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Sunday, March 25, 2012

The XL Pipeline

I don't usually put my newspaper rants on the blog but due to a shortage of other entries, I am putting this one on. It is a guest editorial in the Stevens Point Journal.
                                                  Keystone XL Oil Pipeline

On Jan 27 The Journal ran an editorial advocating the approval of the XL pipeline. I thought I might add an additional perspective.

First off, it is important to know that the US uses almost 20 million barrels of oil a day (m/bl/d) and around 60+% of it comes from foreign sources. Canada sells all of their surplus oil to the US, about 1.8 m/bl/day. The Canadian oil (crude and sands bitumen) comes to us now via pipelines. The building of the XL pipeline will add another 700,000/bl/day . In total, in the future, the US might get 15% of its oil needs from a very friendly Canada---- it still is foreign oil.

The US domestically produces 5.6 m/bl/day. Up until recently the amount had been declining noticeably since  peaking at 10m/bl/d in 1972. Our new shale oil drilling has added an additional 600,000 bl/day. It is thought additional drilling in the shale may add another 600K-700K bl/day in a few years. These shale wells decline rapidly in 18 months, so the drilling rate has to be intense just to stay even.

While the US may have these new sources of shale oil, most of our other domestic sources (i.e. Thunderhorse) are still rapidly declining. So the increase coming from shale sources, may give us a small, brief increase, but, in the end our domestic oil supplies will continue to decline. Presently, we are getting over 10 million/bl/day from foreign sources. In other words, it is not possible to be energy independent. So to keep using this term, “energy independent” is nonsense.

The only way to be close to energy independent is to cut consumption in half, meaning using the same per capita as Europeans do.

There is more. The oil from tar sands requires huge amounts of energy in production and that energy comes largely form Canadian natural gas---and their natural gas supplies have been declining, so now they are talking about using nuclear power. The amount of energy it takes to produce the bitumen is massive and makes the energy invested to energy returns small. As a result of using huge amounts of natural gas to produce the bitumen/oil, more CO2 is emitted than in conventional oil production. 

The tar sands mining is catastrophic in every sense.. The environmental destruction is profound. This includes the outright plundering of the landscape and the trashing of the Athabascan River. The National Catholic Reporter Jan. 7th cited the following, “Bishop Luc Bouchard of Alberta’s St. Paul diocese, where the heart of Canada’s tar sands industry is located, wrote a pastoral letter in 2009, “The Integrity of Creation and the Athabasca Oil Sands,” challenging the moral legitimacy of the project. In an August 2011 interview with Catholic News Service, Bouchard questioned the morality of exploiting the oil fields because of the danger posed to indigenous people and the environment. He said he doubted that oil mining made necessary by the pursuit of profit and to satisfy a consumer lifestyle was worth the risk of enhancing climate change.”

We also have to keep in mind that refining and burning the bitumen/oil, which is very dirty fuel, significantly contributes to pollution and more and more CO2 production, the culprit of global weather change. The issue is the XL pipeline is an out-and-out facilitator of massive environmental destruction, of uncontrolled CO2 emissions, and definitely a question of morality.

Again from National Catholic Reporter:
Activist Bill McKibben, who in 1989 wrote the first popular book about global climate change, The End of Nature, reported being startled by a remark made to him by James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. McKibben asked: “The pipeline will support and extend the extraction of exceptionally dirty crude oil from bitumen, using huge amounts of water and heat, which would then be piped to refineries and eventually consumed as fuel, releasing a vast new volume of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What will the effect of all this be on the world’s climate?”
Hansen replied: “Essentially, it’s game over for the planet.”

In view of the fact that liquid fuels are presently showing a decline world-wide, most notable in net exports (meaning that which is available to purchase by an importer like the US) and that going after more difficult and destructive oil projects, is, in my view,  bordering on insanity, we must begin looking at use reduction. There will not be energy independence. Our own brief growth in shale oil and Canadian tar, cannot even offset or replace declining oil wells much less respond to rapid US population growth of 3 million a year. Americans must consider use reduction. It is the only option.








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