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Lawsuit Filed to Block Pipeline Project
Less than two weeks after the State Department gave the go-ahead for a major new 36-inch diameter pipeline to carry Alberta oil sands crude into the United States, a network of environmental and Native American groups filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco court on Thursday, accusing President Barack Obama's administration of significantly accelerating the importation of "dirty oil" from Alberta.
(flickr photo by someones.life) "This seems to be a step backwards," said Sarah Burt, an attorney
for Oakland-based Earthjustice, one of the groups named in the suit.
Citing the administration's push to promote clean energy and reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, Ms. Burt said the new pipeline infrastructure
will "lock in" American consumption of bitumen for another fifty years.
In 2006, the United States imported 1.6 billion barrels of Canadian crude, not all of which is bitumen from Alberta. The supply of bitumen has been limited by a shortage of specialized refining and pipeline capacity on either side of the border.
The Alberta Clipper project, from the pipeline giant Enbridge, Ms. Burt said, will stoke demand and thus push up the heavy emission levels associated with oil sands mining and processing.
The coalition's lawyers argue that by granting the permit, the American government breached the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to "take a hard look" at the Alberta Clipper's purpose or to comprehensively assess a related project's environmental impact, especially in terms of air and water pollution in the Midwest.
The Enbridge pipeline will be twinned with a north-bound line known as Southern Lights, carrying diluents up to Alberta refineries to help refine the bitumen.
The groups also state that the $8 billion project will inflict short and long-term damage on forests, wetlands and water bodies in the path of the pipeline.
With a daily capacity of 450,000 barrels of bitumen, the Alberta Clipper will extend over 990 miles between Hardisty, Alberta, to a terminal in Superior, Wisconsin, where it joins a pipeline to Chicago. The Southern Lights pipeline will travel about 700 miles north from Illinois, where it will join with another line heading to Alberta.
News of the suit comes on the same day as construction crews broke ground on the first leg of the Clipper project, near Duluth, Minnesota.
"More than 3,000 construction workers, many of them skilled union tradesmen, will be on the job over the next year, including welders making more than 40,000 pipe connections," reported the Duluth News Tribune notes on Thursday.
"The new Minnesota Twins stadium, by comparison," the article added, "had about the same number of workers but is about one-third the cost of the pipeline."- Posted in
7 Comments so far
Show AllHow did the plan for this pipeline from Alaska to the heartland of America just happen to pass through the "Tar Sands" of Canada?
Could it be that the use of natural gas to heat the petroleum to release it from the sand could possibly be the reason? If so what a waste of clean energy (natural gas) to process dirty oil, at the cost of the very environment we are attempting to save!
While on a recent visit to see the folks in Alberta, I read of a new technology developed by the Alberta Government to extract oil from the tar sands.
Currently there are two main methods.
One is that which we are all familiar with. Huge machines strip away what they call "Overburden" which are trees, Muskegs grasses and the like to get at the tar sands underneath. These tarsands are scooped up from the ground and loaded on huge trucks which take the tar sands to the processing plant where, with copious use of fresh water and natural gas the sand is seperated from the Oil leaving the heavy bitumen which can now be pumped via a pipeline to a refinery.
A second method is called in-situ. This involves using a large amount of natural Gas and water in order to inject steam down below. The steam allows the oil to seperate from the sand to the point where it can be pumped up to a collector station. While it not the eye sore the former method is it still energy/water intensive.
These methods combined will get 20 percent of the Oil that is mixed in with the sands.
To the third method.
A small amount of steam injected below. This is followed up by injecting highly compressed air. This causes the tar sands beneath to start burning via spontaneous combustion. The heat generated is enough to seperate the oil from the sand alowing it to be gathered up via more traditional methods (Pipes with holes punctured into them are inserted and natural capillary action then sucks up the oil). This method will extract 80 percent of all oil . This latter method uses very little water and very little natural gas.
If these lawsuits force the Alberta Government to at least consider using these latest technologies wherein no new plants using older methods allowed to be built then they will have achieved a considerable victory for the enviroment.
Now convince the Chinese to Method Three.
The Chinese recently bought two major players in the Tar sands area one of which employs a variant method of insitu.
But what happens, ultimately to the "products of combustion"? It's cheaper and "on the surface" more friendly, but so was oil, years ago.
It costs more energy to produce and transport tar sand fuel than contained in the end product. The only reason is to have a liquid to support the auto system. We need free public transit.
http://freepublictransit.org
Worse than any drug addiction! Give it up, USA! Get serious and start weaning away from something that will not be around much longer - no matter how many countries you attack in the name of "bringing democracy", i.e. stealing natural resources.