More Bad News About Pipelines

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

04 February 14

ecently, arguing that pipelines are safer ways to carry oil than are trains, Ed Schultz has signed aboard with out old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel that will carry the world's dirtiest fossil fuel from the blasted environmental moonscape of northern Alberta to the refineries along the Texas Gulf coast, and thence to the world. Last week, the State Department came to the remarkable conclusion that the project would have a negligible impact on the dynamics of climate change. This made extraction fans happy, environmentalists furious, and it bumfuzzled the administration, which is still clearly playing for more time while it decides who it will eventualy piss off with its decision.

The flimsy argument advanced by the State Department has been shredded even further by a new report that you can read about in Smithsonian. The whole project is a slow-rolling ecological catastrophe from start to finish.

To this list of concerns, we can now add another. A new study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that production in the Athabasca oil sands region is leading to the emission of levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) two to three orders of magnitude higher-that's one hundred to one thousand times greater-than previously thought. These higher levels of PAHs in the area aren't imminently dangerous (they're comparable to levels found in urban areas, which result from burning gasoline in cars and trucks), but they're significantly higher than reported in mining companies' environmental impact assessments and Canada's official National Pollutant Release Inventory.

The reason we didn't know this before was because someone was discreetly moving the pea under the shells.

The problem: these environmental impact assessments, Wania and Parajulee found, only consider PAHs that are directly released into the air during the oil extraction process itself. But the process generates huge amounts of wastewater that's collected in tailing ponds, and this wastewater contains significant amounts of PAHs. Impact assessments considered these PAHs "disposed," Wania says. "But when they get mixed up with hot water, that creates ideal conditions for the PAHs to mobilize and enter the atmosphere." When he and Parajulee created a new model that included PAHs evaporating from tailing ponds in their model, they arrived at estimated levels of PAHs in the atmosphere that were much closer to what's been observed.

The whole project is simply shot through with bad faith, from the phony job estimates to the sharp practices by which people have been relieved of their property to any environmental evaluation emanating from TransCanada or any government to which it has attached itself. These apparently now include our State Department. There is no reason to trust a word coming from anyone who stands to make a dime from it.

SEE ALSO: Oil Sands Pollution Two to Three Times Higher Than Thought