This Exxon tar sands oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas perfectly illustrates why we should not be piping that shit all over the country. The big oil companies COULD build a refinery next to the extraction area if they wanted to. My guess is it was just "too expensive." Much better to lay some pipe and make people compete for your business.
The worst part is that oil sands is one of the worst methods of fossil fuel extraction we have developed. It uses massive amounts of fresh (increasingly rare) water and produces huge lakes of waste fluids. You know the funny thing about retention ponds? They leak. They rupture. It's happened. More than once.
The worster part is that we don't even need to be extracting oil from tar sands or fracking for gas or oil. We have the renewables available and if we had the will and scaled them up, we could shake the fossil fuel habit for good.
There's that tough word again. If ...
Is it worth it to lose a town here and there so that the world can have plenty of fossilized energy? I guess so. Be glad it's not your town.
from ThinkProgress.org
A technicality has spared Exxon from having to pay any money into the fund that will be covering most of the clean up costs of its Arkansas pipeline spill.
The cleanup efforts themselves took a sobering turn as crews found injured and dead ducks covered in oil.
The environmental impacts of an oil spill in central Arkansas began to come into focus Monday as officials said a couple of dead ducks and 10 live oily birds were found after an ExxonMobil Corp. pipeline ruptured last week.“I’m an animal lover, a wildlife lover, as probably most of the people here are,” Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson told reporters. ”We don’t like to see that. No one does.”
Exxon has confirmed that the pipeline was carrying “low-quality Wabasca Heavy crude oil from Alberta.” This oil comes from the region of Alberta where the controversial tar sands are located. Heavy crude is strip mined or boiled loose from dense underground formations that often contain a large amount of bitumen. This oil is very thick and needs to be diluted with lighter fluids in order to flow through pipelines. Reports have stated that at least 12,000 barrels of oil and water spilled into the town.
A 1980 law ensures that diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Other conventional crude producers pay 8 cents a barrel to ensure the fund has resources to help clean up some of the 54,000 barrels of pipeline oil that spilled 364 times last year.
As Oil Change International said in a statement today:
As Oil Change International said in a statement today:
“The great irony of this tragic spill in Arkansas is that the transport of tar sands oil through pipelines in the US is exempt from payments into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Exxon, like all companies shipping toxic tar sands, doesn’t have to pay into the fund that will cover most of the clean up costs for the pipeline’s inevitable spills.”
Whatever you call it, as Judge Dodson says, “Crude oil is crude oil. None of it is real good to touch.”
The smell of the spilled oil (similar to asphalt) has reached residents five miles out in the country, and will likely keep residents of 22 nearby homes evacuated for several days.
Surreal video:
The Enbridge tar sands pipeline spill in Michigan happened in 2010 and parents are still concerned about the long-term health effects of having such toxic substances seep into areas where children play.
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