"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said in a statement. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."
--Barack Obama, as reported by Darren Goode in Politico.
Some time ago, TransCanada proposed to build a 1,700 mile pipeline for transporting Alberta tar sands crude southward into the U.S., from the Canadian border down to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. They called this project the Keystone XL and applied to the U.S. State Department for the necessary permit to approve construction across the border between the U.S. and Canada. Last month, President Obama denied TransCanada's permit request, agreeing with the State Department's conclusion that the project would not "serve the national interest." In reaching this decision, the President declined to address the elephant in the room - development of the Canadian tar sands play requires a method of extraction that unduly depletes our remaining natural capital, burdening future generations with the likelihood of ecological poverty. Rather than send a clear signal that such a program of resource development is incompatible with the public interest, President Obama blamed the decision on Republicans in Congress and offered to consider a revised application from TransCanada, if it would alter its planned route.* This was not a bold act of decisive leadership, it was a punt.
(*As originally planned, the Keystone XL pipeline would have traversed the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies eight central U.S. states and supplies drinking water to the region. Given the risk of spills associated with oil pipelines such as Keystone XL, the Ogallala Aquifer was thus threatened with potential contamination by the original pipeline route.)
As described by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, tar sands “are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous oil.” The mining process involves both extraction and separation operations – in order to separate out the bitumen, which is processed into synthetic crude oil. Using current processes, two tons of tar sands yield one barrel of oil; in addition, extraction methods can require large amounts of both energy and water. Presently, the only large-scale commercial tar sands extraction industry is in Alberta, Canada.
In a lawsuit brought to enjoin construction of a similar Canadian tar sands pipeline into the U.S. – the Alberta Clipper pipeline – the Sierra Club noted that:
“[T]ar sands extraction operations [in Alberta] require large quantities of water and...draw down surface water flow, adversely impacting stream habitat for migratory fish and other species dependent on local water resources. Drilling one well consumes 5.5 acre-feet of water each year, and the production of one gallon of oil requires 35 gallons of water. Water used in tar sands processing is discharged into toxic tailings ponds so large that they are visible from space. In May 2008 over 500 migratory birds dies in a single incident after landing on a tailings pond.”*
The Sierra Club further observed that “NEPA** directs federal decision-makers to ‘recognize the worldwide and long-range character of environmental problems.” A report issued by the Waters Matter Society of Alberta describes in detail many of the environmental problems associated with tar sands extraction in Canada. According to the report, as of June 2008, “720 million cubic meters of toxic water were contained in tailing ponds covering 130 square kilometers,” producing 200 million liters of contaminated water each day. The wastewater contained in the tailing ponds is so toxic that it cannot be re-introduced into the aquatic environment. Even so, tailing ponds do seep toxins into groundwater and surface water – amounting to 11 million liters of contaminated water per day, based on industry data. In addition, tar sands mining operations are permitted to divert 445 million cubic meters of water per year from the Athabasca River – “roughly the annual water needs for a city of three million people.” There are also concerns that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides emitted by tar sands mining operations could lead to increased acid rainfall and acidification of lakes in Northern Saskatchewan.
(*See Sierra Club v. Clinton)
(**The National Environmental Policy Act directs the environmental review process required for all “major federal actions” – including projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline. The end product of this review process is an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS. A Council on Environmental Quality memorandum on EIS preparation for international projects provides that “NEPA requires agencies to include analysis of reasonably foreseeable transboundary effects of proposed actions in their analysis of proposed actions in the United States.”)
Reporting in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert described the impacts of tar sands mining on nearby First Nations communities in Alberta. Writing about the native village Fort Chipewyan (Fort Chip), Kolbert detailed local concerns – including a “peculiarly high number of cases of a rare cancer.” Consequently, the villagers in Fort Chip believe that toxins from the tailing ponds have migrated into Lake Athabasca, which borders the village and provides it with “drinking water [and]…staples like whitefish and pike.”
Consistent with the impacts described above and the understanding that environmental review of federal projects should consider transboundary impacts, EPA analyzed the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the Keystone XL in July 2010 and found it deficient. EPA asserted that the State Department DEIS should have considered the greenhouse gas emissions associated with tar sands extraction in Canada, as accounting for the greenhouse emissions associated with the long term importation of oil sands crude from Canada was an essential component of disclosing the “reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts” of the Keystone XL project. EPA also noted that “extraction and refining of Canadian oil sands crude are GHG-intensive relative to other types of crude oil;” and that there was a “reasonably close causal relationship between issuing a cross-border permit for the Keystone XL project and increased extraction of oil sands crude in Canada intended to supply that pipeline.” In addition, EPA found the State Department’s analysis of pipeline safety from oil spills and the impact of tailing ponds on migratory birds to be wanting.
Perhaps most importantly, EPA criticized the State Department’s narrow definition of the project’s need and purpose. In fact, the State Department’s characterization of the “purpose and need” of the Keystone XL pipeline rendered much of the environmental review process presumptive. According to the State Department, the primary purpose of the Keystone XL is to “provide the infrastructure necessary to transport [tar sands] crude oil from the border with Canada to delivery points [in the U.S.] in response to the market demand of [U.S.] refineries for heavy crude oil.” As EPA correctly contends, a more appropriate project need would reflect the broader goal of the Keystone XL pipeline: “meeting national energy needs and climate policy objectives.” In concert with this broader perspective, EPA suggested that the State Department’s Keystone XL analysis also include consideration of different demand scenarios for crude oil over the course of the project’s proposed fifty year life. Such consideration would presumably include the possibility of a significant decline in oil demand, driven by higher fuel efficiency standards and more widespread adoption of clean energy generation.
Environmental impacts aside, construction of the Keystone XL was also touted as a “jobs generator” – obviously no small deal in the current economic climate. Creation of new jobs is certainly a laudable goal. However, it is equally important that this generally supportable goal not be used as a pretext for adopting ecologically unsound natural resource development policy. The demonstrated long term environmental impacts associated with tar sands extraction render the job generation argument nugatory; it is highly unwise to pursue an ecologically uneconomic path merely to create short term work during tough times.
Blaming Republicans for forcing him to make a hasty decision might make sound political sense for Barack Obama, as he defends himself from attacks by leading Presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.* In ecological terms, however, President Obama's rationale illustrates a potential new road in environmental policy not taken.
(*Mitt Romney’s reaction: “If Americans want to understand why unemployment in the United States has been stuck above 8 percent for the longest stretch since the Great Depression, decisions like this one are the place to begin.” Gingrich: “President Obama’s decision to reject the XL pipeline weakens America’s national security and kills thousands of well paying American jobs.”)
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