What is another $4 billion when you are TransCanada Pipelines? This is not just a pipeline, these people want to complete but a bulldozer to get Alberta tar sands bitumen to the sea. And all they can come up with in announcing changes in the plans is more money and the same old miss-direction.
You would think when you had so much money to spend on a pipeline across the breadth of Canada you would spend a few dollars on better writers?
It seems the objections from Quebec about the safety of an export terminal in the St. Lawrence River have had an effect. This terminal is now scrapped and all the exports are to be through the export port promised to TransCanada by the Irving interests in Saint John, New Brunswick. It makes sense when you realize that foreign tankers can bring light crude to Saint John for processing at the Irving refineries and leave the Bay of Fundy loaded with tar sands’ bitumen. (The Irving’s have made it clear that they do not want to convert their refinery to the highly polluting processing of bitumen to synthetic crude oil.)
But many of the existing parts of this Energy East pipeline are old gas pipelines that have seen many years of service. The intent is to convert these old lines to higher pressure, heated lines that can push bitumen through the line at greater volumes. With the more corrosive nature of the bitumen slurry going through the pipes, it is more of a question when rather than if there will be a rupture.
A pipeline spill of bitumen slurry is far different problem than a crude oil spill. On land a bitumen spill will take time to get down to the water table—once there, the water is poisoned for humans and animals. In water a bitumen spill will float until the lighter slurry separates—allowing the bitumen to sink to the bottom. An example of this was the Kalamazoo, Michigan rupture of an Enbridge pipeline in July, 2010 that spilled over a million U.S. gallons of bitumen slurry that is still not completely cleaned up.
TransCanada’s writers keep on extolling the financial benefits of the changed pipeline and suggest that the pipeline will be carrying 1.1 million barrels per day of Alberta crude oil. The only problem is that the line is designed to carry bitumen slurry and that is not by any stretch crude oil. Nor can the writers explain what new jobs, this pipeline will create after the new sections as well as the new heating and pumping stations are looked after.
The Energy East pipeline might have been hit by inflation causing it to cost another $4 billion. It is still the same old, same old.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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