Deny Deny Deny

A 2011 Keystone XL protest outside the White House gates got the attention of top White House officials and helped derail the Keystone XL project, at least for now. The industry is adapting to avoid another Keystone controversy. Image from treehugger.com.

Their departing CEO, Patrick Daniel, showed no remorse and gave no apologies for one of the biggest fossil fuel disasters in North American history. Instead, he sounded frustrated last week, saying he wished the tar sands pipeline business hadn’t become so controversial. Good riddance Mr. Daniel.

Last spring, his company announced a plan to reverse the direction of a pipeline called line 9, so that it could carry crude east rather than west. No big deal, right? What Enbridge didn’t do was show all its cards. The real plan is to send dirty tar sands oil across several Great Lakes and New England states to Portland, Maine, for transfer by ship to refineries or for export. The project, called Trailbreaker, was floated two years ago, and then abandoned when the recession set in.

When local groups in New England announced opposition a few weeks back to piping tar sands near precious rivers in the area, Enbridge reached up its sleeve for the denial card. A spokesman for Enbridge told the Associated Press, “We have been absolutely clear on the fact that the company is not pursuing the Trailbreaker Project.”

That’s not credible. As NWFs Curtis Fisher retorted in the AP article, Enbridge denied it was looking at reversing Line 9, until they went ahead and announced they wanted to reverse Line 9. In fact, the company is salivating at the prospect of moving (by their 2008 estimate) 150,000 barrels of tar sludge a day to Portland.

“We’re pretty excited about [Trailbreaker],” an oil executive said in a 2008 presentation,”because it provides capacity on an as-needed basis, and it involves existing assets so it can be completed at low cost and on a quick turnaround.”

So what’s the truth? Enbridge appears to be playing a dangerous game of denial, putting the pieces in place for a tar sands route to New England, while denying the once and future Trailbreaker (or something by a different name) is happening. Elephant in the room, what elephant?

Divide and Conquer

Meanwhile, another pipeline giant, TransCanada, has split the 2,000 mile Keystone XL into two, in an attempt to move the project piecemeal and shrink the scope of the State Department’s environmental review. Wildlife Promise recently referred to this as divide and conquer:

[A]after Keystone XL was rejected the first time, TransCanada decided to split off the “Gulf Coast segment” of the pipeline, which stretches through Oklahoma and Texas, as a stand-alone project. Because this route doesn’t cross the US border, it avoided the need for the Presidential Permit and the review it entails.

That particular tactic paid off for TransCanada last month, as the Army Corps of engineers  gave a green light to construction of XL in Oklahoma and Texas. The oil execs at TransCanada probably had some high-fives last month as well when the State Department announced its new environmental review will ignore the southern segment of Keystone XL.

[Click here to take action and stop latest attempt to resurrect Keystone XL.]

Must History Repeat?

In the summer of 2010, over a million gallons of tar sands oil spilled when an Enbridge  pipeline ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, contaminating  the Kalamazoo River. Families were driven from their homes and wildlife suffered and died. Responding to the spill, Michigan Congressman Fred Upton said, “Each and every one of us is all too familiar with the devastation wrought by the BP Gulf disaster and now we have a nightmare here in our own backyard. The mistakes and missteps that sabotaged the response and cleanup in the Gulf cannot happen here in southwest Michigan.”

A wonderful sentiment to ride out the news cycle, but Rep.Upton went on to champion Keystone XL, even as the mess persisted in his back yard.

The Environmental Protection Agency ordered Enbridge to clean up the mess, but it is still not cleaned up. Workers are still struggling to remove residual crude oil and are increasingly resigned to the possibility that it may never be cleaned. According EPA’s website, after the spill 39 miles of the river system were closed to public access. By April 17, 2012, three miles–three—had been reopened. Other segments may reopen this year, says EPA, if it is safe.

Accidents in the Trailbreaker pipeline may be more likely because it’s so old. One section is 52 years old, and other large section dates to 1975. A spill from this pipeline could sully rivers, lakes and bays. At risk would be cherished places like Lake Ontario, the Saint Lawrence River, the Connecticut River, the Androscoggin River, Sebago Lake and Casco Bay.

Can We Afford to Trust Enbridge?

A 2007 Enbridge pipeline explosion in Minnesota, pictured here, killed two and spewed oil, fire and smoke into surrounding communities.

Just recently, we learned from media reports that Enbridge has under-estimated the risk of a tar sands spill along its Northern Gateway Project across western Canada, basically ignoring their dismal record in Michigan.

A former insurance CEO, Robyn Allan, concluded that Enbridge does not have “adequate insurance coverage or the corporate structure to cover a multi-billion dollar spill,” reported Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee.

‘There is no reason to believe Enbridge would be directly responsible for the cost of any spill based on the limited partnership structure. This structure allows profits to flow to Enbridge, but from what I have seen in the documents, not spill liabilities,’ explains Allan.”

Allan also suggested that Enbridge only minimally understands how the heavy crude oil behaves. It usually sinks to the bottom of a river and is harder to clean up than other fuels.

