The Keystone XL pipeline: Environment be damned

There is a ton of literature and information available about the ecological impacts of tar sands.  These impacts stem from the entire spectrum of the tar sands process--from mining the sand, to extracting the unrefined bitumen oil, transporting the diluted bitumen (or "dilbit"), and refining the dilbit to be burned.

First and foremost, a vast expanse of tar sands, the source of the oil that the northern leg of the Keystone XL will be shipping, lies in one of the largest intact forest and wetland ecosystems in the world--the Canadian Boreal Forests.  Currently, trees need to systematically cut down to gain access to the tar sands that lie beneath the ground.  There is a significant amount of greenhouse gas emission that occurs from deforestation.  (It does not really matter what the deforestation is for, greenhouse gases will be released.)  Of the 767 sq. km of forest that has been destroyed over the past few decades, only 104 hectares has been "certified restored," i.e. only 0.13% of the land has been somehow restored to its "original" state, if that is possible.  If the average age of black spruce is 200 years, and the average age of lodgepole pine is 150-200 years, and if it is likely that this is the average age of the trees cut down, how long will it take to actually restore the land the condition it was once in?

Boreal forest against a Suncor surface mine.
The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Alberta's Oil Sands, from wired.com

The yellow spots are the largest trucks in the world. 
The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Alberta's Oil Sands, from wired.com

Secondly, one the trees are cut, the land below must be industrially excavated and large quantities of water used to extract the bitumen from the sands.  According to the Canada National Energy Board, it takes between 2.5-4 barrels of water to extract one barrel of unrefined synthetic crude oil.  This water is significantly contaminated and the water that isn't recycled is stored in tailing ponds that leak into local water supply.  The Athabasca River is connected to the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the world's largest freshwater deltas.  Estimates say that by 2020, around 1 billion cubic meters (the volume of 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or the entire area of around 11 Manhattan islands submerged to a depth of one meter) of toxic water will be stored in tailing ponds by Suncor and Syncrude alone.  

A Suncor facility and tailing ponds alongside the Athabasca River.
The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Alberta's Oil Sands, from wired.com

Tailing ponds along side the Athabasca River, seen on the top left.
The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Alberta's Oil Sands, from wired.com

What is the potential for contamination and leakage of this water, let alone the fact that this water is essentially permanently toxic?  Fish in Lake Athabasca, near Fort McMurray (an oil boom town), have unusual red spots on them, likely from the pollutants.

"Ronnie Campbell hauls whitefish from Lake Athabasca, downriver from Fort McMurray, to use as feed for his sled dogs. Locals say their catches are often covered in unusual red spots, and many no longer eat lake fish. While the cause of the spots is unclear, some believe toxic chemicals, such as those released during bitumen production, are leaching into Alberta's rivers and lakes." Peter Essick, National Geographic Magazine, 2009

Thirdly, the bitumen is viscous and dense.  To transport it, it must first be diluted with diluents--other petroleum products--and then pumped at high temperatures and pressures.  Dilbit is much more corrosive than other kinds of crude oil, and the likelihood of pipe leaks and eruptions thus increases.  When the leak occurs in water, the diluents separate from the heavier bitumen, and the bitumen sinks to the bottom of the water body.  This is exactly what happened in June 2010, just weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred, when an Enbridge-owned pipe erupted and spilled more than a million gallons of dilbit into the Kalamazoo River.  The technology to adeuqately deal with such a spill does not exist.  Four years and a billion dollars later, 40 miles of the Kalamazoo river still remain contaminated.  What might happen if the Keystone XL leaked (and its southern leg Keystone 1 has already...twelve times in its first year...more than any other first-year pipeline in the US) or burst over the Ogallala Aquifer, so important for agriculture and drinking water?

Fourthly, the processing of dilbit creates petroleum coke, or petcoke--a solid byproduct with a high suplur content.  Burning it is illegal in the US because it emits significant amounts of smog-forming sulphur dioxide pollution.  Currently, mounds of petcoke line the banks of the Detroit River and Calumet River and contaminate the air of Detroit and Chicago, or better yet, are shipped to poor places to exacerbate the air there.  "You can't have a picnic outside because you are going to get a mouthful of black dust.  It's so bad we have to power-wash the house every week to wash it off," says Lilly Martin of Mackinaw Avenue in Chicago. The petcoke is this sent to countries even less concerned about environmental issues and public health to be burned.

