Environment Forum

Seeking answers on oil sands crude corrosion

Environmental groups and the oil industry are battling on a new front in the long-running public relations war over Canada’s oil sands. This one concerns claims that crude wrung from the massive deposits is more corrosive to pipelines and hence presents a bigger risk of oil spills.

Green groups say the crude eats away at the inside of pipelines much more quickly than is the case with conventional oil and the industry says it doesn’t.

We took a look at the issue recently, and found a surprising lack of research dedicated specifically to the risks associated with shipping growing volumes of the tar-sands-derived oil on longer pipelines as the United States seeks to cut dependence on other imported crude.

It may be time to answer the question once and for all, and since so much distrust exists among the debate’s players, it’s likely only a formal, truly independent, peer reviewed study will do.

The U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council has led the charge among environmentalists pushing the corrosion theory and has called for a focused study. At least one Canadian regulator we spoke to for our story said he would be interested to see results of one.

But it raises big questions: who could perform such research, what weight would it have and how long might it take, given some major regulatory approvals now looming in the United States and Canada?

Of course, the issue has cropped up as the U.S. State Department weighs an approval for TransCanada Corp’s $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline to Texas from Alberta.

from Tales from the Trail:

White House commission wades into “Deep Water”

The great thing about presidential commissions is that they can soberly consider complicated matters and then offer unvarnished reports on what to do. The tough part is when that information rockets around Washington, as occurred after a White House commission issued its final report on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The "Deep Water" report, apparently titled in reference to the doomed BP Deepwater Horizon rig, blames the deadly blowout and oil spill on government and industry complacency, and recommends more regulation of offshore drilling and a new independent safety agency. But as my colleague Ayesha Rascoe reports, the commission lacks the authority to establish drilling policies or punish companies.

Within minutes of the report's release, and even as commission co-chair William Reilly was bragging about bringing the report in on time and under budget, interest groups started the PR barrage, with industry critical and environmental outfits largely complimentary. Two Democratic members of Congress said they'd introduce legislation to implement the commission's recommendations.

Will that legislation go anywhere? Industry analysts are doubtful. To get an idea of how much action can be prompted by White House panels, it's useful to take a look at two previous ones.

The 911 Commission (formally called "The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States") was perhaps the ultimate in gracefully delivering its hard findings: "... on that September day we were unprepared.  We did not grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over time. As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management, capability, and – above all – a failure of imagination."

Many of the 911 Commission's recommendations were acted upon.

But not all presidential panels' reports make such an impact. In case you missed it, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its report on December 16.

That sinking feeling along the U.S. Gulf Coast

The oil is no longer gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the broken BP well, and a final “bottom kill” is in prospect — though delayed by an iffy weather forecast. That means the environment’s on the mend along the Gulf Coast, right?

Not really. There’s the little problem of subsidence to deal with.

Because the Mississippi River has been channeled to control flooding, coastal wetlands have been starved of sediment. Without fresh sediment coming down the river, wetlands can’t keep up with erosion and protective marshes can turn into open water. Subsidence is what this phenomenon is called.

This sinking is already occurring near Venice, where marinas cluster around the toe of Louisiana’s boot shape. Take a look at a road that looks like a stream in a video clip I took in mid-July:

The rhythmic clicking sound is the hazard blinker on the car.

Photo credit:  REUTERS/Sean Gardner (Oiled crane on a tree limb on a small island in Bay Barataria near Grand Isle, Louisiana June 12, 2010)

The Green Gauge: Black mark on Enbridge

Enbridge’s stain on the Kalamazoo River in central Michigan pushed this Calgary-based energy delivery company to the headlines as details emerged about 840,000 gallons of crude that spilled from one of their pipelines into a creek on July 26.

Enbridge leads this installment of The Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies that made headlines July 18 to August 9 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Enbridge

Enbridge has come under significant criticism following a spill on July 26 of 840,000 barrels of oil along a creek that flows into the Kalamazoo River in Central Michigan.  The spill has led to class action law suits being filed against the company for negligence, as well as complaints by local Congressman Mark Schauer that the spill was not reported in a timely manner to federal authorities. In fact, the first reports of the accident were reported by another company, Consumers Energy.  The spill also prompted protests against the company’s proposed pipeline in British Columbia by Greenpeace, which argues that the pipeline will pose environmental risks to the Pacific Coast and would increase the availability of tar sands crude oil to export markets.  The environmental costs of oil derived from Canada’s tar sands oil industry was recently highlighted in a article by the Economist, which is available here:

from Tales from the Trail:

Should U.S. oil royalties pay for studies of BP spill’s environmental impact?

Oil caused the mess in the Gulf of Mexico. Should U.S. oil royalties pay for scientists to study what happened, and what's still happening, to this complex environment?

At least one scientist thinks so. Ed Overton of Louisiana State University figures the billions of dollars collected in royalties by the now-defunct and much-reviled Minerals Management Service -- re-named and re-organized as the Bureau of Ocean Energy -- must have enough money to pay for research into the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill.

Speaking at a Senate hearing last week on the effects of oil-dispersing chemicals, Overton and other experts called the BP spill an unintentional "grand experiment" into what deep water oil exploration can do to animals, plants, water and land in the Gulf. As Overton put it, the oil and dispersants are out there now. Best to study them over the months and years ahead to figure out what they're doing to the environment.

"The Mineral Management Service has generated royalty income to the federal government of billions of dollars.  And virtually all of that money has been spent on not understanding the environment," Overton said.

While it should be the oil industry's obligation to know how to respond to an environmental disaster like this one, Overton said, "the government  ought to have some oversight in taking some of that royalty money, a significant amount of that royalty money, and understanding how, both from an engineering perspective as well as an ecological perspective, what to do about it."

