Tag: pipelines
Keystone Stalemate: Fix Decaying Pipelines First For Jobs, Health, And Safety

Keystone Stalemate: Fix Decaying Pipelines First For Jobs, Health, And Safety

With the Keystone XL pipeline stalled again, now perhaps we can look ahead and consider more promising ways to rebuild our energy system, creating many more jobs than that controversial project ever would. No matter where we look, the far larger issue that still confronts Americans is decaying infrastructure — which emphatically includes the enormous web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing the continental United States in every direction.

When TransCanada CEO Russ Girling touted Keystone as an engine of employment on ABC News’ This Week last Sunday, he insisted that its construction would create 42,000 jobs. Not only would his venture create those 42,000 “direct and indirect” jobs, boasted Girling, but those positions would be “ongoing and enduring” rather than temporary, like most construction jobs — citing a State Department study that drew no such conclusions. A company spokesman later tempered Girling’s pronouncements, more or less acknowledging that they were grossly exaggerated. The number of permanent jobs when construction is completed would top out at around 50. With or without Keystone, the national economy already produces about 42,000 jobs every week, so it just doesn’t matter much.

Yet even if Keystone would actually result in tens of thousands of permanent jobs, its expected impact on the environment, health and safety raised grave questions about whether it should be permitted to proceed. But there are pipeline projects of unquestioned value that could create far more jobs for many more years that any of Keystone’s promoters ever contemplated.

Rather than a new pipeline for the dirtiest tar-sands fuel, what America needs is a commitment to repair the “leaks and seeps” that have made the old network of pipelines into a continuing danger to health and safety, air and water – as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka noted in a 2013 interview with The National Memo. The labor chief estimates that a serious program of repair to degraded oil and gas facilities would mean at least 125,000 jobs a year – three times as many as Keystone – and they would continue for decades.

In that brief remark, Trumka alluded to an important point: With more than 2.5 million miles of corroding underground pipes, often made of steel or cast iron laid decades ago, the likelihood of deadly and potentially catastrophic accidents increases every year. Fuel and fumes that escape old pipelines every day, along with occasional large spills of petroleum products, pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as well.

Using pipelines to transport natural gas and hazardous liquid fuels is generally safer than the alternatives of road and rail, but when pipeline accidents happen, they can be devastating – as we have learned in recent years from the tragic explosions in San Bruno, CA, which killed eight people and razed dozens of homes, and in Allentown, PA, which killed five people and destroyed 50 buildings.

Officials in Michigan are concerned about the condition of 61 year-old pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet – and where, if the pipelines failed, a ruinous oil spill could conceivably leave the Great Lakes in the same ruinous condition as the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And New York officials worry every day about the perilous state of the city’s gas mains, aging and decrepit, which exploded in East Harlem last March, killing and injuring dozens of people and causing millions in property damage.

An investigation by reporters at Pro Publica, the nonprofit news service, revealed that over the past three decades, pipeline accidents accounted for more than 500 deaths, over 4,000 injuries, and almost $7 billion in property damage – numbers that will swell in the years ahead unless repairs and inspections are stepped up drastically. At the moment, replacing only the most dangerously corroded pipes in New York’s Con Edison system is estimated to require $10 billion and 30 years of construction.

The upside of this looming threat is that confronting it would create hundreds of thousands of permanent, well-paid jobs while preserving the environment and improving public safety and health. Like so much of the incredible infrastructure left to us by previous generations, the pipelines need to be maintained, modernized, or mothballed for the sake of the future. Politicians and their paymasters may prefer to look the other way, but it is a responsibility we cannot escape.

Opposition Grows As Oil Pipelines Proliferate In Northern Minnesota

Opposition Grows As Oil Pipelines Proliferate In Northern Minnesota

By David Shaffer, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — Leon Rogers has lived next to crude oil pipelines for years. He’s had enough.

With four pipelines already buried beneath his farmland and a fifth one planned next to his house, Rogers and many of his neighbors are no longer ambivalent about the river of oil flowing through this region of forests, lakes and rivers.

