Are you as weary as everyone else with the heavy-handed TransCanada Pipelines television commercials? All the company wants to do is convert its main gas pipeline to a heated, high pressure line for bitumen slurry and extend it across Canada to Saint John, New Brunswick. And if you think the television commercials are expensive, you should attend one of the dog and pony sales pitches the company is doing for the locals along the pipeline route. What matters a few millions when potential profits are in the billions?
But the rub is that you would have some sympathy for their objectives if they were just honest with Canadians about what they are really doing. While it is true that pipelines have a better safety record than rail transport on a per barrel shipped basis, pipeline spills can be even more catastrophic. Sensors can tell the pipeline company that they are spilling into the environment, but it depends on where the leak is and how fast they can get people to it that determines the extent of the problems.
They will tell you that oil sands crude is no more corrosive than regular crude oil. They have very artfully changed the subject. They are right: bitumen from the Alberta tar sands refined into synthetic crude oil is no more corrosive than normal crude oil. Tar sands bitumen mixed with polymers to create a slurry for shipment by pipeline is still much more viscous material and it has to be heated and pushed under considerable additional pressure to move it through a pipeline. The ability to completely remove corrosive and wearing materials from the bitumen remains of concern.
They also say that cleaning up oil sands synthetic crude poses the same challenges as any crude. The difference with bitumen slurry is that in a waterway, the polymers carrying the bitumen float and carry the spill with the current—until enough of the polymer has evaporated to let the bitumen sink. That is why more than 40 kilometres of the Kalamazoo River and tributaries in Michigan are still not cleansed of bitumen after three years of effort after a pipeline spill.
And if you think this entire bitumen exercise is to make sure you get gas for your family car, they have really got you conned. Whether any or all of these new pipelines makes it to Kitimat, Vancouver, the Texas Gulf ports, Saint John, Quebec City or Portland, Maine, the objective is to ship it offshore to countries that do not care about pollution. Caring Canadian refineries do not want to convert to handling bitumen because they do not want the pollution problems.
It is amazing to observe—as something of a footnote—that they are building a new refinery in Alberta so that the province can have its own super-polluting solution as to what to do with bitumen.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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