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OIL CHEM SPILL

517 belated redumdent, at any rate, age of trump-ish

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10 21

freight ship anchor storm CA --> spill

katie porter hearings? boosts BBB?

biden wants offshore wind?

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carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village of Satartia, Mississippi, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path.

Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country. Spurred by federal tax incentives from the Biden Administration, the fossil fuel industry is planning to build tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States for experimental carbon capture and storage — a process aimed at sequestering carbon emissions from power plants, sending it through pipelines, and injecting it underground.

While regulators are working to craft updated safety rules for these pipelines, major fossil fuel companies and their trade groups — including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — have launched a lobbying blitz to scale back regulations and target the regulators themselves so they can construct new pipelines as quickly as possible.

Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. Upon entering the atmosphere during a pipeline leak or rupture, it can travel long distances, shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate, or even kill people and wildlife.

Only about 5,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines currently exist across the country, largely operating in states across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. Many communities, landowners,and environmental and public health groups have staunchly opposed and, in some cases, successfully prevented their build-out, such as eliminating the proposed 1,300-mile Navigator pipeline that would have crossed through five Midwestern states.

But now, this pipeline network could be greatly expanded. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and financial industry estimates, it could take up to 96,000 miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines — enough to wrap around the earth four times — to transport just 15 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency tasked with pipeline safety, announced in 2022 that it would update rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

The agency, which is overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and was implicated in the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is itself up for reauthorization, meaning Congress will reconsider its lawmaking mandates and funding. Now the pipeline industry, represented by its main lobbying group, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, is using both the rule-making and reauthorization processes to push its agenda forward.

“There is no need for adding a host of punitive provisions on the pipeline industry,” reads written January testimony from Andrew Black, the lobbying group’s president and CEO, to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has proposed a bill on the pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization. “The data just does not support those who wish to impose harsh new mandates or penalties on pipeline operators.”

On March 6, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association arranged a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is currently reviewing the draft carbon dioxide safety rules. Also present at the meeting were representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Marathon, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, Phillips 66, and Valero, along with representatives from the Department of Transportation.

“THE ADMINSTRATION [sic] SHOULD AVOID AN OVERLY BROAD OR UNSUBSTANTIATED CO2 PIPELINES RULEMAKING THAT RISKS DELAY AND IMPERILS FINALIZATION,” reads the all-caps intro to the lobbying group’s talking points for that meeting.

In response to a request for comment, Liquid Energy Pipeline Association’s president and CEO Andy Black offered several reasons “why we think a measured approach to pipeline safety legislation is appropriate.” According to Black, federal data shows “the number of CO2 pipeline incidents is flat over the last 5 years,” and “Federal regulation imposes dozens of safety requirements on interstate CO2 pipelines on everything from design and construction to inspection, maintenance, and emergency response.”

Robin Rorick, one of the American Petroleum Institute's vice presidents, said in an email, “The safe use and development of CO2 pipelines will be critical as our industry and the nation as a whole advances its emissions reduction efforts. API will continue to work with [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] and industry experts to safely accelerate the widescale, responsible deployment of CO2 pipelines while protecting the environment and communities where we live and work.”

An Invisible Menace

The urgency of this issue reemerged this month after a carbon dioxide leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, co-owned by ExxonMobil and Denbury, a carbon capture developer that owns the country's largest carbon dioxide pipeline network.

Residents within a quarter mile of the leak received a phone notification to shelter in place. But others only received the news from a Facebook post by local officials, citing a “bust” in Exxon’s high-pressure carbon dioxide pipeline in Sulphur and warning residents to shut their doors and windows, turn off any ventilation, and wait.

While the proper procedure is to evacuate, local fire chief Todd Parker said changing winds near the leak made that impossible. “For the homes that were affected, they had to drive through the release to be able to get out, so we couldn’t evacuate them,” Parker explained. He said it took more than two hours for pipeline operators to stop the leak, which was called in by a resident who reported seeing “white clouds” coming from the pipeline.

In the meantime, Roishetta Ozane, a Sulphur resident and local environmental justice organizer, began fielding calls from panicked residents.

“People were reaching out asking me about what CO2 is,” Ozane said. But as a mom of six children, she was also scared and confused. “We know that this is colorless and odorless, so I just kept my children inside and made sure they were OK,” said Ozane. “Pipelines leak, CO2 leaks, and you don’t know it’s happened until tragedy has struck.”

