Thank goodness for mayors who can call a spade a spade. Not every city enjoys that luxury. The only problem is that mayors and their municipalities have no jurisdiction over pipelines. What they do is posture for their voters and then conveniently remember it is not their bailiwick when the going gets tough.
Toronto Mayor John Tory blew by the pipeline issue in the last Toronto election because he did not want a fight with fellow Conservative Stephen Harper at the time. Toronto has a pipeline right through the city that is currently preparing to pump diluted bitumen through high density housing areas. It was quietly given the final go-ahead in the middle of last year’s federal election.
But if it was just crude oil, there would not be the concern. The Enbridge Line 9 is an old pipeline that has pumped crude oil back and forth for almost 40 years. With increased line pressure and the corrosive nature of bitumen, it is a disaster waiting to happen. What is particularly grating is that the National Energy Board approved the Line 9 reversal to specifically pump crude oil at a variety of high pressures. There is no mention of bitumen in the NEB order.
Bitumen is what you get when you wash the sands out of tarsands. Bitumen is a potpourri of chemicals in a viscous tarry substance that can be converted to synthetic oil. It can be pumped through a pipeline by diluting it with hydrocarbons, heating it and pumping it at high pressure. When it gets to a refinery, the conversion process creates vast quantities of what is called bitumen slag which can be used as a highly polluting fuel. This is a major component of what is referred to as downstream carbon emissions. Bitumen is polluting our environment even before it becomes fuel for your gas-burning automobile.
Bitumen is a triple threat polluter. The tar sands exploiting companies are polluting the Alberta environment with vast acreages of settling ponds for the polluted water and tar sands residue. The refineries dread the bitumen slag that can blow like a dirty cloud over their communities. And bitumen spills from a pipeline are a triple threat that can never come clean as on water the hydrocarbon thinner floats and the bitumen goes to the bottom, while on land the bitumen can seep down and pollute the water table.
While Prime Minister Trudeau will bend over backwards to try to save the Alberta tar sands, the mayors are right. There is no redemption for bitumen to be shoved down a pipeline. Rebuilding the Canadian economy has to be high priority but it cannot be done at the expense of our environment.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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