In today’s Aabitoose we hear from Sierra Club and Minnesota 350.org attorney Paul Blackburn, who discusses leaky pipelines, bomb trains, and a proposal to ship oil by tanker on Lake Superior. Honor the Earth, Sierra Club, and Minnesota 350 have filed an injunction against the Alberta Clipper (Line 67) pipeline expansion. There are already 7 pipelines through Minnesota and thousands of explosive train cars passing through every day. Winona LaDuke says keeping up with pipeline and railroad companies is like playing “whack-a-mole.” Meanwhile, American energy use has decreased by 15% since 2007, yet extreme energy expansion continues at an alarming rate. “This is a new world, and the new world is one of oil coming through Minnesota and putting Minnesotans at a much greater risk than they’ve been in the past,” says Blackburn.” “We think that people all up and down the pipeline routes and the railroad routes should be involved in a variety of different efforts that we’re taking and other groups are taking to express their concern about this new world to ensure that their communities, their families, and their environments are safe.”
Listen to Aabitoose with Winona LaDuke: Leaky Pipelines & Bomb Trains here:
The Enbridge Pipelines Corporation has experienced 804 oil spills for a total of 6.8 million gallons from 1999-2010. Despite the need for ongoing clean-up and retrofitting of old lines, Enbridge has proposed 3 new pipeline projects through Minnesota by 2016: the Alberta Clipper (Line 67), Sandpiper, and Line 3 pipelines. Enbridge claims a 99.993% success rate for its transportation of oil. However, there are currently 2 million barrels (84 million gallons) of oil flowing through Minnesota each day, making Minnesota the largest international pipeline corridor in the country. With 84 million gallons of oil traveling through Minnesota every day, a .007% rate of release would translate to an average of more than 2 million gallons of oil leaked per year in Minnesota. Of course major spills have skewed the average, such as the rupture of 1.3 million gallons of tar sands oil from Enbridge Line 6B along the Kalamazoo River in 2010.
Tar sands oil mining is the largest industrial project in human history. Most of the oil in Minnesota is coming from the from the Alberta tar sands, such as the Enbridge Line 6B and Alberta Clipper (Line 67) pipelines have been carrying. Instead of refitting the decades-old Line 6B pipeline, Enbridge played craps with peoples’ safety by constructing the new Alberta Clipper before fixing the old Line 6B. The people of Michigan are still paying the price for the Kalamazoo spill 3 years later, and Enbridge has still not cleaned that up according to Environmental Protection Agency standards. “Those costs get passed on to people at the pump. So that $1 billion spill isn’t coming out of the shareholders pockets for Enbridge,” says Blackburn. “That’s coming out of your pockets, everybody who is paying for the fuel that gets shipped through that pipeline. Everybody who is served by those Enbridge pipelines is paying for that spill.”
Tar sands oil comes out of the ground as road tar and must be diluted for transport. In fact, the Cochin pipeline, which imports propane to the U.S., is being converted to bring natural gas to Canada that will power tar sands extraction and dilute the tar. When a tar sands pipeline bursts, the natural gas evaporates into the air, and the tar sinks to the bottom of water and mixes with the sediment. In the case of the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge did not respond to the spill for 17 hours after being contacted by a natural gas company that received reports of a leak from community members.
While pipeline companies assure people that their super-systems and technology such as the pipeline inspection gauge (P.I.G.), there is no guarantee a pipeline will not leak unless it does not exist. Abstinence is the safest policy. When pipelines do rupture, the majority of the time local people find the spills and not the pipeline company. “The oil companies say they’ve got all this great technology, all this computer equipment, and remote sensors that will detect a spill instantly and shut it off. Well the truth is there’s been studies done about this. I believe it’s less than 20% of the spills are detected by the technology, by the super-system,” says Blackburn. “So the rest of them are detected by guess who? The people who live there, local emergency response folks, by people who smell the spill. The rewards go to the company, but the risks are sometimes right on the front line emergency responders.”
In addition to the risk of pipeline leaks, landowners within the path of a pipeline must deal with the threat of having their land seized by eminent domain. Essentially, eminent domain allows a foreign company like Enbridge to force settlements on landowners to purchase rights-of-way, condemning private property for pipeline construction. While disguising their private investment as a public works project, Enbridge has been working on loopholes in Minnesota state law to avoid federal review and analysis for their new pipeline proposals. “That’s a thing a lot of rural landowners find to be very disturbing, that a company like Enbridge can have the right of the government to take property,” says Blackburn. “When you have a pipeline company taking property at market value for the same rate the government would get private property to create a private pipeline that creates private profits for a company out of state, there’s something wrong about that.”
