Tag Archives: alberta

How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

by rakil23 Posted on September 26, 2013

How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

By

Photograph obtained by the

Toronto Star

Oil polluting the ground at Cold Lake in Alberta.

We told you in July that tar-sands oil had been leaking into the Canadian wilderness from a drilling site for well over a month — and that nobody knew how to stanch the flow.

It would be nice to update you on how that leak was finally fixed. No such luck: The oil is still leaking.

More than 12,000 barrels of leaked bitumen has been mopped up, but at least 100 animals have died at the Canadian Natural Resources’ Primrose oil extraction site. So much bitumen has flowed into a 131-acre lake that Alberta’s environment department has ordered the company to drain it and dredge it before the waterbody freezes over. From Reuters:

The leak, one of four on the sprawling project site, sprung up from an oil sands reserve produced by a process that melts bitumen with high-pressure steam so that it can be moved and processed. The leak has yet to be stopped, and has become the latest focus for environmentalists concerned about the impact oil sands production.

“The Alberta government should, at a minimum, put a hold on approving new underground tar sands operations until we understand how these leaks are happening and if other sites could run into similar problems,” Mike Hudema, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Canada, said in a statement.

The order says the company must pump the water from the area of the lake that is in the vicinity of leak into the third of the lake where it can be contained by a road that cuts across the water body. Then the cleanup of the spill site can be completed.

The drill-happy province says the massive spill has not affected water quality in the lake. That’s wonderful news, because it means that this is a lake visited by dragon-slaying unicorns that lap up tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carrying them to another planet where they won’t do any harm. Also, magic is real.


Source
Canadian Natural told to drain Alberta lake due to oil sands leak, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

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Keystone backers hire lobbyists with ties to John Kerry

by jogakatowicefitness Posted on May 31, 2013

Keystone backers hire lobbyists with ties to John Kerry

By Lisa Hymas

State Department

Will John Kerry be swayed by former colleagues who are now pushing the Keystone pipeline?

The fight over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is getting personal — or should that be personnel?

Pipeline company TransCanada and the Canadian province of Alberta have been hiring lobbyists and consultants who previously worked with Secretary of State John Kerry, hoping they’ll help convince him that Keystone XL deserves a thumbs-up.

After the State Department finishes environmental and other reviews of the pipeline plan, Kerry will make a recommendation to President Obama about whether it should be approved. Obama will then make the final call.

From The Boston Globe:

In mid-March, about six weeks after Kerry was confirmed as secretary of state, the province of Alberta hired new consultants — some with ties to Kerry — to help them ensure the project wins approval.

They enlisted Boston-based communications and strategy firm Rasky Baerlein to “reach out and engage the US administration and key Senate and congressional committees,” according to federal records. Among those registered to lobby for the firm are Graham Shalgian, who worked on Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign; and Joe Baerlein, who has known Kerry for decades. …

The Alberta government also hired the well-connected Washington firm Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti to lobby US officials. David Castagnetti, a principal at the firm, is a longtime Kerry supporter who was the chief liaison to Congress during Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

The Financial Times reports that TransCanada and Alberta have also hired “companies staffed by former aides to President Barack Obama or to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state.”

TransCanada has already been under fire for hiring Paul Elliott, a key member of Mrs Clinton’s campaign team during her presidential run in 2008, as its chief lobbyist.

TransCanada is also poised to rehire SKD Knickerbocker, the communications company run by Anita Dunn, a former Obama adviser who worked for Mr Kerry in the late 1980s.

From Politico:

[E]nvironmental groups say they are particularly appalled by the lobbyists’ connections to Kerry.

“The most effective, tried-and-true method to sway policy decision makers is to put their former staff, advisors and/or colleagues on your payroll,” Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, told POLITICO in an email. He added, “It is money and influence-peddling that, more often than not, sets energy policy, rather than merits, science or national interest.”

But green groups are playing the game too. From The Washington Post:

Four [former Obama aides] — Bill Burton, Stephanie Cutter, Jim Papa and Paul Tewes — work as consultants for opponents of the [Keystone] project ….

Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said her group hired Burton, the former White House deputy press secretary, to highlight problems posed by Keystone XL.

Still, the playing field is far from level. Keystone opponents have nowhere near as big a lobbying and PR budget as Keystone pushers.

And it’s still too early to tell whether environmentalists’ insider trump card — Joe Biden — is an ace or a joker.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

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Keystone backers hire lobbyists with ties to John Kerry

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Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

by Felixct7yh Posted on May 22, 2013

Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

By Claire Thompson

Canada obviously has a huge stake in the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline. If President Obama fails to approve it — a decision he recently put off yet again – the Canadian oil industry will have a tough time getting its abundant tar-sands crude to seaside ports. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently came to the U.S. to make the case for the pipeline in person, as did Canada’s ministers of foreign affairs and natural resources and the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Let’s be friends!

And now our neighbor to the north is focusing its powers of persuasion directly on the American people. The country just launched a taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar marketing campaign extolling the virtues of tar-sands oil to U.S. citizens. From The Vancouver Observer:

To support the government position and its travelling ministers, Ottawa has launched a $16 million marketing campaign that includes a new website and newspaper advertisements in the US to promote Keystone KL. The thrust of the campaign is the promotion of Canada as a reliable supplier of oil and a “world environmental leader” in the field of oil and gas development.

The millions of dollars being spent on marketing efforts and road trips is unsettling to many in the scientific and environment community.

