Rain doesn't halt BP protest
By Erik Potter
(Chicago) Post-Tribune
April 21, 2008
Mother Earth was feeling a little crabby on Saturday's Earth Day activities in Whiting.
Rain pounded the area all day, but subsided long enough for the group of area residents and environmentalists to hold an outdoors rally at Whiting's Whihala County Park.
The group was protesting the $3.8 billion expansion of the BP's Whiting Refinery facility, which will allow it to process crude oil extracted from Canadian tar sand.
Air emissions from refining the tar sand oil are expected to contain increased amount of various pollutants versus traditional crude oil, while maintaining a decrease in emissions overall.
"That's why this is a community issue," said Ruth Breech, program director for Global Community Monitor, a California-based organization that assists communities fighting for greater environmental protection.
Scott Dean, spokesman for BP, said that while the expansion will result in "very small" increases in the sulfur dioxide, particulates and lead, the overall impact of the project will be positive.
"When this project is completed in 2011, we will have reduced emissions by 75 percent over a 10-year period," Dean said.
Because of new pollution control measures the plant has and will install, Dean said, "The air around the (Whiting) plant continues to get cleaner and cleaner."
That vision could not contrast more sharply with the picture painted by Macdonald Stainsby, who told the small crowd that the oil sand project "is taking us somewhere near the end of the world."
Stainsby, of Oil Sands Truth, and who lives in Alberta, Canada, claimed the tar sand mining and refining will be the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Mary Skida, a Whiting resident who attended the rally, said she opposes the BP project because she thinks the company could reduce all of its emissions, including particulates, lead and sulfur dioxide.
"It just really bothers me," she said.
