Wherein I Prove* That Keystone XL Pipeline Will Have No Environmental Impacts

You might think that the largest pipeline from the world's largest industrial project, which will cause deforestation second only to the Amazon, would have a huge environmental impact, but I can prove, given three assumptions actually used in assessing the impacts of Keystone XL (KXL), that KXL will have no impacts whatsoever.

1. Assume that the rate of Alberta Tar Sands development will be unchanged if KXL is not built and tar sands will be fully exploited no matter what.

This assumption made in the State Department's EIS outraged environmentalists and may seem outrageous to you, but it's the primary assumption made by the contractor that wrote the State Department's EIS.

Jane Kleeb of the group Bold Nebraska joined other environmental leaders in rejecting the report's conclusion that tar sands development would not be impacted by rejection of the pipeline.

"Tarsands does not expand unless Keystone XL is built," Kleeb said. "The State Department's assumption that tarsands development does not change with or without this pipeline is wrong and laughable. Why would TransCanada spend billions on building the pipeline and millions on lobbying unless this piece of infrastructure is the--not a--but the lynchpin for the expansion of tarsands. Without this pipeline Canada stays at 2 million barrels a day, with it they get 3 million barrels a day. The President has the ability to keep a million barrels of tarsands in the ground a day. With a stroke of a pen he can protect property rights, water and make a dent in climate change."

"This report is laughable using the wrong assumption and therefore the wrong science," she said.

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben agreed, saying that "everyone in Canada knows they cannot expand the Alberta tar sands the way they'd like to without the Keystone XL being built."

“If President Obama is serious about confronting the deepening climate crisis, he needs to take Keystone XL off the table,” said Bill Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s simply no way to be in favor of this dirty, dangerous project and still think we’re going to avert climate catastrophe.”

Referring to the many glaring errors and what seem like conscious exclusion of scientific consensus, McKibben added: "This is not the State Department's finest hour."

2. Assume that the diluted bitumen (dilbit) transported by KXL and other pipelines is similar to conventional crude oil.

This assumption, which has been made by KXL advocates, was found to be disastrously wrong in the Enbridge pipeline leak in Marshall Michigan, but it continues to promoted.

When emergency responders rushed to Marshall, Mich. on July 26, 2010, they found that the Kalamazoo River had been blackened by more than one million gallons of oil. They didn't discover until more than a week later that the ruptured pipeline had been carrying diluted bitumen, also known as dilbit, from Canada's tar sands region. Cleaning it up would challenge them in ways they had never imagined. Instead of taking a couple of months, as they originally expected, nearly two years later the job still isn't complete.

Dilbit is harder to remove from waterways than the typical light crude oil—often called conventional crude—that has historically been used as an energy source.

While most conventional oils float on water, much of the dilbit sank beneath the surface. Submerged oil is significantly harder to clean up than floating oil: A large amount of oil remains in the riverbed near Marshall, and the cleanup is expected to continue through the end of 2012.

The editor of Science Magazine, Marsha McNutt, was converted from  KXL pipeline opponent to a KXL supporter in response to the disastrous train fire in Canada. She is concerned about the dangers of rail transport. However, she wrongly believed that the light Bakken crude which caught fire is similar to synthetic crude from Canadian tar sands. Inside Climate News explained in detail why this assumption is false.

First, it's the wrong oil. The Keystone XL and comparable pipelines under review in Canada would be almost entirely filled with less-volatile, diluted bitumen from landlocked Alberta on its way to the refining hub and export terminals of Houston, or to export facilities on Canada’s east and west coasts. They would carry very little, if any, of the light crude oil that is now riding the rails, such as that being drawn out of the Bakken in North Dakota. That lighter oil is chemically more combustible than heavy grades of crude, and regulators suspect that the specific make up of the Bakken variety may have boosted the risk of fire.

Second, most Bakken producers want rail. The producers of light, sweet Bakken oil are largely focused on shipping to the east and west coasts, where light crude usually sells at higher prices—and where only oil rail goes. Virtually all of the existing U.S. crude oil pipelines—as well as those on the drawing board such as Keystone XL—run north and south through the nation's midsection, reaching markets that usually aren't as lucrative for Bakken producers.

For instance, the delivery point for the Canadian heavy crude that would be carried by the Keystone XL is the Gulf Coast, where refineries are flooded with all the light crude they can handle, much of it from Texas' Permian Basin and Eagle Ford formation. And so, even though a small portion of the Keystone XL's capacity was reserved to carry light crude from the Bakken to the Texas Gulf Coast, that's unlikely to be a popular option now.