She remembered the incident in Satartia, where another Denbury carbon dioxide pipeline rupture caused mass asphyxiation, turning people into dazed and unresponsive “zombies,” with some losing consciousness. As hundreds rushed to evacuate, vehicles became paralyzed, since cars need oxygen to burn fuel. Some residents still face serious health issues years later.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration slapped Denbury with the second-largest fine in its history after the Satartia disaster for neglecting to address hazards to its pipeline system and notify emergency responders of the leak or train them to address such an accident before it happened.

The leak in Sulphur is “a very sobering introduction to how the companies will probably try to handle similar incidents,” said journalist Dan Zegart, who reported in depth on the Satartia disaster. “I say ‘similar incidents’ not even really knowing what [kind of leak] we’re talking about here, which is a perfect example of what we’re worried about in the future.”

No injuries have been reported so far in Sulphur — regulators are still investigating the leak and the local municipality said it did not have records to provide — but the bewildering incident highlights the uncertain future for residents in the path of the carbon dioxide pipeline build-out.

“It is alarming that we have been organizing, educating the community, educating ourselves, and trying to get answers from the government on [carbon capture and storage] in Louisiana for three years now, and we still did not have the information or frankly relationships necessary to get real-time information on what was happening [in Sulphur],” said Jane Patton, a campaign manager at the nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for International Environmental Law.

“[The Liquid Energy Pipeline Association] supports Congress mandating and [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] imposing new safety requirements on CO2 pipelines reflecting the lessons learned from the Satartia, MS pipeline incident,” said Black, the lobbying group’s president, in his email to The Lever. He added that the organization “looks forward to the results of Sulphur, LA pipeline incident review and any recommendations it produces for how to improve CO2 pipeline safety further.”

A Carbon Capture Future?

ExxonMobil — which purchased Denbury last year — is planning to build carbon capture infrastructure throughout Louisiana, where about a third of the nation’s carbon capture projects have been proposed.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve got plans to grow our carbon capture business and really focus on emitters all along that Denbury pipeline,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Louisiana newspaperThe Advocatein February. “What we’re doing is taking advantage of the ability to pump carbon dioxide back into the ground, and store it very safely. It’s isolated from the rest of the community.”

Patton says that such statements are just “another lie that we're being sold” by the fossil fuel industry.

“Louisiana is magic, and I want to be able to pass this magic onto the next generation behind me,” she said. “We deserve a future here and that future is not in carbon capture.”

Scientists have been sounding the alarm that carbon capture and sequestration is not an effective way to reduce emissions and is most often used for enhanced oil recovery, which means accessing more fossil fuels to be burned. The Department of Energy just announced it would invest $23 million in two projects to evaluate the potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide.

In internal company documents, the oil and gas industry has privately admitted that though CCS is “complex, costly, and will require additional power,” it will “enable the use of petroleum and natural gas” well into the future.

But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which ratcheted up tax credits available for carbon capture technology, the race is on to build out carbon dioxide pipelines.

Meanwhile, advocates say their concerns are being ignored. “You’ve got communities, NGOs on pipeline safety, governmental experts on pipeline safety all raising alarm about the hazards of what is being planned,” said Monique Harden, director of Law and Policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “What you don’t have is the response of protection or response that validates those concerns. Instead, what you have is silence.”

Last week, U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Brad Crabtree told the Illinois newspaper The Springfield State-Journal Register, “I would argue that our electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, it’s essential to modern life, but it also results in injuries and fatalities… But as a result of those risks, we do not have people saying we shouldn’t have electric transmission and distribution… CO2 pipelines are no different in that regard.”

Many of the proposed pipeline projects would run through communities like Sulphur — low-income communities of color already burdened by polluting petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities. These communities often have minimal resources to respond to worsening extreme weather events, like a tornado that destroyed the office of Ozane’s disaster-relief and environmental justice nonprofit not far from Sulphur just days after the leak.

“On top of the fact that this is taking public money, it is essentially a program where the federal government pays the oil and gas industry to deal with its own waste product in a way that burdens communities and makes us demonstrably less safe,” said Patton. “Accidents that happen along CO2 pipeline routes are going to become more common and much more dangerous if this program is allowed to move forward.”

While significant public resources are being deployed to develop this technology, understanding of carbon dioxide pipeline leaks — how they happen, the extent of their damage, and how they should be addressed — lags far behind.

“Often you need the knowledge gaps to be filled before you can fully fill the regulatory gaps,” said Bill Caram, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization that advocates for stronger regulations on pipeline safety. “Right now, CO2 pipelines are relatively rare and relatively rural, and we’re moving toward building a lot more CO2 pipelines closer to communities. I don't think we are ready to do that safely.”

