Michigan Ag Connection - Report: Tar Sands Tankers in U.S. Waters Could Rise 12-Fold

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Report: Tar Sands Tankers in U.S. Waters Could Rise 12-Fold
Michigan Ag Connection - 12/09/2016

Canadian oil producers have roared back from President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline with a scheme to send hundreds of tar sands-laden oil tankers and barges down the East and West coasts and the Mississippi River, the Natural Resources Defense Council warned in a report released.

Under their plans, tar sands tankers and barges traveling U.S. waterways could skyrocket from fewer than 80 to more than 1,000 a year--dramatically increasing the chance of devastating spills.

That, according to the report, would put the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, including the Salish Sea, San Francisco Bay, the Gulf of Maine, the Hudson and Columbia rivers, the Chesapeake Bay and the Florida Keys, at risk for costly spills for which there is no known effective cleanup technology. In addition, as many as 130 tar sands barges per year could travel on the Mississippi River, which today sees almost no such traffic.

The potential for destructive tar sands spills endangers hundreds of inland and coastal communities. And it puts at risk multibillion tourism and fishing industries, along with protected ocean preserves and abundant marine life; including whales, dolphins and unique deep-sea creatures.

"Canadian oil producers have a scheme to flood us with dangerous tar sands oil. Their hopes to send hundreds of millions of barrels of tar sands oil into U.S. waters are truly alarming. We can't let them endanger American livelihoods, our most iconic and threatened species, or our beautiful wild places with these irresponsible plans," said Joshua Axelrod, lead author of NRDC's report.

"The risks and costs created by possible tar sands spills are so substantial that local, state and federal governments should take immediate action," added Axelrod, policy analyst for NRDC's Canada Project. "Protecting the public, communities and the environment from a plague of dangerous tar sands oil on U.S. waterways should be their top priority."

If all that wasn't bad enough, the climate impact of the planned tar sands development would be severe. Expanded production would destroy a large swath of Canada's boreal forest--a carbon storehouse that helps to mitigate climate change. And burning all the tar sands oil that the industry seeks to develop would add 362 million metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year--twice as much as Keystone XL's tar sands would have contributed.

NRDC released the report, "The Tar Sands Tanker Threat: American Waterways in Industry's Sights," in a telephone-based press conference. Joining Axelrod for the event was: Stephanie Buffum, executive director at Friends of the San Juans; Michael Riordan, physicist and resident of Orcas Island; and Jewell James, a Lummi Nation representative and fisherman on the Salish Sea.

It outlines plans by Canadian producers to excavate tar sands oil from forests in northern Alberta and use four new pipeline and rail operations--and existing infrastructure on the Mississippi River--to move tar sands oil by tanker and barge down the coasts and on the Columbia, Hudson, and Mississippi rivers to reach heavy oil refinery operations in the Mid-Atlantic, Gulf coast and California.

Canadian producers are pressing ahead with these expansion plans, despite climate realities and findings like those in a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences that tar sands crude has unique physical properties leading to extreme clean-up challenges, including missing tools and technology that could clean the heavy, toxic oil in the event of a spill.

It's notable that six years after a tar sands pipeline spill fouled Michigan's Kalamazoo River and created a billion-dollar cleanup effort, the river is still contaminated.

The tar sands threat outlined in NRDC's report isn't theoretical. Just recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, which would increase oil tanker traffic by 600 percent in the already-congested Salish Sea between Washington state and British Columbia.

If the pipeline is built, much of this traffic is expected to move south along the U.S. west coast to California heavy-oil refineries. Scientists contend the project is a death sentence for the region's beloved Killer Whale population.

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