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To make sense of the points of contention, I've outlined a primer on the pipeline. By looking at Keystone XL through the lens of what it lacks, I hope to map the rocky terrain of the debate and the ground that's left for both sides to cover, regardless of the final decision. As such, it seems best to begin with why it's still a dispute, which is that the plan is missing:
Approval
If its application were approved, Keystone XL would add an 875-mile stretch of pipe to a larger system exporting a petroleum deposit named bitumen from Canadian oil sands. Because the proposed section would cross a US border, the corporation seeking to build it, TransCanada, must obtain a presidential permit to proceed.
In March 2008, George W. Bush granted TransCanada a permit for an earlier phase of Keystone, which laid pipe from the Bakken Shale Formation in Alberta, Canada, through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri to refineries in Illinois. In September 2008, the company applied for a permit to build Keystone XL, a branch that would cut through Montana instead of North Dakota and provide a path from Oklahoma to refineries along Texas' Gulf Coast.
Barack Obama was elected president the next month though, and the pipeline landed in limbo when he postponed his decision to allow for more review. In January 2012, he formally rejected TransCanada's application and asked the company to reapply with revisions. It did, and Obama's now expected to make an announcement by late summer or early fall. As for his criteria, he recently said that that he'd approve the Keystone XL extension only if it would not "significantly exacerbate" the problem of carbon pollution.1,2
Not surprisingly, these remarks have been interpreted as a good sign for both pipeline supporters and opponents. As these groups continue to voice their views, it should be noted that Secretary of State John Kerry has yet to weigh in on the topic, which he's compelled to do by an executive order.3 Due to the language of this precedent, the secretary of state must decide whether projects of this kind are in the "national interest" before permits are granted.
Kerry's department should be issuing a recommendation soon, but with Obama's reasoning to hinge on "carbon pollution" and Kerry's on "national interest," it will be interesting to watch how they'll be defining these terms. Their analysis may be made all the more difficult by the lack of:
Scientific Consensus
Many researchers have released their findings on the plan, from jobs numbers to speculations about oil consumption, but their conclusions have mostly furthered disagreement.
The State Department has released four drafts of its Environmental Impact Statement, with the latest reporting that bitumen "produces 17 percent more greenhouse gases than natural crude oil already refined here."4 However, the department also looked at market data and maintained that these oil sands would be developed with or without Keystone XL, making the release of greenhouse gases eventual and a pipeline the best option.After a review, the EPA sent State Department officials a letter declaring their report "insufficient." Particularly, the EPA found some of their climate calculations flawed and called for a closer look at route and transport alternatives with a special consideration of cleaning up diluted bitumen in the event of a spill.
The EPA feels the latter requires attention because raw bitumen is heavier than other forms of petroleum. If there's a spill in water, bitumen sinks, such as with the ruptured Enbridge pipeline that dumped 20,082 bitumen barrels into the Kalamazoo River. Three years and nearly a billion dollars later, the Kalamazoo is still being drudged as a superfund site and the largest inland oil spill in US history.5Relatedly, a study by the National Research Council found that diluted bitumen does not corrode pipe more than conventional crude,6 but Department of Transportation figures show that US pipelines lately have spilled an average of 112,569 barrels of conventional crude a year.7 While pipeline promoters cheer the corrosion findings, one wonders if they're factoring into their appraisals how much more difficult it would be to clean an equivalent amount of spilled, and potentially sunken, bitumen.
For these reasons, even with these discrepancies, if Keystone XL is approved I hope it has:
Sensitive Leak Detection
If permitted, TransCanada would use software to detect potential pipeline leaks. The program notifies operators if there is a drop of pressure of 1.5%, which for Keystone XL's 36-inch pipe and 830,000-barrel capacity is a detection threshold of more than 12,000 barrels a day. By design, more than 12,000 barrels of bitumen would need to be released for TransCanada to be notified that there is a leak.
It could install monitors on helicopters as well that can detect oil vapors in infrared rays of sunlight from leaks at a rate of 1 barrel a day.8 Sections in ecologically sensitive areas could be lined further with fiber optic cables that measure strain and temperature,9 but TransCanada has not committed to them.
Its CEO, Russ Girling, has said that Keystone XL "will be the safest pipeline that has ever been built in the United States." Even if this is the case, it's clear that Keystone XL would not be the safest pipeline that is possible.
Similarly, a caveat to the entire Keystone XL controversy is also necessary. While we don't know yet what the historical decision will be, what we do know now is that the pipeline lacks:
A Monopoly on US Energy Infrastructure
Here in New York, the Spectra pipeline soon will be moving millions of barrels of hydrofracked gas beneath the streets of West Village. Earlier this month, the State Department approved construction of the Vantage pipeline, a 430-mile-long conduit set to export natural gas from North Dakota to Alberta. Countless other decisions determining the quality of our environment are made at the municipal and state levels each day, and many without awareness campaigns.
Keystone XL has unified diverse networks of advocates, and members of these groups could keep mobilizing their diffuse resources to move into political spaces broader than the pipeline's path from Hardisty to Houston. This passage has been bent into an unavoidable question mark for the Obama administration, but it's only part of a legacy that they—and we all—can help construct.
Credits: Map of Keystone pipeline system from Wikipedia Commons. Video of all US pipeline incidents since 1986 by the Center of Biological Diversity. Image of pipeline in Nebraska by Flickr's shannonpatrick17.
1. Broder, J.M. "Obama's Remarks Offer Hope to Opponents of Oil Pipeline." New York Times. July 6, 2013.
2. Shear, M. D. and J. Calmes. "Obama Says He'll Evaluate Pipeline Project Depending on Pollution." New York Times. July 27, 2013.
3. Graves, L. and R. Grim. "John Kerry Controls Keystone XL Decision — Good News For Pipeline Opponents." Huffington Post. June 25, 2013.
4. Johnson, M. A. "State Department Admits Keystone Environmental Impact but Says There's No Better Way." NBC News. March 4, 2013.
5. Matheny, K. "Three Years after Oil Spill, a Slow Recovery Haunts Kalamazoo River." Detroit Free Press. June 24, 2013.
6. National Research Council. TRB Special Report 311: Effects of Diluted Bitumen on Crude Oil Transmission Pipelines. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.
7. Penty, R. and M. Lee. "Keystone XL Pipe Shuns Infrared Sensors to Detect Leaks." Bloomberg News. June 15, 2013.
8. Ibid.
9. Inaudi, D. and Glisic, B. (2010). Long-range pipeline monitoring by distributed fiber optic sensing. Journal of Pressure Vessel Technology, 132, 11701-1 - 11701-9 DOI: 10.1115/1.3062942