Current carbon dioxide pipelines are largely located in small communities with underpaid or volunteer fire departments, many of which lack equipment to respond to and monitor for carbon dioxide leaks. In Sulphur’s case, the fire chief said he had not seen an emergency response protocol from the company until after the leak occurred.

Environmental and public health groups are pushing federal regulators for additional pipeline safety provisions, including updated “dispersion modeling” requirements, which show how carbon dioxide moves and would help emergency personnel respond to accidents, and adding odorants to the carbon dioxide to warn community members of a leak.

Groups are also advocating for new limits on contaminants in the pipelines that can lead to corrosion; mandates for training and coordination between pipeline operators and first responders; and additional rules for transporting gaseous and liquid carbon dioxide, which are currently unregulated.

Pipeline Pushback

But companies, and the lobbying groups that represent them, are pushing back. Since the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced its intention to make new rules on carbon dioxide pipelines in 2022, records show that Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Marathon, Shell, and Targa, along with trade associations like Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, have been lobbying the agency on pipeline infrastructure, rule-making, and safety, and/or lobbying on the agency’s reauthorization, among other issues.

During their March meeting at the White House Office of Management and Budget, fossil fuel interests appeared to push for rulemaking that prioritizes secrecy and expediency over safety and transparency.

“Any emergency response requirements should ensure the protection of sensitive information and be aligned with industry current best practices,” reads API’s talking points from the meeting. “The rule must be technically feasible and set realistic timelines for implementation to ensure it supports rather than hinders the build-out of this additional CO2 pipeline infrastructure.”

Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said advocacy groups are particularly concerned about the industry’s attempts to keep data about potential pipeline leaks hidden from the public. One of the bills being considered for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety reauthorization, which has received broad support from industry trade groups, contains a provision for the “protection of sensitive information in responding to a public request for information regarding carbon dioxide dispersion modeling.”

“There’s an additional cost in doing things safely, and increased public scrutiny when you’re affirmatively tasked with informing first responders and members of the public,” said Coulter. “Right now we just have to trust the company.”

Black, president of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, said in his comment to The Lever that his organization “supports operators sharing the results of pipeline modeling with state and local emergency planning officials and first responders,” but advocates for “limiting general public sharing of security sensitive information, as is the current approach for crude oil pipelines, to prevent bad actors from misusing this information to harm surrounding communities.”

Black did not respond directly to questions about evidence showing that pipeline operators have failed to communicate with first responders ahead of and properly respond to CO2 pipeline disasters in the past.

Caram of Pipeline Safety Trust said that given the risks that carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities across the country, the companies involved shouldn’t be allowed to dictate their own safety standards.

“It's like the difference between a speed limit of 55 MPH as opposed to a sign saying ‘please drive safely,’” Caram said. “We need something specific to hold them to.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/oil-spill/

pro publ

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the Gulf of Mexico came upon a mystery. The water had oil slicks that, because of the currents, couldn’t have originated from the site of the notorious accident.

With the help of satellite imagery, they figured out that oil was leaking from a different spill, a six-year-old disaster the public knew almost nothing about. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan had swept the legs out from under a 40-story oil-drilling platform operated by a company called Taylor Energy, causing a leak that continues to this day. It is the longest-running — and by one estimate, the largest — U.S. oil spill ever recorded, a contentious saga that prompted a recent “60 Minutes” segment.

It’s been an environmental nightmare for the region — but a massive tax bonanza for Phyllis Taylor, the owner of Taylor Energy and the fallen rig.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of a secret trove of tax data, from 2005 to 2018, Taylor took in some $444 million in income, most of it from wages, interest, dividends and capital gains, and didn’t pay a cent in federal income tax.

That’s in significant measure because she was able to transform money her company was compelled to spend cleaning up the oil spill into a perfectly legal nine-figure tax write-off for herself.

Representatives for Taylor, now 80, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Taylor is part of a set of ultrawealthy Americans who manage to avoid federal income taxes for years on end by using their businesses or leisure interests to throw off enough deductions to offset the millions or even billions of dollars they make. We’ve nicknamed the group the biggest losers. Taylor’s story shows just how lucrative it can be to be a member of that particular club.

Patrick Taylor, Phyllis Taylor’s husband, founded Taylor Energy in 1979. He would eventually become the richest man in Louisiana and enjoyed the sort of lifestyle that went with the title. He raced speedboats on the Mississippi, rode bulls in rodeos and skydived more than 500 times. But he often said he preferred to be known for his role in advocating for the creation of a beloved state program that provided scholarships to Louisiana colleges and universities.