Trains are not much safer, but they do spill less oil and less frequently than pipelines. However, pipeline companies have been using images of exploding trains as propaganda to push new pipelines and expansion projects. These bomb trains have been carrying Bakken crude oil, which is a volatile mixture from western North Dakota oil fields, extracted by hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Little is known about fracking fluid, since the contents are kept “trade secrets.” Only so much can be done to improve the safety of both trains carrying Bakken crude, but there are currently more than 300,000 DOT-111 tanker cars on the rails in the U.S. and Canada, which are not safe to carry flammable materials. Railroad companies are endangering people and the environment by cutting labor and maintenance costs and not improving the safety of rail cars or infrastructure.
“The oil companies try and minimize their costs by not having as much emergency response equipment, by not helping to pay for training for local folks, and by not providing the equipment to local people,” says Blackburn. “Since the local responder is more than likely going to be the first person to see the spill, we need to help protect them.” Communities are almost never prepared for the damage caused by a major oil spill. For instance, the Lac Megantic train crash was caused by the combined negligence of the company and ignorance of emergency responders. When the unmanned train caught fire, Canadian firefighters responded and cut the air brakes, accidentally setting the 74-car train in motion, and 57 tanker cars derailed and exploded. Witnesses called the Lac Megantic crash a “tsunami of fire,” and authorities said the exploding Bakken crude had “vaporized” the 47 missing people. There is also the concern of companies going bankrupt after a major and not cleaning up, leaving the people living in the sacrifice zone to fend for themselves.
“I think it seems quite likely that what happened was the railroad company was cheaping out, keeping their labor costs low, keeping their maintenance costs low. They weren’t properly having the right kind of workers on the train, and not maintaining the train properly because they’re just being cheap,” says Blackburn. “Like all companies they’re trying to reduce their costs and maximize their profits. They did it at a risk to that train, and that train killed all those people. That railroad company declared bankruptcy, and it’s hard to say if those folks, all the people who own the property, and all the people who died and lost family and friends to the fire, whether they’re going to be properly compensated by that railroad because the railroad declared bankruptcy.”
While the Department of Transportation has estimated that retrofitting the remaining 300,000 DOT-111 tank cars to make them safer for Bakken crude will only cost $1 billion, there has been ongoing resistance from the railroad industry. Currently 90% of all oil coming out of North Dakota is already being transported by train, and Enbridge has decreased the flow of its existing North Dakota pipeline from 200,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. However, Enbridge has proposed a $2.7 billion project known as the Sandpiper pipeline, funded by oil companies in western North Dakota. Furthermore, North Dakota oil companies could fund the retrofitting of 300,000 remaining DOT-111 cars in the U.S. and Canada for a third of what the Sandpiper pipeline will cost.
The oil in the Bakken formation is only expected to last 20 years and holds less than a year’s supply of U.S. oil. However, tar sands oil extraction is planned for another 50 years at least, and Bakken crude pipelines will likely be converted to tar sands oil. “The Bakken oil is not projected to be lasting anywhere near that long. It’s expected to peak sometime in early 2020s. So the pipelines for the Bakken will be used for a shorter period of time,” says Blackburn. “The pipelines they’re building are for the tar sands. They’re planning to develop the tar sands to damage an area the size of Florida.”
While the oil industry is working to convince public officials that extreme energy expansion is good for American energy security, much of the oil extracted in the U.S. and Canada will be exported. “The truth is that there’s a big middle ground there, and I think we all know we can conserve and use fuel much more efficiently than we’re doing now. That will make us all wealthier at some level because we won’t be giving our money to Texas,” says Blackburn. “We’ll have more energy security, and our lives will be healthier. There’s so many reasons to be conscious and thoughtful about saving our energy for our own benefits.”
Winona LaDuke: Aaniin, this is Winona LaDuke with our show Aabitoose, here with Paul Blackburn. He’s an attorney with MN350.org and also with Sierra Club. Paul, you have cases you’re working on and some legislation as well, but we’re going to start with the contested case of the Alberta Clipper. For those who don’t know, the Alberta Clipper is the line running across Highway 2. It is carrying tar sands oil from the Alberta tar sands to Duluth.
