More Keystone XL Lies

Transcript

Mining Tar Sands Produces Much More Air Pollution Than We Thought

By Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian

February 3, 2014 8:02PM

Last week, the U.S. State Department released a report indicating that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Western Canada’s Athabasca oil sands to the U.S., wouldn’t have significant environmental impacts. It’s worth noting, though, that the report didn’t say that extraction from the oil sands itself won’t have environmental impacts-just that this mining will proceed with or without the pipeline being built.

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Frank Wania and Abha Parajulee, environmental scientists at the University of Toronto, came to the finding by looking at previous estimates for the PAH emissions that result from mining (gleaned from the pollutant release inventory and the mining companies’ environmental impact assessments) and comparing them to levels of PAHs that they measured in the air in the Athabasca region.  

“We found that these estimates are insufficient to explain what’s being measured in the environment,” Wania says. “The concentrations of PAHs that should be out there, based on these assumptions, are far too low.”

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Impact assessments considered these PAHs “disposed,” Wania says. “But when they get mixed up with hot water, that creates ideal conditions for the PAHs to mobilize and enter the atmosphere.” When he and Parajulee created a new model that included PAHs evaporating from tailing ponds in their model, they arrived at estimated levels of PAHs in the atmosphere that were much closer to what’s been observed.

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If nothing else, it is concerning that throughout decades of oil extraction in Athabasca, environmental impact assessments have dramatically underestimated the emissions levels of a key air pollutant. The finding provides one more reason to be worried about how oil sand extraction affects the environment.

Measured Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons are 100 to 1000 times higher than those listed in the State Department report and “the EPA does list them as priority pollutants [PDF] because in animal-based lab experiments they’ve led to tumors, interfered with the immune system and caused reproductive problems.”

Nor is it true “that this mining will proceed with or without the pipeline being built.”  If it were, why the need to build Keystone XL at all?

Or as Charles Pierce puts it in Esquire–

The whole project is simply shot through with bad faith, from the phony job estimates to the sharp practices by which people have been relieved of their property to any environmental evaluation emanating from TransCanada or any government to which it has attached itself. These apparently now include our State Department. There is no reason to trust a word coming from anyone who stands to make a dime from it.