Taylor Energy operated out of an ornate four-story mansion in New Orleans, off Lee Circle, where a statue of Robert E. Lee stood until 2017. Female employees were not allowed to wear pants, and employees addressed their superiors as “sir” or “ma’am.” Patrick’s office had hand-painted blue-and-white silk wallpaper from a Russian palace, while a nearby dining room featured marble fountains from an 18th-century French chateau. Rooms were named after Ronald Reagan and the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Phyllis cut an unusual figure in the world of brash wildcatters. She started out in the business working for another Louisiana oilman, sometimes being mistaken for his coffee-bearing assistant before he surprised the men in the room by announcing she was his attorney. She married Patrick Taylor in 1964 and served on the board of directors of Taylor Energy while he ran the company.

Deemed the “gentle dove” of Louisiana for her philanthropy, Phyllis Taylor supported local education and art institutions, as well as housing for the homeless. She loved to travel, and in an interview with Condé Nast Traveler, extolled the joys of circumnavigating the world: “The difference between a short cruise and a world cruise is night and day, storm and calm, fleeting thought and thoughtfulness. With an extended cruise you absorb the lifestyle of life at sea; with the great advantage of having a crew and staff that treats you like royalty.” A frequent hunter, Taylor proudly displayed the skin and head of a leopard she shot in Zambia.

The year Ivan hit changed Phyllis Taylor’s life. A couple of months after the hurricane, her husband died at age 67. At 63, she took over the company.

Deaths create a spectacular tax boon for the wealthy, what some experts consider one of the largest loopholes in the code.

Taylor Energy had ballooned in value in the 25 years since its founding. If Patrick Taylor, who controlled the vast majority of the company, had sold it while he was alive, the Taylors would have owed a huge sum in capital gains tax. But all of that value disappeared at death for the purposes of taxes thanks to a widely decried provision of the code that will cost the U.S. Treasury more than $500 billion in lost taxes over the next decade. Phyllis inherited the company and became the wealthiest woman in Louisiana, worth an estimated $1.6 billion. There’s no estate tax for property transferred to a spouse.

In 2008, four years after Taylor Energy became aware of the spill, the company had yet to clean it up. Taylor decided she wanted out of the business. She sold all of the company’s oil rigs and other assets, except for the damaged rig, to two South Korean entities. Taylor, who owned about 95% of the company, according to her former CEO, received close to $1.2 billion of the roughly $1.25 billion price tag.

Yet Taylor was legally allowed to portray the sale to the IRS in a very different light — and that in turn depended on the fact that the law allows owners of private companies a lot of leeway in determining the value of their assets. Since Taylor was inheriting the company tax-free, she and her advisors had every reason to assign it a high initial value, because that would mean that when she later sold the assets, the high value would minimize or eliminate the gain on paper. “When property is transferred between spouses at death, there’s a tax incentive to aggressively value it on the high end,” said Gregg Polsky, a tax law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, who has been retained as a consultant to ProPublica.

Taylor’s tax records suggest that’s what happened. Taylor did not record a gain on the sale of her company. In fact, she was able to report a loss of $211 million.

It’s difficult for outsiders to value a private company. But a former company insider said Taylor Energy was sold at a premium. “I did the valuation. I know what the assets were worth and know what we sold them for. We did not take a loss. Period,” John Pope, Taylor Energy’s former CEO, told ProPublica.

The upshot of the claimed loss was that Taylor paid no federal income tax in a year when she realized an enormous gain from the sale. She even got a remarkable extra goodie: refunds on $30 million in taxes she’d paid in previous years.

After the 2008 sale, what was left of Taylor Energy was devoted to one thing only, cleaning up the spill. The company had professed to be trying to plug the leaking oil well but seemed to make no progress.

A few months after the sale, the federal agency that oversees drilling in the Gulf negotiated an agreement that required the company to create a $666 million trust to cover the cost of the cleanup.

That was a lot of money — more than half of the proceeds from the company’s sale — but it came with a silver lining. Because Taylor Energy was set up as a sole proprietorship, its income and losses flowed through to Phyllis’ personal taxes. She could write off the costs of the cleanup against her own income.

It may be surprising that the costs of cleaning up an environmental disaster are tax-deductible. But such write-offs are legal, qualifying as “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. By contrast, fines and penalties are not deductible. Oil giant BP was able to deduct most of the settlement it reached with the government over the Deepwater Horizon spill because much of it went to address the environmental calamity, rather than to penalties for wrongdoing.