Paul Blackburn: That’s correct. Actually, there are 7 pipelines running through northern Minnesota. Most people don’t understand that Minnesota hosts a tremendous amount of crude oil infrastructure in the form of these pipelines. They’re shipping sort of the equivalent of the Exxon-Valdez amount of oil across Minnesota each day, and some of those pipelines are quite old. The Alberta Clipper, Line 67 is the bureaucratic name. The Alberta Clipper pipeline is the newest one. That was just built in 2010, but they also have a number of other pipelines, some of which are decades old at this point. As pipelines get old they do tend to corrode, and when they corrode, there’s a bigger risk of them rupturing.
Winona LaDuke: As well, I think it depends on what you’re carrying in them. From what I understand, tar sands or dilbit as it’s called is more corrosive.
Paul Blackburn: It can be more corrosive than some kinds of oil, but there’s a lot of different issues with dilbit. Dilbit is short for diluted bitumen. The tar sands crude oil is not normal crude oil. It’s never been used until the last few years. Essentially, bitumen is road tar. What they do is get this tar mixed with sand in Canada, and they extract the tar out of it. You can’t ship tar through a pipeline really well, since it’s so thick and gooey. So what they do is dilute it. They mix it with lighter kinds of oil and petroleum constituents, sort of like gasoline. They mix road tar with gasoline, and they blend it all together. Then it gets runny enough to pump through a pipeline.
The problem is it’s not like normal crude oil because if it ruptures, first off the gasoline component starts to all evaporate. So when dilbit pipelines rupture, there’s a lot of air pollution like when a big gasoline pipeline ruptures. Got a lot of really nasty fumes in the air. Then what’s left over after the gasoline part of the mixture evaporates is the road tar-type stuff, and that all tends to sink into water. As we saw in Kalamazoo when there was a big dilbit spill down in Michigan, what happened was it spilled and people miles away were complaining about the smell. They had to close daycare centers, and folks had all different kinds of symptoms from the smell.
All this diluent was evaporating while the oil was in the river, and the tar sunk to the bottom. So rather than being able to skim it off the top or use those absorbent mats to get the oil out of the water, they had to come up with dredges to get the oil out. That mixed up all kinds of sediments, and it was a real mess. So far Enbridge, the same company that owns pipelines in Minnesota and this is a different part of its system down in Michigan, has spent over a billion dollars cleaning up that spill. It’s a complete mess.
Winona LaDuke: And it’s still not cleaned up.
Paul Blackburn: No, they’re still working on it. They’re still fighting with the Environmental Protection Agency on this. Again, this is because diluted bitumen or dilbit is not normal crude oil. It’s a manufactured product that’s made up in Canada and shipped through these pipelines. Because of its physical properties, the dilbit also creates new risks of ruptures because it changes the way that pressure works within pipelines. There can be higher or lower pressures, and it’s those changes in pressure that can result in a pipeline burst.
Winona LaDuke: So in the Clipper are they having only dilbit in there or are they having batches of Bakken crude in there too?
Paul Blackburn: Well, within the Alberta Clipper pipeline, one of these 7 pipelines up there, it’s almost entirely dilbit because that pipeline is specified, according to Enbridge, to ship only heavy crude oil, which is at this point dilbit. There’s also a pipeline called Line 4, one of the older pipelines, and it ships both dilbit and Bakken crude. Then there are other pipelines that may ship Bakken crude too. The older pipelines ship heavy oils for the most part, but they do ship a combination of light oils, probably a lot of Bakken crude as well.