“They are making it a freeway for pipelines,” said Rogers, a registered nurse who has lived on a small farm south of Park Rapids for 18 years. “It comes down to, ‘I don’t want to live here.’ ”

Anti-pipeline sentiment is spreading in Minnesota’s North Woods, where 14 percent of the nation’s oil supply already flows through 10 cross-state pipelines leading to Superior, Wisconsin, and the Twin Cities. It’s happening amid persistent environmental opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would run from Alberta, Canada, through western U.S. states, and to a proposed copper-nickel mine near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

For years, pipeline companies like Enbridge Energy, based in Calgary, Alberta, have faced not-on-my-property opposition over new pipelines carrying Canadian and U.S. oil. Now, residents like Rogers and a new citizens group are asking: Should the Mississippi River headwaters be a major conduit for crude oil?

Enbridge is proposing to build the 610-mile, $2.6 billion Sandpiper pipeline across North Dakota and Minnesota to transport oil from the Bakken region to Superior. Part of the route passes Itasca State Park on a corridor that already has four crude oil pipelines owned by another company.

“This one has caught everyone’s attention,” said Willis Mattison, a former regional administrator for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency who is advising a newly formed group called Friends of the Headwaters, which has challenged the project.

Two month after it formed, the Park Rapids-based group says hundreds of people have expressed support. In a sign of the anti-pipeline sentiment, a crowd of 130 people at a public meeting in Park Rapids Wednesday applauded everyone who spoke against the project. The lone supporter, a local bus driver, made his remarks to polite silence.

The following night, in Carlton, Minn., an even larger crowd showed up at a meeting held by state agencies and Enbridge. “Where did all these people come from?” said Steve Schulstrom, an organic farmer who helped form the Carlton County Land Stewards to protect organic and sustainable farms in the pipeline’s path. He said about 180 people showed up. “It amazed me.”

State agencies led by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission have just launched their review of the line, a process expected to take 10 months. Enbridge recently said it plans to build another $2.6 billion pipeline across Minnesota, replacing an older one that’s prone to leaks. The route hasn’t been announced, but Enbridge said it will consider using the same path as the Sandpiper line.

“We are the headwaters for the Mississippi River, one of the world’s great rivers, and within 25 miles of Park Rapids are over 400 lakes, some of them the clearest in the state,” said Richard Smith, a photographer who serves on the Friends of the Headwaters steering committee.

In a uniquely North Woods problem, Smith said many summer-only residents likely don’t know about the Sandpiper pipeline, and deserve a say on the route before regulators act. Enbridge announced the proposed route in November, after many seasonal residents had left. Yet the deadline for objections is early April, before many return.

Although the Hubbard County Board and other groups have pressed for more time, the PUC says that’s not possible because state law requires a decision 12 months after the project’s application. Indeed, activists like Smith and Mattison said the state’s fast-paced review process may make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to halt the Sandpiper line or have much influence over its route.

That’s a big difference with the better-known battle over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring Canadian oil through western states. Keystone XL needs a presidential permit to cross the international border, and unless President Barack Obama approves the project, it may not be built.

But Sandpiper, whose route is entirely in the United States, doesn’t need such a permit. It also doesn’t require a full-blown environmental impact statement, like Keystone XL and the proposed PolyMet Mining copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota. Instead, a consultant will conduct a streamlined environmental review of the Sandpiper route.

Mattison said the pushback against Minnesota oil pipelines has been influenced by the high-profile Keystone XL debate and the resurgence of environmental activism in Minnesota over what would be the state’s first copper mine.

“People are making a difference with Keystone. People are making a difference with PolyMet,” Mattison said. “Maybe we can make a difference with the pipeline.”

Enbridge, whose executives attended meetings across northern Minnesota hosted by state regulators, said the 30-inch-diameter pipeline will be built to high standards, with extra-thick steel where it crosses the Mississippi River and other waterways like the Straight River, a trout stream. It will mean 1,500 temporary jobs during the 2015-2016 construction period, and an economic jolt to local economies.

“We are offsetting (oil) imports from other countries that are unstable or are unfriendly to U.S. interests,” said Barry Simonson, a Duluth-based manager of engineering and construction for Enbridge.

Photo: Rickz via Flickr