3. Piecemeal the impacts ignoring total risk. Do not add up the individual impacts.

Break up all the hundreds of water crossings into independent assessments, ignoring the total project impact and overall risk. Find that the risk of each crossing of lakes, rivers and wetlands is below regulatory concern, then expedite approval without a full environmental review. Keystone XL was the first case this approach to avoiding full regulatory review was attempted. Its success is setting a precedent expedited review of other pipelines. The Army corps of Engineers has literally called each water crossing an independent separate project, breaking pipeline review into over a thousand separate parts. Of course, the risk of a major problem on any given segment was found to be small.

‘Piecemealing’ Pipelines

Once constructed, Flanagan South, an Enbridge project, will be a 589-mile pipeline that will carry tar sands and Bakken crude from Pontiac, IL. to Cushing, OK. The pipeline, which workers began constructing last fall, will have an initial capacity of 600,000 barrels of oil from Canada, North Dakota and Montana per day — by comparison, Keystone XL will be 1,179 miles in its entirety and have a capacity of 830,000 barrels per day.

Since Flanagan South doesn’t cross an international border like Keystone, its approval fell under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, not the State Department. For Flanagan’s approval, the Army Corps used a permitting process called Nationwide Permit 12, a process that gives expedited approval to projects like access roads and pipelines that do not “result in the loss of greater than 1/2-acre of waters of the United States for each single and complete project.”

In Flanagan’s case, the Corps treated each of Flanagan’s water crossings — about 1,950 wetlands and waterways — as a single and complete project, thus allowing a pipeline that will impact about 25 acres of streams and 38 acres of wetlands in Missouri alone to qualify for the NWP 12 process.

That practice of breaking up the pipeline into separate waterway crossings allows it to avoid a project-specific analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), says Doug Hayes, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club. Last year, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court claiming that the Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline without adequate environmental review or public notice.

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Not The First Time

NWP 12 has been used on pipelines before — on Keystone XL’s southern half, which was approved in March 2012 and began shipping oil last month.

“This idea that the Corps can approve a 5-or 600-mile pipeline under NWP 12, and no agency has to ever do a project-specific NEPA analysis — that is something that’s new and I believe started with Keystone XL,” Hayes said.

So far, Flanagan South’s history with NWP 12 has closely followed Keystone XL’s. When the group found out about the permitting process for Keystone XL’s southern leg, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit similar to the one against Flanagan South, asking for a temporary injunction while the lawsuit was active and challenging that the Corps’ approval of Keystone XL violated NEPA and Clean Water Act laws.

In August 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma denied the Sierra Club’s request for injunction, saying, like the Judge in the Flanagan South injunction case, that the Corp’s use of NWP 12 for Keystone XL was acceptable and the more thorough environmental review was not required.

KXL would have no additional environmental impacts if these assumptions were true, but I have proven the assumptions false. The acceptance of these assumptions as true by the State Department and the Army Corps of Engineers shows that the regulatory process is broken. Political pressure and financial interests have apparently corrupted the regulatory review process for KXL. KXL is setting a horrid precedent that is being used to rush more pipeline projects without proper environmental review.

The Line 3 Replacement will likely follow the existing route from northern Alberta to Clearbrook, Minn., Little said, but then could follow either the Alberta Clipper or old Line 3 route to Superior or move south and follow the route where Enbridge wants to build the new Sandpiper line.

“The route options still haven’t’ been determined. We have had discussions with the Department of State but we have not applied for any permits as of this point. We’re just announcing this,’’ she said.

It was immediately noticed by some environmental groups that the new Line 3 will allow for increased shipment of so-called tar sands crude oil from northern Canada into the U.S. – the same substance proposed to move on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that many U.S. groups have urged President Obama to halt.

The same groups already are rallying to stop what they are calling an Enbridge expansion, not simply a replacement.

“Enbridge’s plans to increase capacity on another pipeline in the Great Lakes basin is both absurd and insulting. Enbridge needs to call this project what it is… another tar sands pipeline expansion and not a replacement,’’ Beth Wallace of the National Wildlife Federation, said in a statement.

KXL must be stopped, not only because it would have disastrous environmental effects, but also because it is corrosive to democracy and has already corrupted the regulatory process. The environmental review process, which was undertaken by corporations with gross conflicts of interests must not be allowed to stand.