Winona LaDuke: So for those just listening in, I’m talking with Paul Blackburn. He’s an attorney who knows a lot about pipelines. I don’t know if you grew up working on pipelines, but you really know a lot about pipelines from what I can gather. A lot of people didn’t know that there were 7 pipelines crossing northern Minnesota, and most of those go along the Highway 2 corridor. Then there is the MinnCan pipeline that runs south.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, the oil comes from just the border of North Dakota. It cuts down through a tiny bit of North Dakota and goes down to Clearbrook, Minnesota, and there’s a big terminal. In Clearbrook a separate pipeline comes in from North Dakota, and the combined set of pipelines goes over to Duluth, to Superior, Wisconsin. From there they go down to Chicago. Essentially, these pipelines that go through Minnesota serve not only Duluth, but they serve refineries in the Chicago area, they serve in Toledo, Detroit –
Winona LaDuke: They serve the Great Lakes refineries.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, and they serve the upper-mid-West refineries in general, so refineries in Illinois, including St. Louis. They are planning to ship as far as Montreal, and they just announced that they are going to change one of the refineries in Lima, Ohio to be able to start processing this heavy dilbit. Refineries generally can’t process dilbit because it’s such an unusual kind of oil, unless they spend a huge amount of money to include additional equipment to essentially turn road tar into gasoline. It’s a fairly complex chemical process that they have to change the refineries. In addition, they’re planning on shipping a lot of this oil to the Gulf Coast, where they already have a lot of refineries that can already process heavy oil from Venezuela. They also want to export crude oil from the Gulf Coast of the United States. Even from the pipeline network out to Portland, Maine they want to export this heavy crude oil overseas, and/or they could also refine it into gasoline and diesel fuel, then export gasoline and diesel fuel from the United States overseas too.
Winona LaDuke: A lot of people don’t know where Clearbrook, Minnesota is. It’s not on a lot of people’s maps, but it’s over there by Bagley/Bemidji area. It’s a centerpiece for oil coming into this whole region.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, these pipelines are the primary way that oil moves out of Canada into the United States. There’s another relatively small pipeline that comes in from Alberta to the Pacific Northwest, and there’s another pipeline called the Express Pipeline that goes into Montana, and it pales in comparison.
Winona LaDuke: So the size of the Clipper right now is 440,000 barrels per day.
Paul Blackburn: It’s about 450,000 barrels per day, but the entire amount of capacity for Enbridge at this point is, I believe at this point, just under 2 million barrels per day. So if you think about 2 million barrels of crude oil potentially coming into the United States, they can bring in a huge amount of oil into the United States through Minnesota, and most people don’t know that. It is the primary interstate highway in from Canada to the United States to bring in crude oil.
Winona LaDuke: And we’re talking tar sands.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, that’s primarily tar sands. There’s also some oil in Canada that’s been termed “synthetic crude.” That synthetic crude comes through Minnesota as well, but it’s all from the tar sands.
Winona LaDuke: For those who are just listening in, there’s conventional oil, which is what your mother’s oil was. We were used to that, but the reason this is so contentious is because it’s known as extreme energy extraction. It’s highly environmentally destructive at the source and has a huge carbon footprint.
Paul Blackburn: One of the ways they get dilbit out of the ground is to strip mine it. So they have these area that are much like the Boundary Waters. They’re all boreal forest areas and they bring in the bulldozers, they scrape it all to bare dirt, they dig holes that are hundreds and hundreds of feet in the ground. These mining areas are now stretching over hundreds and hundreds of square miles; I think the largest mining area in the world at this point. It’s a complete sacrifice zone.
They also have other technologies where they can pump a great deal of steam underground to melt that tar, and then they can up bring the tar up in the melted form while it’s still hot. That requires tremendous amounts of energy in the form of natural gas. There are so many impacts in this. For example, there was a pipeline that brought propane to Minnesota. Propane is important for people in rural areas for home heating but also for drawing crops. It’s a very important fuel for a lot of rural Minnesota. It was called the Cochin pipeline, and they just rededicated that to moving this diluent, gasoline-like stuff up to Canada from the United States, mix it with road tar, and bring it back down here. Now this propane pipeline’s being used for the tar sands development, and they’re going to bring in propane by rail instead to replace it. So we’re going to see a lot more propane railroad cars rolling through northern Minnesota, and that creates a new set of dangers.
Winona LaDuke: So we’re going to talk about rail cars, risk, explosions in a few minutes. I don’t know how old you are, but basically we’re children of fossil fuels. We’ve lived in this era. We’ve like it. I have a couple of pick-up trucks and an S.U.V. I’m a child of fossil fuels era. We consumed 50 percent of the world’s fossil fuels in a rather short period of time, and what’s out there is this new stuff that’s kind of hard to get. You’re talking about the tar sands as something that environmentally in terms of health impact is a huge destruction of a region. Northern Alberta’s kind of remote, so people don’t know that there’s people who live there, kind of out-of-sight out-of-mind, but it comes to a pipeline for us. And some of us say, “That’s just how it is.” But this is a little more than “just how it is.”
