While world politics will change significantly if the US can become energy independent, fierce battles over how to access energy continue. The US federal government has quietly approved major tar sands transportation projects with unstudied environmental effects — managing to circumvent the executive branch’s impact analysis that paralyzed development of the Keystone XL pipeline and bolstered activists’ claims that the project is dangerous and damaging to the environment. The Keystone pipeline has become a household name. The controversy caused by Canadian pipeline company TransCanada’s project, which would bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. each day, has ignited an environmental movement across the country, but the U.S. has approved other cross-border tar sands transportation projects with little fanfare. Projects include TransCanada competitor Enbridge to build a facility in Illinois to transport crude oil from the tar sands via train, which was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last week. The decision came just weeks after the State Department approved an Enbridge pipeline project that would cross Canada through the Minnesota border and help bring millions more barrels of oil to the U.S. each year. The project was approved without a public review process or an environmental-impact assessment.
Environmental activists say the two approvals show that the tar sands industry is intent on getting tar sands oil to the U.S. regardless of whether Keystone is approved. And the approvals may show the industry has taken a lesson from the current Keystone debacle about how to move tar sands oil without public relations headaches. Pipelines that cross an international border need to go through an often-lengthy review process, and that is what has stalled TransCanada’s Keystone plans, as President Obama delays a decision on whether to approve the pipeline.
The Keystone XL pipeline would move as many as 830,000 barrels of oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska, where it would then be transferred to other pipelines that snake their way down to Gulf Coast oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Environmentalists say the project would guarantee the further development of the tar sands in Canada — a previously pristine area that has been extensively mined for oil that’s particularly carbon-intensive to process.
Last Friday, FERC approved plans for an Enbridge rail facility in Flanagan, Illinois, that would help transport up to 140,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day across the Canadian border to the states. That pipeline connects to another pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma, which brings the oil down to refineries in the Gulf where it can be turned into usable fuels, or sometimes sold for export to other countries. Like many debates in the US, the tradeoffs in certain decisions are not made clear.