Such deductions are unobtainable for executives or shareholders at publicly traded corporations, where only the company gets to deduct the expenses.

It took years for the extent of the spill to become known. Taylor disclosed almost nothing about the accident and fought public records requests. The reality unspooled thanks to the persistence of environmental groups, investigative reporting, and revelations from a dizzying array of suits and countersuits.

In the years after it established the cleanup trust, Taylor Energy claimed that it could not have foreseen such an accident and that stopping the leak was technologically impossible. In 2012, the Coast Guard finally ordered Taylor to install a dome to contain the leak, but three years later, when Taylor Energy settled a lawsuit that forced it to start publicly disclosing more about its efforts, the company had not even finished the design.

According to a later review by the Coast Guard, Taylor Energy was “obstinate, difficult to deal with and verbally combative,” and preferred “to employ stall tactics over cooperation with an intention to confuse, delay or misdirect” the government.

In 2015, The Associated Press revealed that both Taylor and the government had dramatically underestimated the volume of the leak. The Coast Guard released a new estimate, much higher than its previous ones and 20 times the roughly 4 gallons a day Taylor was claiming. In a lawsuit, a federal expert put it higher still, estimating the spill to be up to 29,400 gallons a day. That would mean that starting in 2004, more oil spilled into the Gulf from Taylor Energy’s rig than the estimated 130 million gallons that gushed into it as a result of BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

For more than a decade, Taylor Energy has launched a series of legal actions against the government to try to recoup at least a portion of the money in the trust or to end its cleanup obligations, saying it has done all that it could. The company has come up empty every time. Rather than put resources into fixing the problem, Taylor has been “putting all of its money and efforts into fighting the cleanup,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group.

Today the oil is still flowing at a rate of about 1,000 gallons a day. A protective dome, finally installed by a contractor the Coast Guard hired after losing faith in Taylor, contains the leak.

Taylor has weathered all of this remarkably well. She remains known as a great benefactor to her city and state. Praising her philanthropy, the U.S. Marine Corps gave her honorary marine status in 2013, and The Times-Picayune granted her its “Loving Cup” award in 2016.

The combination of the loss on the sale of the company and the expenses from the cleanup meant Taylor did not pay any income taxes from 2005 through 2018. At the end of 2018, her reserve pool of losses exceeded $330 million, making it a distinct possibility that she would never have to pay income taxes again.

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6/20

https://www.ecowatch.com/oil-spill-russia-arctic-wildlife-2646152380.html

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note aha hurricanes and floods are bad for toxic spills: pipelines and tanks break, coal ash ponds overflow; lagoon animal waste

5/20 massive flood (agw?) dow? chem superfund

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21052020/michigan-dams-flooding-climate-change-storms-extreme-weather

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220 gas pipeline rupture missisippi

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an 220

‘Invisible oil’ from Deepwater Horizon spill may have reached the Florida Keys

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/23/8-years-bp-oil-spill-sick-cleanup-workers-waiting-louisiana-court

Years After BP Oil Spill, Sick Cleanup Workers Still Waiting for Day in Court

On the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré stood in front of the New Orleans Federal Court House and called “bullshit” on the court’s handling of claims made by those who participated in the cleanup efforts.

Thousands of workers BP hired to clean up the spill that polluted the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 have claimed exposure to oil and the dispersant has made them sick and still have not had their day in court. “It’s a crying damn shame we’ve allowed this in America,” Honoré said.

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3/18

Trump Administration Offers 77 Million Acres in Gulf of Mexico to Oil Industry...[also trying 220?]

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an 1119

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/keystone-pipeline-springs-a-massive-leak-and-dumps-at-least-383000-gallons-of-oil-in-north-dakota/

n o lnx

Keystone pipeline springs a massive leak and dumps at least 383,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams November 1, 2019

Environmentalists were outraged but not at all surprised to learn Thursday that the Keystone pipeline sprung yet another massive leak, this time spilling 383,000 gallons of crude oil in North Dakota.

“I wish I could say I was shocked, but a major spill from the Keystone pipeline is exactly what multiple experts predicted would happen,” Greenpeace USA senior research specialist Tim Donaghy said in a statement. “In fact, this is the fourth significant spill from the Keystone pipeline in less than ten years of operation. History has shown us time and again that there is no safe way to transport fossil fuels, and pipelines are no exception.”

As 350.org founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to the leak, “It happens over and over and over and over and over.”