Paul Blackburn: I think the term extreme oil is good because if you think about what happened in the past, there is an oilfield like the ones in Louisiana and Texas that they started drilling in the 1920s and 30s. They put a well in the ground, and they could get up to around 100,000 barrels per day for years, and years, and years. The oil was easy to get out of the ground; it was less expensive to find; it was not very deep wells; it was pretty simple oil and pretty high quality oil. So what’s happened is we’ve used up a lot of those kinds of fields, and now we’re moving to extreme oil.
Everybody remembers the Deep Water Horizon explosion, but one form of extreme oil is going into extremely deep areas in the ocean and doing drilling there, which creates an entirely new set of risks. Then you have the tar sands developments in Canada, which are these huge mines and huge amounts of natural gas, and tremendous amounts of resources that turn it into something that can even be shipped to the United States. Tar sands oil is an entirely different kind of extreme oil and the cost is very expensive to do that. Then you’ve got the Bakken oil. The Bakken oil requires all this fracking equipment and all the diesel fuel to run the fracking equipment, a lot of sand from Wisconsin and Minnesota, and they have to bring in a lot of water. There’s tremendous amounts of truck traffic and all that requires a lot of labor and a lot of money to get relatively small amounts of oil out of the ground per well, compared to the past.
Sure, the industry does a lot of cheerleading and they do pretty amazing things technologically to get this oil, but the fact that we’re having to go to that means that: One the oil is very expensive and two there’s not a good sign we’re going to have a lot of oil after this. So what happens after the Bakken fuel and any of the Bakken developments? You hear a lot about the Bakken developments and how it’s saved all of us and how we don’t have any more energy and oil problems. What the United States Geographic Survey says is that the Bakken has about 3.65 billion barrels of oil that’s recoverable in it. Another one you hear about is the Three Forks, which is an underlying formation there, and it has about 3.73 billion barrels of oil. That may sound like a lot to your listeners, but the U.S. consumed 6.8 billion barrels of oil in 2012 alone. Those two fields together, assuming the U.S. Geographic Survey is right, have one year of oil in them. In the U.S. Geographic Survey’s extreme forecast, the Bakken and Three Forks have maybe 11 billion barrels of oil, that’s still only about 2 years of oil.
That is like somebody saying that because I’m still getting a good pull on my soda out of the straw, it’s not going down. The fact that you can still get a good drink out of your soda while it’s getting near the bottom doesn’t mean it ain’t getting near the bottom. The fact that we can suck it faster doesn’t mean we got more.
Winona LaDuke: So Paul, we’ve been talking about the tar sands oil and the Alberta Clipper pipeline. When I first met you, which is only a few months ago, we were talking specifically about you guys, being Minnesota 350 and Sierra Club, have intervened in this contested case hearing about if this pipeline expansion is needed. This is the Enbridge Corporation, who is trying to expand this tar sands pipeline, which basically you’re telling me now is the equivalent of an Exxon-Valdez oil – 2 million barrels per day crossing Minnesota. Holy buckets! Or holy pipelines! That’s a lot of oil.
Paul Blackburn: It’s a tremendous amount of oil and people think about Texas as being an oil state, and Minnesota doesn’t get any real revenue out of that. There’s not many jobs. There’s no real advantage to Minnesotans. All the risks are here, the risks of those pipelines rupturing, but the rewards really get passed on to Texas. Most of the oil companies have their headquarters down there, and that’s where all the profits tend to flow to. Minnesotans don’t think of themselves as a state with much crude oil infrastructure, but it is the single largest import pipeline system coming right through Minnesota. Now with the trains, the majority of those oil trains that have been exploding all over the country are rolling right through Minnesota and right through Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Detroit Lakes, and Elk River –
Winona LaDuke: Staples.
Paul Blackburn: There’s many, many whistle-stop towns along these rail lines with 75 to 100 tanker cars in them. I think that some of your listeners may have heard what happened in Lac Megantic in Quebec, where about 57 of those cars derailed and exploded. 47 people were killed and they never found the bodies –
Winona LaDuke: Vaporized, that was the term that they used.
