Oil - Pipelines

Deepwater Horizawhatnow? Less than a year after BP upgraded its Whiting refinery in northwestern Indiana to allow it to handle heavy Canadian tar-sands oil, causing petroleum coke to begin piling up in nearby Chicago, an industrial accident at the refinery has spewed some of that oil into Lake Michigan.

With a deeply unpopular $6.5 billion Northern Gateway project at risk, Enbridge is betting heavily on ads and a door-to-door corporate campaign to sway residents in a small northern coastal B.C. community to "vote yes" for its oil sands pipeline project.  "It’s mind boggling how they’re pouring so much into [the Enbridge campaign]...

The Koch Brothers are known for many things — their vast financial empire, their conservative political ideology, their active political involvement, their support of the Keystone XL pipeline — but their Alberta, Canada land ownership has not been as widely discussed. A Washington Post feature has brought this subject back to attention as the Keystone XL debate heats up and discussion over the relationship between the Koch Brothers and their Republican allies takes on even greater significance in an important election year.

It was reported today that Exxon-Mobil will begin disclosing the degree to which its assets are exposed to future greenhouse gas policies. This risk is at the heart of what has become known as the carbon bubble, a term advanced by UK group Carbon Tracker, which suggests that assets may be over-valued as a result of not accounting for potential future limits on fossil fuel extraction imposed to fight climate change.

You might expect the biggest lease owner in Canada's oil sands, or tar sands, to be one of the international oil giants, like Exxon Mobil or Royal Dutch Shell. But that isn't the case. The biggest lease holder in the northern Alberta oil sands is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately-owned cornerstone of the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David.

The fight over the Alberta-to-Burnaby oil pipeline proposed by Kinder Morgan is shaping up as a political battle royale that will entangle all three levels of government. The $5-billion project to triple the capacity of the company’s existing pipeline is opposed by Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, and now Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan is turning up the volume. “This is the wrong place and the wrong time for them to put in this pipeline,” Corrigan told me, adding opponents of the project are even willing to break the law if it’s approved.

The oil giant Exxon Mobil has agreed for the first time to report on how climate change could affect its business model, campaign groups say. The groups said on Thursday that Exxon had agreed to prepare a public report on “carbon asset risk” – the prospect that the company might be forced to leave some of its oil and gas in the ground as a result of climate regulations. The campaigners said the move by Exxon was an important step forward in getting companies to recognise that oil, gas and coal holdings could potentially drop in value under climate regulations.

A new study has found that certain types of chemical pollutants emitted by Canada's oilsands tailing ponds have gone underreported for years.

Using a computer simulation model, two University of Toronto scientists also found the pollutants in question are blowing off mine sites or evaporating from nearly two dozen impoundments containing a billion cubic metres of toxic waste.
 

CALGARY - The proposed Energy East pipeline won't be the boon to Eastern Canadian refineries that supporters claim because the vast majority of the oil in it would be bound for export markets, environmental groups argued in a report released Tuesday. The $12-billion project would likely use the lion's share of its 1.1 million barrel per day capacity to send unrefined oilsands crude to markets like India, Europe and possibly the United States, says the report, penned by The Council of Canadians, Ecology Action Centre, Environmental Defence and Equiterre.