parts of Sacramento along the trains’ route.
The legislation follows a disastrous oil train derailment in Canada that killed 47 people and spilled 1.6 million gallons of crude last year.
Worried that a similar spill could happen in California, firefighters and other safety officials have urged state lawmakers to increase safety regulations on oil trains and improve communication between railroads and first responders about when oil shipments are coming through.
President Barack Obama proposed new safety requirements last month that could lower speed limits for trains carrying oil and increase safety standards for oil tank cars.
The volume of oil shipped by train through California has increased dramatically in recent years, public safety experts told a legislative committee at a hearing in June.
The influx has been propelled by increased production in Western Canada and North Dakota without an accompanying boost in pipeline capacity.
Oil and rail industry representatives told lawmakers that they had already done much to improve safety. BNSF Railway lobbyist Juan Acosta testified that the company had agreed to slow its oil trains to 40 mph and increase inspections of its tracks.
Railroads are not currently required to proactively share their oil train schedules with first responders.
(additional reporting by Aaron Mendelson in Sacramento; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Simon Cameron-Moore)
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