A very significant statement, buried within the article below, produced for a North Dakota audience, in that is shows basically why EVERY SINGLE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT is a crock of doo-doo. Cumulative Impacts are measured, or there is nothing to look at within a report. It's really quite simple-- if the report does not factor in all the ways in which the environment is impacted by development, then you don't have an impact of development to the environment report. Everything else then, is a smoke and mirrors game.
Some of us would like to see a full shut down of tar sands and related projects. Others have different views. But let us put those differences aside and force the Canadian and US governments to carry out a full impact assessment, a cumulative impact assessment, of all the actual ways in which the environment of all of Turtle Island will be impacted-- from the destruction of caribou herds in Alaska, to the poisoning of ocean routes for whales, to the destruction of rivers in the "lower 48" and the vast acceleration of climate change the continent over.
But what is the little quote from within the article?
"The North Dakota Public Service Commission can't, by law, factor in environmental damage in Canada..."
Oh, really? Factor this...!
--M
TRANSCANADA KEYSTONE PIPELINE: Looking north
By Janell Cole, State Capitol Bureau
Published Friday, December 28, 2007
BISMARCK - The thought of digging a trench to send 590,000 barrels a day of 100-degree crude oil coursing through a pipe buried in eastern North Dakota's subsoil has some in this state worried about environmental damage.
But the lands where the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline contents will originate already are more ravaged than the amount of potential harm to cropland, waterways and trees between Walhalla and Cogswell, N.D.
Some opponents of the Keystone route through North Dakota cite the controversial extraction process in northern Alberta as a reason to discourage bringing the 30-inch line through on its way to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma.
The North Dakota Public Service Commission must decide in the coming weeks if it will grant TransCanada a route permit.
Landowners in opposition
One such opponent is Janie Capp, a Lankin, N.D., landowner. The Keystone route, set for construction next summer, runs through her and husband John's farm.
“I don't care if it's the damage that this will do (to her land or in Alberta), it should not even be built,” she said. “We don't need the oil that bad.”
Among other things, Capp fears groundwater contamination in case of a leak.
Tar sandsOil for the Keystone line will come from vast tar sands fields northeast of Edmonton, Alta., where extraction and processing is putting out a million barrels of oil per day. One oil partnership announced this month that it could be producing another million barrels a day within a few years and that tar sand oil production could reach 3 million barrels per day by 2015.
Compare that with North Dakota's oil production: As of October, 129,000 barrels per day were being pumped out of the ground, and the highest production ever was about 150,000 barrels per day in the mid-1980s.
Canada's vast oil reserves
Counting both conventional oil and the tar sands - also called oil sands - Canada has the second largest petroleum reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia, and now is the U.S.'s No. 1 source of imported oil. More Canadian oil flows into this country than from all Persian Gulf countries combined.
North Dakotans haven't heard much about Alberta tar sands until a few years ago because it wasn't economical to extract and wasn't recognized as an oil reserve. But in 2003, the U.S. Energy Department decided to count it, and when oil crept to $75 a barrel and beyond, development exploded.
The unique industry extracts a huge price from the Albertan landscape and ecosystem, and conflates global greenhouse gas levels.
Tar sand is dug in huge open-pit mines. Before mines are dug, the overlying boreal forest is clear cut, rivers and streams are diverted, wetlands are drained and wildlife chased out. The small amount of crude bitumen (tar) - has to be wrung from the sand, clay and water it permeates. About 10 percent of each scoop of sand is bitumen.
Where oil sand is too deep for mining, bitumen is extracted using steam wells. Steam heated by natural gas is injected into the ground to heat the bitumen, so it flows into extraction pipes.
A half-dozen or more opposing groups argue that all this simply isn't worth the fuel produced, and that Canadian and provincial governments are mistaken in letting expansion run wild.
“Last year, we had three major hearings (on tar sand development) and the federal government didn't even show up,” said Pembina Institute's Simon Dyer.
