Tag Archives: tar sands

Once on the Fast Track, Tar Sands Pipeline Faces Tougher Scrutiny | OnEarth

Will a pipeline like this one in Alaska soon run tar sands oil all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast?
>> Concern mounts that a Canadian company’s plan to transport more tar sands oil across the continent will cause environmental harm and fail to make a dent in U.S. energy prices.

For TransCanada, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

First, there was BP’s runaway well in the Gulf. Then, on the night of July 25, the steel skin of a 30-inch-wide oil pipeline split open in a wooded stretch of southern Michigan. By the time the flow had stopped, upwards of 1 million gallons of toxic crude had disgorged into a nearby creek and polluted the Kalamazoo River.

TransCanada doesn’t own the ruptured pipeline — it belongs to the company’s top rival, Enbridge. But the spill in Michigan and the disaster in the Gulf have led both the public and regulators to cast a more skeptical eye on what once looked like a sure thing: TransCanada’s plan to build a $12 billion network of pipeline that would roughly double the capacity connecting Canada’s vast­­ — and highly controversial — tar sands oil reserves to U.S. refineries. Continue reading Once on the Fast Track, Tar Sands Pipeline Faces Tougher Scrutiny | OnEarth

Canada’s tar sands: Oil from Sand: High Risks, High Costs | The Fiscal Times

As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s sunken Deepwater Horizon rig, half a continent away a major new pipeline is delivering the first supplies of crude to refineries in Illinois. With the consistency of heavy molasses, the raw oil took about three months to travel some 1,073 miles.

The pipeline is the first step in a $12 billion TransCanada Corp. project that aims to more than double the capacity of oil that can be piped into the U.S from Canada, just as Americans are looking for alternatives to offshore drilling and oil from the Middle East. Oil extracted from Alberta’s tar sands — deposits of dense, sticky sand, saturated with a viscous form of petroleum — account for about 20 percent of U.S. crude imports. The newly opened pipeline, known as Keystone I, is part of a network that, when completed, will wind 3,800 miles underground through three provinces and eight Great Plains states before terminating in Texas.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/07/08/Oil-from-Sand-High-Risks-High-Costs.aspx