Increasing amount of Tar Sands oil coming into Great Lakes

I live in Battle Creek, Michigan, just a few miles downstream from the largest (~1 million gallons) tar sands oil disaster ever spilled on American soil.

Enbridge Energy was responsible for this spill in 2011, and they have been cleaning it up for the past four years. They tried to walk away from the job claiming it was complete last year, but the EPA called them back to continue efforts to remove the heavy oil sludge that had settled to the river bottom.

Info about this spill and clean-up here.

Enbridge has just received approval to almost double the amount of tar sands oil flowing through their pipeline that terminates in Superior, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Superior.

Info on this approval and how it was obtained is here.

A larger problem with the mining and transport of this oil product -- beyond the fact that is much more difficult and detrimental to our environment to refine than oil from other sources -- is that Canada is allowing the destruction of their boreal forests 
to reach these oil sands.

The boreal forests are one of the largest natural carbon dioxide "sinks" in the world. These temperate forests constantly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen.

For more info on this, watch this TED Talk here. 

I fear that we will reach a point where the cascade of environmental destruction will be irreversible. Where the change in our atmosphere will reach a tipping point and all of our efforts to backpedal will be pointless.

This latest move by the State Department to approve this increase in flow of tar sands oil into the Great Lakes is a bad decision even if there is never a spill into the Great Lakes.

If there is a large spill, 

then the decision may well be catastrophic.

It is one thing to clean up a river (it takes years and costs about a billion dollars -- details here), but how would one restore the Great Lakes once a million gallons of tar sands oil -- or more --  corrupts the largest fresh water system in the world?

Enbridge Pipeline: Replacing the section that leaked

Enbridge Oil Pipeline Rupture, 2 1/2 years after the incident

In July of 2010, an oil pipeline ruptured in Michigan spilling 1.1 million gallons of heavy crude into the Kalamazoo River.

Over two years and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent cleaning up the river.

This was the nation's 

costliest oil pipeline accident.

Consider this:  Enbridge has a pipeline that rests at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac. What if the rupture had taken place there instead of inland and contained in a river?  Would the shores of Mackinac Island still be coated in thick oil? How much of that spill would now be working its way down past Port Huron, Detroit, and into Lake Erie? 

Do you think it can't happen? Enbridge pipelines have had a dozen leaks in the state of Michigan alone since 2003. 

I walked along the river earlier this month:

Keystone XL Pipeline Rejected

President Obama rejected the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline this week. This pipeline was to stretch from Alberta, Canada, 1,700 miles across America's heartland to refineries in Texas.

You may wonder why I'm blogging about this issue when it doesn't seem to relate to the Great Lakes or Michigan. Well, check out these photos:





These are photos of the oil spill in West Michigan that happened less than two years ago. There is an oil pipeline running through Michigan that ruptured and spilled approximately one MILLION gallons of heavy, crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. Enbridge, the company that owns and maintains the pipeline, has spent over a year cleaning up the river and there is still residual damage to the ecosystem.

Some of the homes near the source of the spill were so contaminated that Enbridge bought out the owners and condemned the houses.

The Keystone XL Pipeline's proposed route passes through many environmentally sensitive areas, not to mention America's breadbasket where much of our grain is grown.

Yes, job creation is important, but it is about time that government had a vision for the future. And that vision should be looking for cleaner sources of energy. Refining oil from Alberta's oil sands is a much more toxic process than refining heavy or light crude. And the byproducts are not only more toxic, but in greater quantity.

I applaud President Obama's decision. No doubt this issue will be pressed again in the future, and I hope his resolve and vision are not shaken.

Enbridge Oil Spill...one year later

Efforts to clean up the Kalamazoo River continue one year after a leaking oil pipeline allowed over 800,000 gallons of crude oil to spill into the Kalamazoo River. For weeks following the spill, my home town of Battle Creek smelled of the thick, crude oil for weeks. People living near the origin of the spill had to leave their homes due to the smell and toxic effects of the spill.

The EPA is overseeing the clean-up. Here are the stats to help put it in perspective:

766,000 gallons of oil have been recovered
15 million gallons of oil/water mix have been recovered and disposed of
93,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil/debris have been disposed of
19,500 feet of boom have been deployed on the river
clean-up has cost $25.7 million so far
245 workers involved in these efforts