The latest Keystone spill was first detected Tuesday night by TC Energy, the pipeline’s owner, and the extent of the damage to the surrounding areas is not yet known to the public. According to Greenpeace, the leak “is already the eighth-largest pipeline oil spill of the last decade.”

Greenpeace USA

?

@greenpeaceusa

The Keystone pipeline just spilled AGAIN** — and is now the 8th largest pipeline oil spill in the past decade. ????

**Brought to you by the corporation that wants to build the much larger #KXL pipeline and have it cut right through the Midwest... https://nyti.ms/2oxONNq  #NoKXL

92

11:15 AM - Oct 31, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

127 people are talking about this

The Keystone pipeline just spilled AGAIN** — and is now the 8th largest pipeline oil spill in the past decade. ????

**Brought to you by the corporation that wants to build the much larger #KXL pipeline and have it cut right through the Midwest… https://t.co/gHXxIC12Sw #NoKXL

— Greenpeace USA (@greenpeaceusa) October 31, 2019

Brent Nelson, emergency manager for Walsh County, North Dakota, told the local Grand Forks Herald that the cleanup process could take months.

“The roads around the spill area have been closed to assist with the cleanup,” the Herald reported. “Walsh County Sheriff Ronald Jurgens asks the public to avoid the area so the cleanup process can proceed. On-site security will stop and fine any driver ignoring the closed road signs.”

TC Energy, previously known as TransCanada, denied that the spill had any impact on drinking water, a claim that was met with skepticism.

@RuthH_Hopkins

Keystone Pipeline leak spills oil in northeastern North Dakota

Corp says the oil hasn’t contaminated any drinking water & they’re cleaning it up butanyone who drives to the site will be fined by their security so who knows what’s going on. #NOKXL https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/4746575-Keystone-Pipeline-leak-spills-oil-in-northeastern-North-Dakota …

Keystone Pipeline leak spills oil in northeastern North Dakota

Corp says the oil hasn’t contaminated any drinking water & they’re cleaning it up but anyone who drives to the site will be fined by their security so who knows what’s going on. #NOKXL https://t.co/7H6Dcz4bsm

— Ruth Hopkins (@RuthH_Hopkins) October 31, 2019

Catherine Collentine, associate director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels initiative, said “this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last.”

“We’ve always said it’s not a question of whether a pipeline will spill, but when,” said Collentine, “and once again TC Energy has made our case for us.”

Keystone’s leak in North Dakota was detected just hours after the U.S. State Department held a public hearing in Billings, Montana to solicit comments on the department’s new analysis (pdf) of the potential environmental impact of the Keystone XL project.

The Trump administration has worked hard to approve and accelerate the project over the protests and legal challenges of indigenous rights organizations and green groups.

Joye Braun, frontline community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said the State Department meeting on Keystone XL “seemed more like an industry showcase rather than public comment hearing.”

“We stand firm in opposing this project as the latest spill is further evidence of just how dangerous pipelines are,” said Braun.

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ew 519

no lnx

OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING

Trump Weakens Rules Meant to Prevent Next Deepwater Horizon Spill

Olivia Rosane  May 03 ENERGY

Spill-response crews in the Gulf of Mexico, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on June 22, 2010. Dr. Oscar Garcia / Florida State University / Flickr

The Trump administration announced Thursday it was rolling back offshore oil drilling regulations put in place after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest ocean spill in U.S. history.

Officials announced changes to the Well Control Rule on the Louisiana coast, not far from where the 2010 oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and poured around 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, The Washington Post reported.

"The well control rule was one of the most important actions we took, as a nation, in response to the BP-style disaster at sea," Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Director of Strategic Engagement Bob Deans said in a statement of the original rule. "The rule draws directly from lessons learned from that debacle. It creates tools to help reduce the risk of these dangerous industrial operations at sea."

The NRDC explained how the Trump's Department of Interior (DOI) was weakening that rule, which was finalized by the Obama administration in 2016:

The agency is walking back components of the well control rule, such as removing requirements for real-time backup monitoring by onshore experts and annual certification of the blowout preventer's integrity by an approved third-party expert. Blowout preventers will now be allowed to simply close, instead of achieving an effective seal, which mirrors standards set by the American Petroleum Institute. (A malfunction of a blowout preventer is what caused the 2010 disaster.) Together, the changes represent a favor to the oil industry and a threat to "workers, waters, and wildlife," Deans says.

In a statement Thursday, Interior Secretary David Berhnardt insisted the change was made with safety in mind.