Next, more about the environmental impacts of the pipeline, specifically on public health and the economics of greenhouse gas emissions.

Specific concerns about the bridge in Detroit

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post, which was inspired by comments from Matthew. I will address some specific concerns he had about another post from a few days ago. But before that, I want to mention the specific reasons why the bridge is being built.

Many of you probably know that the Ambassador Bridge, owned by Matty Maroun, is the largest trade crossing in the US. This bridge is privately owned, and the monies from the crossings go directly to Maroun's Detroit International Bridge Company. The State has basically been missing out on money for the longest time; the Ambassador Bridge is basically a monopoly. Therefore, they've decided to have their own bridge. On looking at the environmental impact statement (EIS) made by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the reasons for the new bridge are to:

• provide safe, efficient, and secure movement of people and goods across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Detroit River area to support the economies of Michigan, Ontario, Canada and the United States
• support the mobility needs of national and civil defense to protect the homeland
• provide new border-crossing capacity to meet increased long-term demand
• improve system connectivity to enhance the seamless flow of people and goods
• improve operations and processing capability in accommodating the flow of people and goods 
• provide reasonable and secure crossing options in the event of incidents, maintenance, congestion, or other disruptions

Given these reasons, I will address Matthew's specific concerns...

Yes, the bridge will undoubtedly cause more local air pollution, this is true of all development not just the bridge. 
This is an interesting point of contention. There are various perspectives. One is that Delray has been a heavily industrial area - cement, paper, steel, coal, waste water, oil refining, etc. - for many decades, and zoning laws have allowed industry to move in right next to residences. Now, the bridge can do one of two things for industry - by taking up a one hundred and sixty acre footprint, there are that many fewer acres left to fill industry in. This is the position taken by MDOT. So maybe some air pollution is being mitigated? Whoe knows. On the other hand, industry may want to be closer to the bridge, given that there will be easier access to Canada. This is the position of Southwest Detroit Business Association. This may increase air pollution in the area. My position is that people should not be living in Delray at all, and while localised air pollution many be diffused because of the bridge, the cumulative and global impacts of the pollution cannot be neglected.


You suggest, but have not shown, that not building the bridge will be better for the environment overall. Not building the bridge may mean that the net number of miles that goods are transported is increased, which would mean each of your concerns would be amplified not reduced (i.e. it seems unlikely that the alternative is mostly local production of goods). 
I looked into this, and MDOT does a wonderful job at skirting these issues. In the detailed EIS statement, MDOT says, 


"...With respect to global warming, to date no national standards have been established regarding greenhouse gases, nor has EPA established criteria or thresholds for greenhouse gas emissions. But, on April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al. that the USEPA does have authority under the Clean Air Act to establish motor vehicle emissions standards for carbon dioxide CO2 emissions. However, the Court’s decision did not have any direct implications on requirements for evaluating transportation projects. Further, because of the interactions among elements of the transportation system as a whole, project-level emissions analyses for greenhouse gases are less informative than those conducted at the regional, state, or national level. Because of these concerns, FHWA concludes that CO2 emissions cannot be usefully evaluated in this EIS in the same way as other vehicle emissions. With With respect to health impacts, the “Interim Guidance on Air Toxics in NEPA Documents” indicates that presently there is not adequate science to reliably include exposure modeling or risk assessment in the air quality analysis. The Interim Guidance explains that modeling tools to generate air pollution emissions cannot be properly used at the project level because they are based on certain assumptions with regard to trip length and amounts of congestion and were based on a limited number of tests of mostly older vehicles. Dispersion models that would indicate how much particulate matter and air toxics are in the air were developed to deal with carbon monoxide, which is relatively non-reactive, and their intent was to determine maximum, not more typical levels. Further, little is known about background pollution levels in many areas. Even if emission levels and concentrations could be estimated, exposure assessment and risk analysis have their own shortcomings, due to extrapolation to annual levels, for example, let alone multiple years."

