The United States Department of State is preparing to release its environmental report on a controversial proposed arm of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, sources indicated late Thursday. With the statement rumored to arrive as early as Friday and with many suspecting that the analysis will not point to an appreciable increase in carbon emissions from the project, President Obama may be forced to decide on the fate of the expansion sooner than expected.
“The Environmental Impact Statement is in the final stages of preparation and we anticipate a release of the document soon,” a senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The proposed pipeline — the “Steele City Expansion” — which would pump diluted bitumen and synthetic crude oil from the Keystone Hardisty Terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, Canada directly to Steele City, Neb., has raised the ire of environmentalists due to the fact that the pipe crosses both the Ogallala Aquifer and the environmentally-sensitive Sand Hills Region, a National Natural Landmark.
The Ogallala Aquifer provides water to 27 percent of the nation’s irrigated land and provides 82 percent of the drinking water for 2.3 million people. Bitumen — also known as tar, asphalt and sand oil — is a semi-solid form of petroleum that is known to be environmentally detrimental on all levels of its processing: when mined, it releases high levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. When transported, extraordinary care must be taken, as bitumen’s high viscosity and density make leaks exceptionally hazardous to a region’s flora and water supply. Finally, extraction exposes the risk of heavy metals concentration — particularly, mercury and lead — and contamination. This has led the European Union to consider labelling oil extracted from bitumen as “highly polluting.”
Many have questioned the logic of following through with this potentially dangerous pipeline — particularly, in light of the nation’s energy independence due to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for shale oil and gas. Concerns about the environmental impact of the “Steele City Expansion” have caused the State Department to order additional environmental evaluations after its “final” report in August 2011.
A secondary expansion of the Keystone Pipeline — the “Gulf Coast Pipeline Project,” which extends the Keystone network from Cushing, Okla. to Nederland, Tx. — was completed earlier this year. The president ordered the expedition of the expansion’s completion.
Canada holds the largest concentration of bitumen in the world, and the Obama administration’s delays in the implementation of the “Steele City Expansion” have stressed Washington-Ottawa relations. Canada currently sees the Alberta Tar Sands as being key to its future energy plans and is relying on the added capacity of the new pipelines toward increasing the yield of bitumen being processed in American refineries and synthetic crude oil being shipped into the global market from the Gulf of Mexico. Republicans are arguing that the Keystone expansion will bring at least 20,000 jobs to the United States, although the State Department has argued this figure to be false.
“No one who is serious about reversing global warming could support the #KeystoneXL pipeline,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Twitter on Tuesday, before the president’s State of the Union address. While the president did not mention the Keystone project in his speech before Congress, he did say that “climate change is a fact.”