Masked by Year-End Turmoil, Will the Pipeline Be Quietly Approved?

Obama volunteer?

Proof enough that the pipeline project would go forward was evident by March when TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to transport its oil through the United States, threatened to invoke eminent domain against those in the farm belt who were denying access to their lands. Let that sink in for a moment: a Canadian company claiming the right to eminent domain to transgress on property owned by Americans.

And that is exactly what has gone on since in Paris, Texas, where in August a county judge upheld TransCanada’s condemnation of a stretch of pasture (doing so in a 15-word decision delivered on his iPhone). In October, a group named Tar Sands Blockade erected a timber barrier to prevent construction crews from bisecting a 300 acre ranch in Paris. Environmentalist activist and actress Daryl Hannah joined 78-year-old owner Eleanor Fairchild to stand in the path of the machinery but to no avail (video).

They were arrested — Fairchild for trespassing on her own property. The protesters said that police officers used "sustained chokeholds, violent arm-twisting, pepper spray, and multiple uses of Tasers, all while blockaders were in handcuffs."

Such is Texas, so married to oil and gas interests that any company declare itself a common carrier simply by checking boxes on a one-page form. Common carriers can exploit eminent domain. “No notice is given to the affected parties, no hearing is held, no evidence is presented, no investigation is conducted”, wrote a judge in one case, ruling in favor of a plaintive, but there has been no change in the process.

Back to our point: would TransCanada have gone forward without a wink and a nod from the Obama administration to tell them that approval was in the bag?

America runs on oil and gas and cannot help but continue to do so for the foreseeable future. That renewables account for only 8% or so of the nation’s energy supply (nuclear another 8%) makes that clear. But the question is whether Obama’s “all of the above” policy should include particularly damaging sources of hydrocarbons.

The administration’s only expressed reason for officially stopping the pipeline a year ago was that the intended path sliced through the Ogallala in Nebraska, the largest water aquifer in the United States, along a 65-mile wetland where the groundwater is only 10 feet below the surface. A pipeline break there would contaminate a source that supplies 30% of the water used in the U.S. for agriculture, 83% of Nebraska’s agricultural water and 78% of the that state’s public water supply.

The pipeline's planned route has since been detoured around the aquifer, but what remains problematic is the nature of the oil — Canada’s Alberta Province tar sands, a viscous bitumen sludge that releases from 10% to 30% more carbon dioxide than customary oil when burned, says a Rand Corporation study. And producing that oil, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), triples the greenhouse gas emissions of regular drilling because natural gas must be burned to produce the steam that separates the bitumen from the sand, and is needed again to turn the bitumen into synthetic crude. Our earlier article said:

“At current production levels, that's the greenhouse gas equivalent, every day, of 12 million cars, and enough natural gas to heat six million homes — and that's before the tar sand oil is burned as fuel.

Water used to produce that steam winds up in tailing ponds that so far occupy 50 square kilometers. The toxic water kills unsuspecting migrating birds and leakage — alleged by the NRDC and denied by Canada — contaminates the water table and flows into streams.

What's more, tar sands are strip-mined. It takes two tons of oily sand to leach one barrel of oil. To get at the sand requires felling the natural carbon reservoir of the northern forests. The doubling to 1.8 million barrels of tar sands production projected by Canada's environmental ministry over the coming decade leads to cutting down some 740,000 acres of trees”.

If the U.S. were to scrub the pipeline, Canada’s Plan B is the far more arduous option to run it west across the Sierras in British Columbia for export at a projected cost of $5.5 billion. Some 220 tankers, reports The New York Times, would then ferry the oil out the twisting waterways from the inland town of Kitmat to the sea. Sending oil through the U.S. was a fine idea, but the alternate plan has British Columbians alarmed at the hazard of spills while seeing no benefits in return.

Not to worry, Canadians. Obama will come through to spare you, we have no doubt.