"Today's final rule puts safety first, both public and environmental safety, in a common sense way," Bernhardt said, as The Washington Post reported. "Incorporating the best available science, best practices and technological innovations of the past decade, the rule eliminates unnecessary regulatory burdens while maintaining safety and environmental protection offshore."

But officials at DOI division the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said the changes would also save the offshore oil and gas industry about a billion dollars over 10 years.

"Given David Bernhardt's close ties to his former clients and friends in the fossil fuel industry, it's no surprise that he's seeking to give them free rein to spoil our coasts and public waters and put workers in harm's way," Sierra Club Lands Protection Program Director Athan Manuel said in a statement. "These safeguards were put in place in response to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and with this latest favor for oil and gas companies Bernhardt is putting us at risk of a similar disaster."

The Deepwater Horizon spill had disastrous consequences for the environment and economy of the Gulf of Mexico, The Washington Post reported. Those included:

$95 million in losses for the Gulf fishing industry just in 2010

The deaths of one million seabirds

The deaths of more than 150 whales and dolphins

The deregulation is part of President Donald Trump's overall push to expand offshore oil drilling and "energy dominance," The Huffington Post explained. It comes about a month after a judge blocked Trump's attempt to open up the Arctic ocean to drilling, leading the DOI to likely postpone plans to make more than 90 percent of coastal waters available for oil and gas leasing, NPR reported.

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Oil Spill Now Larger Than Paris Ravages Indonesian Island, 5 Dead

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https://www.ecowatch.com/transcanada-pipeline-explodes-west-virginia-2576042392.html

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https://www.ecowatch.com/rover-pipeline-spill-2526282302.html

Rover Pipeline Spills Another 150,000 Gallons of Drilling Fluid Into Ohio Wetlands

Energy Transfer Partners' troubled $4.2 billion Rover pipeline has spilled nearly 150,000 gallons of drilling fluid into wetlands near the Tuscarawas River in Stark County, Ohio—the same site where it released 2 million gallons in April.

The 713-mile pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan and Canada, is currently under construction by the same Dallas-based company that built the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.

Horizontal directional drilling work to lay the pipe beneath highways and rivers was temporarily halted in the wake of the major April spill, but work was allowed to resume in December. Energy Transfer Partners said it is continuing to follow a plan approved by the federal government and the state EPA, WOSU reported.

According to Kallanish Energy, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency inspected the horizontal directional drilling site on Jan. 10 and reported 146,000 gallons of drilling fluids "lost down the hole," referring to the pilot hole installation under the Tuscarawas River. Three attempts to seal the hole have failed, the state agency said. No inadvertent returns have been detected.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/ohio-epa-rover-pipeline-2488296855.html

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the state attorney general's office Wednesday to hold the owners of the troubledRover natural gas pipelineresponsible for $2.3 million dollars in fines. Rover leaked more than 2 million gallons of drilling mud into protected Ohio wetlands this spring, leading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order a halt to construction.

The Ohio EPA claim that while Rover's owners, Energy Transfer Partners—which also owns the Dakota Access Pipeline—has done sufficient cleanup and monitoring at impacted sites, the company has refused to pay multiple fines. Over the last two years, the pipeline has racked up more "noncompliance incidents" than any other interstate gas pipeline.

a deeper dive:

Columbus Dispatch, AP, WOSU, Cleve Scene

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http://hpr1.com/index.php/feature/news/gray-eminence-the-power-behind-dakota-access/

By C.S. Hagen

cshagen@gmail.com

The true power behind the Dakota Access Pipeline extends beyond the private sector and into state leadership. This gray eminence – or power behind the proverbial throne – rivals the story books, both ancient and modern, truth and fiction.

In North Dakota, politicians have been bought by big oil and gas lobbyists, according to statesmen and analysts. Some have invested heavily in Bakken oil interests, declaring profits for the good of North Dakota’s infrastructure.

“We are where we are…and having difficulties today because only one side has been able to really participate in the decision making in North Dakota, that’s totally dominated by the oil industry,” Don Morrison, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, said. “So what’s happened is our elected officials – every single one of them – is supported by the oil industry.”

Ten years ago, most people in North Dakota supported responsible growth in the Bakken Formation. Today, however, an unhealthy environment has emerged, of you are either for or against oil, with no room in between, Morrison said.

“The power of the oil industry in so many ways sets the agenda of North Dakota. It’s what they do,” Morrison said. “They dominate. They’ don’t listen to anyone else’s opinion. Why? Because North Dakota elected officials have decided that’s the future of North Dakota, and that they don’t want to fight the oil industry.

“Every time questions are raised about this, people are accused of wanting the oil industry to go away. And it’s been designed by the politicians to do the bidding of the oil industry.”