Blackburn: People said it was like a wall of napalm burning, going through the town and burning everything in the town. It was a tremendous disaster. If your listeners want to go online and look up Lac Megantic and the oil spill, there’s amazing video about what that was like. That kind of disaster is potentially possible in many places in Minnesota from the Twin Cities to many, many small towns –
Winona LaDuke: Detroit Lakes. In this case it seemed like the human error of not putting the brakes on. Casselton case was they hit another car.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, in Casselton, North Dakota there was a big explosion, as I understand it a soybean train fell over into the oil cars and set them on fire. Lac Megantic was a little more complicated. There the engineer left the train running. Only had one person working and he’d been working for 12 hours, so they called him off.
Winona LaDuke: He was probably exhausted.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, the engineer left. He apparently left the brakes in place. He left the train running because then the pneumatic air brakes would keep going, but the train wasn’t properly maintained. The engineer told his dispatchers that it wasn’t working properly, and apparently the engine caught on fire. The locomotive caught on fire. So the fire department came out, turned off the locomotive, which cut the air brakes, and apparently the manual brakes weren’t sufficient to keep the train in place. It rolled down a hill, got up to 60 miles per hour, slammed into this town, all those rail cars derailed, and it exploded.
I think it seems quite likely that what happened was the railroad company was cheaping out, keeping their labor costs low, keeping their maintenance costs low. They weren’t properly having the right kind of workers on the train, and not maintaining the train properly because they’re just being cheap. Like all companies they’re trying to reduce their costs and maximize their profits. They did it at a risk to that train, and that train killed all those people. That railroad company declared bankruptcy, and it’s hard to say if those folks, all the people who own the property, and all the people who died and lost family and friends to the fire, whether they’re going to be properly compensated by that railroad because the railroad declared bankruptcy.
Winona LaDuke: We started talking about pipelines, and now we’re talking about trains. We’re going to get back to the trains after, but basically what you have is a lot of stuff they’re trying to move really quickly. North Dakota’s kind of an ecological mess with what’s going on in the Bakken. There’s not a lot of regulation. There’s trash everywhere. There are man-camps. There are spills that have not been reported. There’s the 865,000 gallon spill in the Tioga farm field, and that seeped up from 6 feet down in a 6-inch pipe that they said maybe got hit by lightning with a thumb-size leak in it. That’s a lot of not monitoring. Pipelines are generally monitored by the companies. They have this things called the P.I.G.: Pipeline inspection gauge. I really like that.
And then they have a super-system up in Estevan, Saskatchewan. Their super-remote system monitors everything, but for instance they just had a spill up there near Winnipeg. I don’t know how far that was from the monitoring system, but they had the spill right there. In the case of the Enbridge spill in Kalamazoo, that went for a while before they noticed it.
Paul Blackburn: Well, it went for 17 hours. The oil companies say they’ve got all this great technology, all this computer equipment, and remote sensors that will detect a spill instantly and shut it off. Well the truth is there’s been studies done about this. I believe it’s less than 20 percent of the spills are detected by the technology, by the super-system. So the rest of them are detected by guess who? The people who live there, local emergency response folks, by people who smell the spill. In Kalamazoo they thought they had a bubble in the pipeline because the diluent dilbit tends to be at high risk for creating essentially bubbles in the pipeline. I can’t go into the reason right now, but they thought they had a bubble in the pipeline.
They actually had a rupture, and they kept turning that pipeline on and off for 17 hours before they figured out and they had a rupture. They kept pumping on and off for 17 hours after it was completely ruptured, and they just kept pumping oil out into the river. That’s because their technology didn’t really tell them what was going on. They had controllers up in Alberta, who looked at the data and simply misinterpreted it. In the meantime, it was actually a natural gas company people were calling because of the smell. The natural gas company sent somebody out, and the natural gas local utility guy saw the oil in the creek and called Enbridge and said, “Hey you got an oil leak.” That was 17 hours it took them to shut that down. Sure it’s not bad to have the technology, but it isn’t terribly reliable.
Winona LaDuke: So you’re saying that 20 percent of the spills are actually detected by the company?
Paul Blackburn: Maybe it’s a little bit less than that.
Winona LaDuke: Maybe it is because that spill in the Tioga farm field was a Tesoro pipeline, not an Enbridge pipeline, but it was still found by the guy.