“I think it’s pretty inappropriate for government ministers to be salesmen for particular industries particularly when opinion in Canada is so divided,” Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett told The Vancouver Observer in an interview. “We cancelled regulations, we backed out of the Kyoto Protocol, we’ve had four different plans with three different (emission reduction) targets and each time they announced targets they were weaker and further off.”

The federally funded campaign comes two months after the Alberta government purchased a full-page Sunday New York Times ad promoting the pipeline as “the choice of reason.” According to The Globe and Mail, ads “targeted at lobbyists and lawmakers” appeared last Monday, May 13, on Beltway-insider sites The Hill and Politico, and are slated to run later in other influential publications.

Go With Canada, the government’s newly launched website, promotes the idea of the Keystone XL pipeline as a crucial component of the U.S.-Canada alliance. “America faces a choice,” it states. “It can import oil from Canada — a secure and environmentally responsible neighbor that is committed to North American energy independence — or it can choose less stable offshore sources with much weaker environmental standards.”

The Globe and Mail reports:

The taxpayer-funded campaign doesn’t solely focus on TransCanada’s private $5.3-billion pipeline proposal designed to link the vast oil sands reserves with massive refineries along the Gulf coast and thus provide the vital access to major markets that will, in turn, permit further oil sands development. There also is a major effort to portray Canada as a leader in curtailing greenhouse gases and environmentally responsible. Both claims are apparently intended to deflect attacks by anti-Keystone XL groups.

But some of the figures the government’s website touts to back up those claims have already been called into question, says CBC News:

The site asserts that “Innovation and research drives improvement in the oil sands — GHG emissions have dropped 26 per cent between 1990 and 2011.”

In fact, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions more than tripled between 1990 and 2011. The emissions intensity per barrel of oil fell 26 per cent.

CBC also notes that this “current promotional onslaught has been years in the making,” with meetings as far back as March 2010 between the Canadian government and oil industry to start hashing out their communications strategy.

Will the marketing money work? Obama is, after all, the one with the final say — but it looks like the Canadian government, seeing what a fractious issue the pipeline has become, is counting on the president’s tendency to take what he assumes to be the politically safe route.

But when half of Americans don’t even know what the Keystone XL pipeline is [PDF], any information campaign — for or against — has its work cut out for it.

h/t: Fiona Woo at World Future Council

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Canada’s government is spending millions to get you to like the Keystone pipeline

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Huge tar-sands waste pile grows alongside Detroit River

by Shicsshaw Posted on May 20, 2013

Huge tar-sands waste pile grows alongside Detroit River

By John Upton

Detroit’s Petroleum Coke PilesFacebook page

A gift to Detroit from Canada’s tar-sands operators.

A riverside refinery that has operated in Detroit since the 1930s began refining a new type of oil in November: tar-sands oil from Canada.

In the few short months since it began handling the Canadian oil, the refinery has already spewed out a three-story mountain of black waste covering an area the size a city block. That mountain is still growing, and it is not covered with anything to prevent tiny carbon particles from blowing over the city.

The waste can’t be legally used as fuel in the U.S. So the Koch brothers have bought up the pile and plan to sell it to be burned in poorer countries that enjoy freedom from all of America’s bothersome environmental regulations.

From The New York Times:

An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.

Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here. …

“Here’s a little bit of Alberta,” said Brian Masse, one of Windsor’s Parliament members. “For those that thought they were immune from the oil sands and the consequences of them, we’re now seeing up front and center that we’re not.” …

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth.”

The Detroit pile is ugly as hell, but state officials insist that it poses no health threats, so they’re not planning to do anything about it. From The Detroit News:

New tests by Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality have found the massive piles of petroleum coke sitting along the Detroit River do not pose a threat to human health.

The findings aren’t likely to satisfy Detroit and Windsor residents who have complained about the growing piles of petroleum coke on the U.S. side of the river that the Environmental Protection Agency determined in March were not toxic. …

For about two months, residents in Windsor and Detroit have watched with worry as mounds of the material have grown into small mountains. Before they even knew what the material was, there were concerns about its toxicity as well as its proximity to the river.

With the EPA and DEQ findings, state officials said there is little action they can take.

So here’s something else that American can look forward to if their president approves the Keystone XL pipeline, in addition to a very small handful of jobs: mountains of filthy fuel waste.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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Huge tar-sands waste pile grows alongside Detroit River

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Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

by xf0ks040u Posted on May 6, 2013

Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Christopher KolaczanTar-sands developments such as this one, in northern Alberta, could be expanded if Keystone XL is approved.

The U.S. State Department has curiously asserted that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t significantly affect the development of tar-sands fields in Alberta, Canada. But that assertion is being contradicted by a big player in the Canadian tar-sands industry.

Steve Laut, president of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., told the Toronto Globe and Mail that “we do need Keystone” to be built if the industry is to increase its oil extraction in Alberta. Here’s the quote in the context of the article:

New refinery capacity and pipeline projects coming on line will help demand and prices for Canadian bitumen in the next two years but Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. president Steve Laut says the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will eventually be essential for growth in the oil sands industry.

“Long-term, we do need Keystone to be able to grow the volumes in Canada,” Mr. Laut said in an interview following the release of his company’s first-quarter results on Friday.

Mr. Laut’s emphasis on the importance of Keystone stands in contrast to what others in the industry, as well as the U.S. State Department, have said regarding the project.

Are you listening, State Department?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

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