When the Canadian environment minister went to Bonn last year to announce the country would cut greenhouse gas emissions with a “made in Canada plan, emphasizing new technologies” instead of keeping its Kyoto pledge, one Edmonton environmental group responded with a broadside.
“It's more like a policy made in corporate boardrooms in Calgary and Houston to divert attention from the gassy elephant sitting in the living room - Alberta's tar sands,” wrote the Parkland Institute's leadership.
A high price in Alberta
According to opponents like the Pembina Institute, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Edmonton-based Parkland Institute:
-- Four tons of soil is dug for each barrel of bitumen recovered.
-- Tar sand production is the largest contributor to Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and Alberta, with a population one-fourth the size of Ontario, now emits more greenhouse gases than its larger counterpart, which is Canada's most populous province.
-- The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is used to produce three barrels of oil from the sands. Most involves burning natural gas. One Alberta politician has quipped, “Injecting natural gas into the oil sands to produce oil is like turning gold into lead.”
-- Six barrels of toxic tailings are produced for each barrel of bitumen extracted, and they now molder in huge wastewater reservoirs. Scarecrows and noise cannons keep migratory birds from landing in the poisonous slough.
-- Once the thick tar-like bitumen is refined from the sand-clay-water mixture, it needs further processing to become synthetic crude oil. The amount of natural gas burned doing this means a barrel of synthetic crude oil releases up to three times more greenhouse gas than conventional oil.
-- Expansion plans will require 741,300 acres of Alberta's boreal forest be cleared. The remaining 3.4 million acres will be marred by a hopscotch network of steam well pads, roads, pipelines and other infrastructure. Even Environment Canada, though it won't put brakes on the oil sands rush, has said the plans mean “staggering challenges for forest conservation and reclamation.”
-- Oil sand mining uses 2 to 4.5 barrels of fresh water for every barrel of oil produced, most of it from the Athabasca River. Some is reused, but groups argue the amount used is not sustainable.
-- Reclamation badly lags development. Forty years after the first major developer, Suncor, started up near Fort McMurray, only 9 percent of the land it's mined is reclaimed and not a single tract is certified by the Alberta government as fully reclaimed.
Industry eyes better practices
The North Dakota Public Service Commission can't, by law, factor in environmental damage in Canada when it decides whether to grant a route permit for Keystone, but that doesn't mean the commissioners are blind to it.
“I know a lot of natural gas is used for preparing it for transportation, and some people have expressed concern for the use of natural gas, which is, in itself, a precious commodity,” said Commissioner Kevin Cramer. But, in the U.S.'s current predicament, it's a choice of importing from a friendly nation like Canada or from a volatile region like the Persian Gulf, he said.
Suncor spokesman Brad Bellows said new technologies in the oil sand industry are making the processes more efficient all the time.
“Since 1990, we've cut our greenhouse gases per barrel by half,” he said.
But while efficiency is growing, the fourfold expansion of production has overtaken efforts to reduce total emissions, he said.
The company and industry want to reduce the amount of natural gas it burns because of the cost it adds to production.
“Nobody's more interested in reducing the amount of energy we use than we are,” Bellows said.
TransCanada spokesman Jeff Rauh says oil sands environmental problems, while not inconsequential, don't factor into its business.
“There is lots of interest in building (pipeline) capacity from Canada to the U.S.,” he said. “What Keystone is responding to is the strong demand for petroleum in the U.S. Do we meet that demand or do we not meet that demand?”
Rauh said the company envisions eventually placing more than one pipe in the North Dakota route corridor, though it will have to repeat the process of buying easements and seeking government permits.
One line is bad enough, according to Capp and some other landowners along the route. They believe, based on reading and photos of other land overlying oil pipelines, that warm oil flowing under crops will ruin them or hurt yields, even though the line will be at least 48 inches below the surface.
Oil temperatures in the Keystone line as it passes through North Dakota will range from about 80 degrees in winter to 100 to 102 degrees in summer, Rauh said. He said there is no evidence that crops are affected.
Capp isn't convinced.
“It is true you will not get a decent crop,” she said.
http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=61919§ion=news...