Paul Blackburn: It’s a local person that found it, and I think that’s one of the things that we’re concerned about because very often our first responders – volunteer fire departments, the sheriff’s departments that are going out there and seeing these spills. All this extreme oil tends to create new kinds of risks, and the companies are not being terribly transparent about it. They’re not really helping that much. The rewards go to the company, but the risks are sometimes right on the front line emergency responders. This town in Quebec that had that oil train crash into it, it’s only 5,000 people. How many fire fighters and how many police officers do they have to help keep people safe? How many of them got killed in the fire? In rural areas, who is really there to help you?
The oil companies try and minimize their costs by not having as much emergency response equipment, by not helping to pay for training for local folks, and by not providing the equipment to local people. Since the local responder is more than likely going to be the first person to see the spill, we need to help protect them.
Winona LaDuke: A lot of us don’t even know where pipelines are. I think half those people down in Mayflower, Arkansas probably didn’t even know they had a pipeline in their backyard.
Paul Blackburn: Companies try really hard to keep people from knowing what these pipelines are. We all also hear about the natural gas pipelines that explode and incinerate neighborhoods. The companies all just want people to trust them. I think that verifying the trust is what we should be doing. Citizens have a right to know what’s being done with the pipelines that run through their towns and communities, literally their backyards sometimes.
Winona LaDuke: So we’re all beneficiaries of this fossil fuel age. A lot of these pipelines are going through. As we said, the Alberta Clipper and the Sandpiper are a couple of newer ones that Enbridge, a 60 year-old company and actually a Canadian corporation so they’re not locals, that’s some new stuff, but a lot of these are old. The whole country is full of aging infrastructure. We haven’t invested in infrastructure. Duluth crumbled in a flood. We get a D in infrastructure from what I’ve heard, and that includes our pipelines. I think it’s a 40 or 50 year-old pipeline that’s under the Straits of Mackinac, and that’s an Enbridge line.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, just like that pipeline that ruptured into the Kalamazoo River. It was called Line 6B. Enbridge was undoubtedly planning to replace that line well before it ruptured, but they built the Alberta Clipper first, rather than fixing their own pipeline first. They were rolling the dice. They were pushing that old pipeline as hard as they could. They misjudged it, and the line ruptured before they got it fixed because they’d rather be putting money into new pipelines and new infrastructure than fixing what they already have. Now they’ve replaced it or are in the process of replacing it.
Winona LaDuke: I think they were forced to.
Paul Blackburn: They were forced to because that pipeline was so old, and the companies all say that age doesn’t have anything to do with pipelines because if they maintain it properly and repair it properly, then they can keep a pipeline going forever. My first car was a really old, ratty Toyota Corolla. It was rusted out. It had holes in the floorboards. In theory, I could have spent a lot of money to keep that going, but did I? No, because it was so old and so fallen apart at that point that it didn’t make sense to invest money in that old car, the same way that pipeline companies don’t necessarily want to invest money into fixing old pipelines because at some point they will likely abandon some of these pipelines.
They want to maximize their profit and minimize their costs. They will play craps with peoples’ safety. In Kalamazoo it cost the people there tremendous impacts to their local environments. The other thing is it cost the company a billion dollars to clean it up, but you know who they could pass those costs onto? Those costs get passed on to people at the pump. So that billion dollar spill isn’t coming out of the shareholders pockets for Enbridge. That’s coming out of your pockets, everybody who is paying for the fuel that gets shipped through that pipeline. Everybody who is served by those Enbridge pipelines is paying for that spill.
Winona LaDuke: So we’re going to take a break here in a minute for our station I.D.s, but I’m talking to Paul Blackburn here, attorney who’s working on the Alberta Clipper intervention and has a lot of pipeline knowledge obviously. Part of what I’m getting out of this is one of the things that Minnesotans and people need to think about is we’re just the place where it all passes through, and a lot of it’s passing through. But we’re not actually benefitting, except for we’re getting a good price on oil, and I’m not actually sure that’s happening. The financial benefits are not accrued by residents of northern Minnesota. There’s some tax benefits.
Paul Blackburn: There’s some tax benefits. There are a few jobs, and some of the oil does come to Minnesota. A relatively small portion of the oil that comes in comes to Minnesota. Minnesota has the highest dependency of any state on this tar sands crude or gasoline that we burn in our cars.
Winona LaDuke: 80 percent is tar sands from the tar sands here, isn’t it?