There are a few things I'd like to mention regarding this. First, and the most obvious, is that the environmental impacts have not been addressed at all with this study - I will save you the pain of having to go through this terrible assessment. I don't understand why it is called an environmental impact statement at all. Second, even if the assessment was conducted, the reasons why the bridge is being built would still completely supersede the environmental impacts. MDOT would say, "Deal with the impacts." Third, such life-cycle assessments can be tailored to give you the answer you want, based on the variables you choose to include in the assessment. My stance is this, the impacts are debatable, what is not debatable is that these impacts are negative.


Having more local revenue could increase peoples salaries which may be more positive than the air pollution is negative. It is not reasonable to assume that people’s lives won’t be dramatically improved by having additional money (e.g. better healthcare, education, healthier food, more money for environmental remediation, etc.). 
I don't think that there should be a tradeoff between salaries and pollution. As I have written about before the choices we've made so far have always pit one important thing against another. What such behaviour connotes is that a degraded environment is necessary for people's lives to be "better." What this also means is that we convert the most important thing, our environment, into something expendable and movable (money), through degradation, and then use that expendable thing we've created to buy back the most important thing. Speaking of entropy, I think there are losses here...

Canadian waste in Michigan, and Michigan's waste infrastructure

Maybe you have heard that Canada ships a lot of solid waste to Michigan. According to this Congressional Research Service report, the entire city of Toronto ships its waste to Michigan. Here are some excerpts of the report.

Private waste haulers and Canadian cities — including the city of Toronto — ship large quantities of waste to the United States. About four million tons (as many as 400 truckloads a day) have been shipped annually since 2004, according to receiving states. Nearly three-quarters of this waste has gone to two large landfills near Detroit. The influx of waste has been highly controversial, in part because the ability of state and local governments to restrict it is limited. Under court rulings concerning the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, only Congress can authorize restrictions that discriminate against foreign waste.

it appears that more than 90% of the solid waste that Canada ships to the United States has gone to Michigan. The remainder has generally gone to the states of New York and Washington.

While somewhat controversial throughout the 1990s, Canadian waste imports have received much greater attention since late 2002, when the city of Toronto — Canada’s largest city — announced that it would close its last landfill and begin shipping all of its waste to Michigan. Canada’s shipments of waste to Michigan increased 83% between then and fiscal year 2006. In FY2006, Michigan reported that it received 12,084,907 cubic yards (an estimated 4.03 million tons) of nonhazardous waste from Canada. Canada accounted for 19.5% of all the waste disposed in Michigan landfills in that year. Canadian waste imports decreased 9% in FY2007, to 10,982,984 cubic yards (about 3.66 million tons), but still accounted for 18.9% of the waste disposed in Michigan landfills.

As always, there is a trade group, representing some interest, having a vested interest in importing trash and waste generation. It seems to me that the Michigan Waste Industries Association this this state trade/lobbying group. Here is some Q&A from their website.

Q: How many landfills are there in Michigan?
A: There are 53 regional solid waste landfills in the State of Michigan.

Q: How much waste is landfilled each year?
A: Each year, more than 57 million cubic yards of solid waste is added to landfills in Michigan. In 2003, approximately 11.5 million cubic yards, or 20 percent of all solid waste, was imported from other states and Canada.

Q: Why is waste moved in or out of other states or Canada?
A: Different state regulations, varying landfill capacities, and financial considerations often encourage the import and export of different types of solid waste. This practice has been ongoing for decades with no negative environmental or safety impact.

Q: Does Michigan export any waste?
A: The state sends about 106 million pounds (53 thousand tons) of hazardous waste to facilities in Canada. Michigan also ships significant quantities of hazardous, low-level radioactive and medical waste to other states and relies on Canada to process all types of electronic scrap and a large percentage of recycled paper collected in Michigan is sent to Canada for processing and re-use. Solid waste from Michigan is sent to Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin from areas in Michigan that border those states. This raises an important point. If Michigan were to close its borders to Canada’s municipal waste, Canada might retaliate by closing its borders to hazardous waste and, electronic scrap from Michigan. Michigan hazardous waste generators would be forced to find more expensive alternatives, an unintended and undesired consequence during this tough economic period.

If you want to feel good about the trash we produce, check out this video, also from the Michigan Waste Industries Association.