Debate Heats Up Over Oil Sands
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NYTimes
July 1 2010
The debate is heating up over whether the Obama administration should approve a huge new pipeline called Keystone XL that would bring oil extracted from the earth in Alberta, Canada, all the way to Texas for refining. The State Department must grant approval for any transnational pipelines, based on the “national interest.” And as we’ve written, politicians and citizens are divided over whether imported oil sands oil is in the national interest, and how energy needs should be balanced with environmental and safety concerns.
For the past few months, the State Department has been soliciting public comments on the Keystone XL’s environmental impact statement, which was released in March. The comment period was supposed to end on June 16 but was extended until Friday because of the large volume of comments.
Last week, 50 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her not to rush to a decision before “a thorough review of the environmental, public health and safety impacts can be conducted.” A special meeting to solicit opinion was convened on Tuesday in Washington.
While a smaller pipeline to transport oil sands oil was approved without much debate a few years ago, this one is being closely scrutinized. Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, said he opposed it because “this pipeline will be a huge setback to our new national goal, as articulated by President Obama, of moving away from extreme methods of extracting oil and toward a more renewable-based energy policy.”
At the hearing on Tuesday, Tom Rudolph, a farmer from Circle, Mont., expressed his reservations “as a landowner directly on the route.” He called the draft environmental impact statement “insufficient,” noting in particular the lack of a “complete spill response plan” in the event of a leak. “The disaster in the gulf serves as a warning,” he said.
From an energy perspective, Keystone XL delivers one thing the United States needs: plentiful oil from a friendly neighbor. Most oil companies have invested heavily in Canadian oil sands and are firmly behind it.
But environmentalists say that extracting oil from oil sands is an inherently “dirty” process that produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions that pumping oil from wells in the United States does. They also say it requires huge amounts of water and defaces large tracts of boreal forest in Canada, an important storehouse for carbon dioxide that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere.
Conservationists and landowners along the proposed path in the United States are worried about its potential impact on local ecosystems. And as they watch the oil spill unfold in the Gulf of Mexico, they point out that a leak along Keystone XL could be even more devastating. The proposed pipeline travels through the nation’s most productive agricultural region and through the Midwest’s most important aquifer.
Adding to their trepidation, Transcanada, the pipeline company building the project, has applied for a waiver to use thinner steel than is normally employed in high-pressure pipelines of this sort in the United States.
It is unclear how Ms. Clinton, whose final decision is expected later this year, will balance the competing viewpoints. Will energy or environment define the national interest?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/energy-or-environment-a-divide...
