U.S. pipeline regulator reviewing special permits after Keystone oil spills -source https://t.co/QOLs8JNV2O pic.twitter.com/Ghi2ZJkKLk
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 21, 2022
This is the third spill in five years. It's spilling into Kansas Mill Creek.
Operators were alerted to an issue with the pipeline on Dec. 7. As of Friday morning, TC Energy says, 4,125 barrels of oil from the creek have been recovered of the estimated 14,000 barrels (about 588,000 gallons) reportedly lost in the spill.
Aerial footage of the leak from Nebraska Public Media shows the leak has affected a nearby pasture and residents' farmland.
Many initial details, like the cause for the spill, are still not clear. What is known is the type of oil that was being transported through the pipeline: tar sands oil, also called diluted bitumen.
Because it's tar sands oil, it's thick and hard to clean up. (It's not easy to convert to gasoline for this reason, too.)
Republicans have been blaming Biden for cancelling further work on the project and claiming it had anything to do with higher energy costs this year (it doesn't--at all)--but this hammers home why this kind of pipeline is a problem: we don't eat or drink oil, and this kind of spill can damage farmland and poison water. For years, my objection to it has been that it runs too close to the Ogallala aquifer, right in the nation's breadbasket.
Anyway, when Republicans want to start in on Keystone XL--the pipeline that runs through the US to ship Canadian oil for export and complain that Democrats hate cheap energy, I think my response is something along the lines of what my dad told me when he despaired of the sloppy condition of my room. He said, "Only a sick animal shits where it eats."
That probably won't make a dent in the hard heads of people who doubled-down on "Drill here, drill now" after the Deepwater Horizon spill. But I don't know how much more obvious the keystone problems have to be.
1 comment:
Completely separate from the question of should these things be built in the first place I have a comment from a different angle. For 20 or so years I had some involvement in maintenance oversight of sections of a number of fairly long-distance pipelines; natural gas, various refined petroleum products, and a few crude oil lines as well. In all my years there was a minor leak on a natural gas line and a fairly large one on a crude oil line. So, inquiring minds would like to know, why is this pipeline such a problem? In my admittedly fairly limited experience the biggest problem was poor/delayed maintenance followed by inexperienced/understaffed work crews followed by shitty/inappropriate construction materials. Given the frequency of problems on this fairly new pipeline I'm guessing were seeing the synergistic affects of all three.
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