A few weeks ago President Obama announced he would delay a final decision on the Keystone pipeline for one year. Now in a cynical political move Republicans are attempting to attach Keystone to the President’s jobs bill. This is a terrible plan and should be scrapped. Not only would the building of the pipeline itself cut a swath across six states, cross major rivers and threaten critical drinking and agricultural water sources, it says nothing of the oil it would transport.
Of course major oil companies and construction conglomerates such as Bechtel think it’s a great idea. It could certainly be argued that the enormous pipeline project would create jobs, but a deeper investigation would reveal the trade off would simply not be worth the ultimate price. Keystone would transport oil produced from Canada’s tar sands and while I’m certainly not opposed to some of the benefits of reducing our dependence on oil from the middle east, this is not the kind of oil we need to be producing.
I visited the Athabasca Valley region in Alberta, where the major tar sands production takes place, three years ago on an editorial assignment for Bloomberg Markets Magazine and what I witnessed shocked me. This is a near zero gain, environmentally devastating process. Let me explain.
The first step is the virgin boreal forest must be clearcut. The land is then strip mined for the sand which has oil embedded in it. Trucks transport the sand to processing facilites where the oil is extracted essentially by super heating with steam. It requires massive amounts of fresh water taken from the Athabasca River only a tiny fraction of which is clean enough to return. The toxic water left behind, some 90+% is then pumped into massive tailing ponds, some of the largest structures ever built by humans, currently covering 50 sq miles and easily visible from space. These massive toxic lakes of tailings are deadly to migratory waterfowl, killing thousands annually.
As if this weren’t enough the process produces three times the carbon emissions of normal oil extraction. The natural gas used to process tar sands in one day could heat 3 million homes. Considered too expensive previously oil produced from tar sand has only in recent years become feasible, due to high worldwide oil prices. I won’t venture what role our middle east wars have played in raising the price of oil but the connection seems obvious.
Coming from someone who drives a car, rides motorcycles and takes an occasional airplane, all this criticism might sound hypocritical. But building the Keystone pipeline will hand oil companies an incentive to expand production of this dirty oil, further increasing carbon emissions, keeping oil prices inflated and doing nothing to solve our dependence on oil. Our entire economy may be based on petroleum consumption but we’ve got to find a better way than this.
For more reading, John Lippert’s excellent story in Bloomberg can be found here: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0308_story1.html
National Geographic has another excellent story here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text/1
