Keystone XL – Oh So Many Questions

In California we have experienced the debacle of passing a $10 billion ballot measure for the California bullet train network, said to cost $33 billion.  Now this has been recosted at $100 billion, since the plans had not been updated in decades.  This makes us quite suspicious of the many impacts of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline through the Midwest, from Alberta to Port Arthur in Texas, in environmental impacts and risks, profits to the US, jobs, and liability and longevity categories.  Little about these impacts has been covered by the mainstream press, and I doubt much of it is known to politicians who have made it into a political football with a time limit as short as an escrow on a single house that is already built.

Environmental impacts have been examined by environmental groups with widely different estimates of pollution and dramatic ways of presenting them from which you cannot extract real numbers.  First of all, there are at least two phases in the extraction over time.  We are in the first surface mining phase.  Yet 90% will have to be mined from underground with injections.  What are the extra greenhouse and pollution gases produced per gallon of output compared to the regular greenhouse gases from burning gas or diesel?  For extra greenhouse gas emissions in production, the conservative estimates are 5% to 17%, whereas I have seen estimates up to 75%.  How does this vary with the different phases of extraction?  How dirty is the output diesel in sulfur compounds, arsenic,  and heavy metals including mercury, and can they be removed, and at what extra cost?  Is the diesel too polluting to be used in California or elsewhere in the US?

There are many questions about the existence of a pipeline that will be a continuous structure from North to South across the entire length of the United States for probably 50 to 100 years.  Even if it is modified to skirt the Ogallala aquifer, which provides one third of the irrigated water in the United States and drinking water for 2 million people, what other sites of concern does it cross?  What happens when over the next 100 years nearby cities expand or roads have to be built over the pipeline.  Do the then very wealthy TransCanada owners have to pay for the overpasses or extra pipeline crossings, or are local cities and the US going to have to pay for all of the inconveniences of protecting and bypassing such a line across the whole country?

There are many risks to consider with the pipeline and questions of who pays for protection and accidents.  This is similar to the questions of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the US states on the Gulf of Mexico, where the driller was a foreign corporation, BP.  First, the question is what is actually going through the pipeline?  How sludgy is it?  How much is it contaminated with toxic chemicals that could erode the pipes?  How much power is needed in pumps to keep it moving, and is the power available along its route?  How short are sectors such that if their is a rupture the pipeline can be shut down with only a small amount of spill?  The pipeline will have 35 pumping stations, which averages to 50 miles between them, and could lead to disastrous spills without many extra cutoff segments.  How well is the pipeline going to be monitored to shut down immediately after a spill starts?  What happens to the pipeline if there is a local or systemwide power failure?  How close by the route is there containment equipment and how fast can it be deployed?  What about putting out fires from a leak?  What are the homeland security costs for protecting the pipeline from sabotage?  How is TransCanada set up to pay such ongoing costs?  Are the reimbursements for accidents unlimited or limited?  Is the major compensation assigned to TransCanada, so that it will make great efforts to protect against or limit accidents and provide cleanup, or is it going to be assigned to a foreign insurance company with no such protections being provided?

How does the US profit from the inconvenience and the risk of having such a pipeline permanently crossing the US?  Is the crude going to be refined in the US?  Does Texas or other nearby states collect taxes on the crude that is refined in their states?  Does the US collect taxes on refined crude as it can for crude pumped up in wells in the US?  Do all the profits just go to multinational oil companies and refiners, and how can they be taxed?  Do port fees for tanker shipments go to states or the US as well?  Why can’t the US congress vote to collect a tax for the transhipment across the country to at least cover the inconvenience and risks assumed by the US, and by the states and cities that it crosses?

Finally there are the political questions.  Run by a multinational oil company, the stock or company’s ownership may shift to those countries to whom the US has a lot of debt, such as China or Saudi Arabia, or perhaps Venezuela.  How will the politicians who insisted on this being rushed respond if and when such a shift occurs?  If there are about 200 billion barrels of oil accessible in the tar sands, at $100 per barrel this would have a gross value of   $20 trillion dollars.  Most of it will be profit, since they are currently producing it at $27 per barrel.  For environmental groups to try to stop this is like standing in front of a fast train.  One way or another it will get produced and shipped out of Canada.  The area from which the tar sands will be mined is the size of Florida, but I don’t yet know if that is the size of the surface mining.   Enridge has a proposal to pipeline it West and take it out through narrow and twisting straits of ecological value that would be a tanker disaster waiting to happen.  The tankers are now ten times the size of the Exxon Valdez.  The Keystone XL, when rerouted around the aquifers, actually appears to be the safer option.

The Keystone XL pipeline will initially only carry 900,000 barrels a day or 330 million barrels a year.  US oil usage is down now to 15 million barrels a day or about 5.5 billion barrels a year.  Eventually the Canadian tar sands could be equivalent to thirty years of US oil consumption.  Presently, the Keystone XL oil will only be 6% of US oil usage and 1% of world oil production.  Even without the additional pipeline, rail cars and existing pipelines can bring in the oil.  It probably will not significantly reduce the price of oil at its present rate of extraction.  The Natural Resource Defense Council explains that bringing the Canadian oil from the present Midwest stopping point to the Gulf refineries, which are in free trade zones, will allow the oil to be exported without paying US taxes.  A political question is whether the US Congress could or would impose a requirement that the oil be sold in the US.  With the eventual large source of Canadian oil, drilling offshore in California, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, or the West Florida coast plus the Atlantic Coast, with each area only supplying about 10 billion barrels, seems quite unnecessary, considering the environmental risks in these locations.

So many questions, so little time.

 

 

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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