There's plenty that the engineers and ecologists don't know, Overton said, starting with how to collect oil samples in deep water (there are sampling techniques to collect plants and animals, but not crude). As he told it, when the samplers went down into the Gulf, they got coated with oil, so it was impossible to tell if the oil was just a layer they passed through or whether it was a true sample of what was there at the sea bed.

Now that the Macondo well has been capped and a final "bottom kill" is seemingly within reach, it's probably natural for everyone to want to turn the page. But researchers want to actually know what happened. Should oil royalties help pay for that research?

Dalian oil spill is all cleaned up

The Chinese government this week announced the oil spill is all cleaned up in Dalian harbor, off the north coast of Liaoning province in China.

That was fast.

Not even two weeks ago, on July 17, a blast hit two oil pipelines and spread an estimated 1,500 metric tons of crude oil (462,000 gallons) into the Yellow Sea.  (Update: Greenpeace on July 30 said as many as 60,000 metric tons could have been spilled.)

It’s a minute fraction of the amount of crude that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the BP Deepwater explosion of April 20, with an estimated 414,000–1,186,000 tons — but it’s still significant enough for 8,000 workers and 800 fishing vessels to dive in to clean-up efforts, some literally.

At least one person was killed in the cleanup efforts. Firefighter Zhang Liang, 25, drowned July 20 after a wave threw him from a vessel and pushed him out to sea, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

from Tales from the Trail:

What does an oiled pelican look like?

You've probably seen the disturbing images of pelicans so badly mired in leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico that they can barely be distinguished as birds at all -- they look like part of the muck.

But nearly three months after the blowout at BP's Deepwater Horizon rig, there are other pelicans touched by the oil where the impact is far less apparent, though still real.

Take a look at some video I took during a boat trip on July 15 along West Pass, a long channel stretching out into the ocean from Louisiana's southern-most tip:

The video was taken aboard a small, bobbing boat with a light wind distorting sound, but it clearly shows a section of a rocky jetty stretching into the Gulf. There were hundreds of pelicans and gulls perched on the jetty; the video only shows a short section.

What's important to look for are the dark patches on the heads, beaks and wings of some of the pelicans; that is untreated black oil, according to Joao Talocchi of the environmental group Greenpeace. There was no black oil in the water nearby, or the reddish sludge of treated oil seen in the photo of the drenched pelican above, only a few isolated pea-sized beads of emulsified oil that appeared to have been treated with dispersant chemicals.

from The Great Debate UK:

BP Gulf of Mexico crisis will transform the oil industry

-Kees Willemse is professor of off-shore engineering, Delft University.  The opinions expressed are his own.-

The news that a huge metal cap has been successfully placed over several of the leaking oil vents at the Deepwater Horizon site marks a potential turning point in the Gulf of Mexico crisis.

It is already estimated that each day some 10-15,000 barrels of the oil that are spilling out into the ocean are being captured and diverted to ships on the sea surface.

Despite this engineering success, a complete end to the oil leakage is unlikely until new relief oil wells are completed -- a drilling process that could take most of the summer, and potentially into the autumn.  This is because the newly installed metal cap is unlikely, even in the best case scenario, to stop all of the oil spilling out.

In advance of the completion of the relief wells, a potentially major new complicating factor is the arrival of the hurricane season last week.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is already predicting between 8 and 14 hurricanes this season, with perhaps a similar number of smaller storms, any of which could complicate (or indeed force a postponement) of the ongoing mitigation and clean-up activities in and around Deepwater Horizon.

from Tales from the Trail:

Lockbox may be making a political comeback

Republicans may be coming around to former Vice President Al Gore's way of thinking. Not on climate change, but on the "lockbox."

During his failed 2000 presidential bid, Gore talked about setting aside Social Security tax surpluses and putting them in a kind of  "lockbox"  to keep them off limits for other government spending and tax cuts. NBC's "Saturday Night Live" comedy show made great fun of the Democrat's comment.

Now Senate Republicans have revived the idea.

Not for Social Security, but for the oil spill clean up fund. Democrats are proposing to increase the oil spill clean up fund tax to 41 cents a barrel from 8 cents a barrel. The increase is part of a bill being considered by the Senate to help the long-term unemployed, offer relief to cash-strapped states and extend some expired business tax breaks.

Democrats said the tax increase is needed to make sure enough money is in the fund to deal with future oil spills. Not all companies have pockets as deep as BP Plc, which has promised to pay for damages caused by the deep water leak in the Gulf of Mexico, Senator Dick Durbin argued during Senate debate on the bill.

The tax increase will ensure taxpayers are not stuck with the tab in case of a future spill caused by a company that is not quite so flush with cash as BP, he said.

Republicans cried foul. They accused Democrats of raising the tax to offset some of the $126 billion cost of the bill.

MMS “cozy” with industry? Hardly

– John Hofmeister is founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy, former president of Shell Oil Company and author of Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider. Any views expressed here are his own. –

How bad, really, was the Minerals Management Service (MMS)?

The quick answer is no one will ever know.

Despite all the accusations of a “cozy” relationship with industry, the recent termination of President Obama’s appointee who served less than a year, as well as the re-organization by the Interior Department suggest that any sleaze has been swept aside by political calculations in the rush to assert that the administration is on top of things in Washington.

I must admit I was surprised to hear of this cozy relationship, since my experience with the MMS was exactly the opposite.

During my term as Shell’s president, my company experienced the frustration and huge costs of being turned down repeatedly by MMS for licenses to drill in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska because the professional regulators were not satisfied with the environmental plans that had been submitted to support test drilling operations.

They said conditions in the Arctic warranted extra review and consideration.