Recently, the “Commission,” or North Dakota Industrial Commission, Oil and Gas Division, a government agency established in 1919 to manage certain utilities, currently comprised of Governor Jack Dalrymple, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring, pushed Big Oil’s agendaby attempting to ban the public sector from testifying, or having any input at Commission meetings. Only “interested parties,” which would have included project owners and landowners, would have been allowed to testify, if the suggestion had been ratified.

Open processes are difficult, Senator Erin Oban said at the April 11, 2016 hearing about new rules for state oil regulation, but they are necessary.

“It would have been easier, I suppose, to limit that process and to only allow a select few to testify,” Oban said. “But my job as a public servant is not to make things easier for me, it’s to make it open and accessible to the public.”

President of the labor advocacy group North Dakota AFL-CIO, Waylon Hedegaard, attended the same meeting, and said big oil has cozied up to North Dakota politicians, affecting legislation and twisting policy to their collective wills.

“I believe everything we do has to be done to the best of our abilities,” Hedegaard said. “Our government has to regulate to the highest degree, achieve the highest quality, we have to hire the most skilled craftsmen, the most skilled people, and our government has not regulated the oil field nearly to the extent it should have.”

The lack of regulation concerning oil drilling, fracking, waste disposal, and crude transportation has caused the perception that all construction in the Bakken region is about bad players putting poor pipes into the ground, Hedegaard said. Hedegaard also asked the Commission to strike the amendment from the proposed rules.

“The essence of democracy is that everyone who thinks they are a stakeholder in something comes together vocally, or gets their opinion out there, and then argues over it and we come to a compromise,” Hedegaard said. “It is not democracy when there’s another group of people limiting who has interest in a certain thing. Democracy is a messy thing.”

Rocks, according to retired correctional officer Eric Thompson, are the only disinterested party to big oil interests.

“If a party drinks water, oil and gas developers could take a minute to make them an interested party,” Thompson said at the hearing. “If a party breathes air, oil and gas developers could take a minute because air is a requirement for life.”

During recent legislative processes, oil companies have frequently opposed changes, and continue to do so stating the “crackdown” is too expensive and that the timing is bad – oil price decline has caused steep inactivity in drilling in North Dakota. No oil companies stepped forward to oppose the “interested party” amendment, according to Commission records.

North Dakota, the second-biggest oil producing state in the U.S., and among the ten largest oil patches in the world, has historically been lackadaisical about instituting stricter regulations. A spirit of leniency toward oil companies has been fostered in North Dakota, analysts said. Criticism over lowering fines for oil and saltwater spills has mounted. In January 2016 the Commission agreed to scrutinize the issues, but behind closed doors.

Some of the state’s top politicians are chairmen or members of regulating agencies governing big oil and Native American interests. Additionally, big oil supports the political campaigns of Governor Dalrymple, Senator John Hoeven, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, and Rep. Kevin Cramer, making their voices, according to some, tainted.

These financial statements were made available by Vote Smart and OpenSecrets Center for Responsive Politics – the statistics do not reflect Dark Money groups, or educational or membership building donations.

Every day, 1,027,131 barrels of oil are produced in North Dakota, and a total of 1,662,917 thousand cubic feet of natural gases are produced from 13,248 wells, according to the North Dakota Industrial Commission, Department of Mineral Resources.

Since January 2016, more than 100,900 gallons of crude oil, waste oil, bio solids, natural gas, and brine were spilled in North Dakota and surrounding areas, according to the North Dakota Department of Health records. Approximately 50,000 gallons of slaked lime solids slid into the Missouri River in June, causing unknown impacts, according to the North Dakota Department of Health.

Few companies involved in the spills have been fined. In January, the Commission reviewed six outstanding spill cases with fines totaling USD 600,000, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Additionally, past spills are still being cleaned up around the state, such as the Tesoro Corp. spill of 2013, the XTO Energy, and the Oasis Petroleum Inc. spills of 2014 and 2015, according to Bill Suess, Spill Investigation Program manager of North Dakota Department of Health.

Spills occur on a daily basis, Suess said, the cleanup is costly, and companies are rarely fined.

“Not everyone gets fined,” Suess said. “Usually we hold off as long as we can on the fines because it is a motivator to get them cleaning it up.”

The North Dakota Industrial Commission’s policy on levying fines for damaging spills is unclear, and is usually negotiated, then settled for a fraction of the initial fine. The Commission did not release information on fines against oil companies for 2015 and 2016 by press time.

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