Allan added that the “company suffers from a corporate culture that places growth as priority above operational safety.”  That offers little reassurance to New Englanders. That was made evident when media recently reported that even as the Kalamazoo spill was happening, Enbridge employees, hundreds of miles away had one priority: get the oil flowing. Rather than check for a spill, they attempted to restart the pipeline, not once, but twice.

If Enbridge’s misadventures weren’t so heartbreaking it would be hilarious. Maybe we should call it “Heartbreaker,” not “Trailbreaker.”

[Note: special thanks to NWFs Peter LaFontaine for advice and editing in drafting this post.]

A Great Blue Heron coated in tar sands oil in Enbridge's Kalamazoo River spill (photo: Michigan Department of Environmental Quality)

Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development said the recent spills are not necessarily cause for alarm, noting they happened in different parts of the province.

The pipeline agency chimed in, saying it’s “confident its regulations are protective of public safety.” Nothing to see here, folks, just another friendly neighborhood Hazmat team trying to clean up toxic material in your rivers and farms!

Enbridge is doing its best to keep these accidents out of the spotlight:

[Enbridge] said as soon as it detected the leak, it notified civic authorities and other regulatory agencies. But Steve Upham, reeve [sheriff] of the County of St. Paul, where the pumping station is located, said as of Tuesday night he hadn’t received any notification. Upham said he was aware of the spill only through media reports.

“I don’t think anybody in the county, at this point, has been notified,” he said. Asked if he should have been contacted by Enbridge, Upham said: “I would have thought so. Or Alberta Environment, because they would be notified, I think. We’ve heard nothing from anybody.”

Industry Profits Despite System-Wide Failures

Sean Kheraj, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto, calculates that the oil and gas industry spilled over 7.3 million gallons in Alberta alone between 2006-2010. Since then, several major incidents have upped that number significantly, including a 1.1 million-gallon spill near Little Buffalo and two ruptures earlier this summer that totaled at least a quarter million gallons. In fact, a spokesman for Alberta’s energy regulator admits that the province’s pipelines averaged two failures per day in 2010.

But Enbridge has done well financially despite its inability to keep oil out of our environment; the company reported a 31% rise in revenue earlier this year. And it seeks an even bigger expansion in the near future, with plans to stretch its tar sands pipeline system to both coasts and covert intentions to send the corrosive sludge through New England. A tar sands spill in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine could spell catastrophe for the northeast’s drinking water and wildlife habitat, and the threat has led groups like NWF to organize citizens against these proposals.

Meanwhile, other tar sands backers like TransCanada and the Koch brothers are leaning on their friends in Congress to speed up the pace of pipeline construction in the United States. More pipelines means more spills and more destruction of the Canadian boreal forest, but with hundreds of billions—even trillions—of dollars at stake, it’s no wonder that Big Oil is pushing these projects even in the face of system-wide trouble.

We need your help to protect wildlife at risk from oil spills and habitat loss in Alberta and across the continent! Speak up now to stop the spread of dangerous tar sands oil.

Cleanup crews are still working to repair the damage caused by Enbridge's 2010 spill in Michigan (photo: Mic Stolz)

Enbridge Inc.—which is known for its terrible safety record and is responsible for a massive tar sands spill in the Kalamazoo River in 2010—has asked the National Energy Board in Canada to allow for a partial reversal of its pipeline between Ontario and Montreal to allow oil in that pipeline to flow east. If this reversal is approved, it is highly likely Big Oil will soon seek to move tar sands through a pipeline that now flows west from Portland, ME to Montreal by reversing the flow of that pipeline as well.

Such a reversal, if approved, would open the way for this dangerous fuel, which is much more corrosive, acidic, and harder to clean up in the event of spill than conventional oil, to flow through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  The pipeline (called the “Portland to Montreal Pipeline” or PMPL) currently cuts through or borders some of New England’s most important waters, including Sebago Lake, the Connecticut River, and tributaries to Lake Champlain. While its safety record isn’t as abysmal as other companies’, the PMPL has suffered major spills, including one that fouled Lake Memphremagog, and is already much older than the projected lifespan of proposed new tar sands pipelines.

The Portland-Montreal Pipeline cuts through New England on its route to the coast.

But even as we take strides toward reducing global warming pollution, climatologists warn that tar sands are a carbon bomb in the process of being ignited. Because it takes so much energy to produce and refine, fueling cars with tar sands gasoline has about 20 percent more carbon emissions than fueling cars with gasoline from conventional oil. This means the use of tar sands will undermine any efforts in the Northeast to reduce carbon emissions from our transportation sector. Climate change threatens to make Vermont maple syrup and Maine lobsters things of the past. We need to turn to carbon-free sources of fuel now, not move in the opposite direction.

Sebago Lake -- one of Maine's biggest sources of drinking water -- would be put at risk by a tar sands pipeline (photo: Peter Hopper)

Tell Canada’s National Energy Board to stop the Trailbreaker pipeline proposal!

To hear NWF’s Jim Murphy talk about tar sands’ threat to Northeastern states, click here.

Read more about our work to fight back against Big Oil’s tar sands scheme at nwf.org/tarsands.