Environmentalists are thankful for the delayed
Keystone XL decision, but the battle to stop more tar sand crude from coming south is not over. Production of bitumen at the northern Alberta site is backing up due to tight pipeline capacity. Syncrude Canada, Ltd. produces 350,000 barrels a day, but has had to delay shipments due to lack of space. Kinder Morgan's 300,000bpd Trans Mountain pipeline was oversubscribed by 24% in December 2010. Consequently the search is on for alternative routes to refineries. The state of Nebraska will finance a supplemental environmental impact study of an alternate route through the state for Keystone XL, bypassing the Sandhills. Many of the objections to the original route that crosses the critical Ogallala aquifer came from politically connected Nebraskan ranchers who are not categorically opposed to the pipeline. The first Keystone pipeline already crosses the state, and it began carrying tar sand last year. In a state with a declining population, the prospect of an extra 150 million a year in property taxes paid by TransCanada Corp. is hard for impoverished local governments to resist. The US State Department has said that the supplemental study is necessary before it can make the "national interest" determination, perhaps signaling that an alternate route which avoids the acquirer may be sufficient for a second term administration to make a positive finding.
Despite the setback to the XL, Canadian firms are actively looking for ways to flow tar sand oil south in greater quantities. Recently Canadians bought up thousands of miles of existing pipelines in the Midwest to accommodate the large amount of product coming from the strip mining operation in Alberta. It is considered an interim workaround solution, with not enough capacity to carry future production. An alternative solution to the US midwest route is to carry the bitumen westward over the Rockies to Canada's Pacific coast where it could be transshipped to California refineries which have spare capacity and have been recently upgraded to handle heavier (dirtier) crude oil. Sources of crude from Alaska and within the state are dwindling. The western route involves two pipelines, expanding the existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain and the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway. Either way, the ultimate consumer is the Chinese dragon that has an increasing appetite for oil. Because of the intense energy required to process bitumen into fuel, it has a carbon footprint of 10-20% larger than light oil, so bitumen as a fuel is not congruent with California's plan for a green energy future.
There are objections to the Pacific route too. The possibility of increased oil tanker traffic at Vancouver, British Columbia already has local environmentalists alarmed and their cell phones sounding off. The Wilderness Committee based in Vancouver is providing oil tanker alerts to cell phone users. The service alerts when a tanker is preparing to fill up at Kinder Morgan's Westbridge terminal to the Trans Mountain pipeline system. According to the Wilderness Committee the alerts are intended to make residents aware of the risks of an oil spill and climate change due to expansion of oil exports. Tanker traffic could increase from two a week to nearly one tanker a day in 2016 if Kinder Morgan is allowed to expand its pipeline. Kinder Morgan has plans to dredge the Second Narrows channel to allow access by super tankers that can carry one million barrels of crude oil, four times what was spilled by the drunken captain of the
Exxon Valdez. Canadian environmentalists say they are determined to prevent the B.C. coast from becoming another Gulf Coast.
The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is even more problematic for environmentalists. Enbridge's plan is to send as many as 220 super tankers a year through the narrow, serpentine passages of the Great Bear Rainforest, North America's largest temperate rainforest. The Northern Gateway would stretch 700 miles from northern Alberta over the Rockies to the port of Kitimat. From there there the dirty crude would be shipped south to California.
NRDC says the plan is "one of the most reckless and potentially catastrophic proposals" ever considered. Clear cutting would be required to create a right of way and it would cross thousands of salmon steams and the headwaters of major rivers like the Fraser. The sea passages involved are even more difficult to navigate than Prince William Sound. The British Columbia coast is no stranger to environmental protests. It was the locus for protracted disputes over industrial logging. Conservationists succeeded in protecting more than five million acres of rainforest with a landmark agreement between the British Columbia government and First Nations in 2006. The white variant brown bear or "spirit bear"
[photo] was adopted as the campaign's symbol. Already more than 70 First Nations along the proposed pipeline and tanker route have indicated their opposition to the plan, and so another fight begins.