Paul Blackburn: It comes from the dirtiest oil in the world. So when Minnesotans are fueling their cars, they’re burning the dirtiest fuel in the world. The gasoline’s the same, but the source of it is the dirtiest source in the world. The oil infrastructure’s here, and I think that Minnesotans have a right and a responsibility to make sure that it’s as safe as possible. Regardless of what folks think about fossil fuels and the impacts on the climate and climate change, still none of us want a spill and none of us want to have the St. Louis River running with oil down into Lake Superior. The other proposal we haven’t even touched on, which is the proposal to ship oil by oil tanker on Lake Superior.
Winona LaDuke: Terrifying actually, Paul. Nice to hang out with you in person though and talk about all the really terrifying proposals that are out there on pipelines and trains. We’re going to get back to that about trains, which someone told me are pipelines on wheels, an interesting way to look at it. This is Winona LaDuke, our show Aabitoose. Thanks for joining us!
The Band – “The Weight”
Winona LaDuke: Aaniin again, this is Winona LaDuke with our show Aabitoose, and I’m here visiting with attorney Paul Blackburn. He’s an attorney for Minnesota 350.org and Sierra Club. You’ve intervened in the Public Utilities Commission case, and this is an Enbridge case concerning the Alberta Clipper. We started talking about that and just generally pipelines, but the Alberta Clipper’s got 400,000 or so barrels per day running through the pipeline right now. They want to expand it to 800,000 barrels per day because they’re saying that they have a need.
Paul Blackburn: That’s correct. What happens is that Minnesota requires that Enbridge prove that there’s a need for this expansion of this pipeline, and citizens have the right to intervene in that process to say, “Well, there’s other ways of trying to deal with this situation.” For instance, we could look at greater conservation efforts to limit the amount of oil that we’re demanding in the state. Also, we have to question whether this kind of exploitation is the right way to go for energy security. As we said, a lot of this oil that’s being proposed and the new pipeline capacity would primarily be used, we believe, for export overseas. So again, Minnesotans get all the risks of this oil pipeline passing through Minnesota, and the rewards are going to refineries and big oil companies down in Texas.
You hear people talking about the pipelines versus the rail and that pipelines are safer than rail. In some ways it’s true; in some ways it’s not. Ultimately it’s between driving the car with the bad brakes and the car with the bad steering. None of these are the best way of doing it. Just like with all energy solutions the best, the cheapest energy is the energy we save. Unfortunately, there’s so little effort put into really improving oil conservation. I think all of us would prefer spending less money on our gasoline and diesel fuel than simply spending more money on it, which is what’s happening because the Bakken, and tar sands, and deep water oil are all expensive oils. Gasoline is more expensive now because it costs more to get oil out of the ground.
Winona LaDuke: It turns out that companies don’t make more money, if you conserve.
Paul Blackburn: That’s correct. It’s a little bit like with electricity too. The companies would prefer to sell as much of their product as possible, and while that may be good for the company, it’s not good for our national energy security. It’s not good for consumer’s pockets, not good for our health. If we are being very thoughtful and careful about our use of energy, if we’re really serious about wise use of our energy, then we use less of it. The truth Americans are using over 15 percent less oil than they did in 2007. That’s in part because of the Great Recession, but still the economy’s getting gradually – I don’t know if better is the right word, but it hasn’t collapsed. Nonetheless, we’re using that much less oil and we’re still surviving.
Winona LaDuke: Well, it’s also a question of choices. We spend a lot of money, for instance moving food around the country. If we get more local food, then we don’t have to transport it all around the country. So that could save a lot on transportation. We spend a lot on really inefficient manufacturing systems, where we break stuff down in like bottles instead of reusing those. We’ve made industrial choices or industrial choices have made by companies, which have a very high energy use and a very high level of inefficiency.
Paul Blackburn: I think that it’s of particular concern for folks in rural areas. One of the reasons that America uses more oil per capita is because we have such large rural areas compared to Europe or Japan for example, where the per capita oil consumption is much lower. That means rural Americans are very vulnerable to price increases in fuel of all types. I think the oil companies should be straight with folks about what’s going to happen into the future about how much more is oil going to cost, as we’re going to get more and more extreme oil. Oil companies have to spend more and more money to get the oil out of the ground, and the cost is going to keep going up. That presents a tremendous risk to rural economies.
The more that rural economies, rural residents can do to limit their use of oil, the safer and more secure they are going to be. I know some folks like to have vanity pick-up trucks, but the truth is in the future that may not be possible. People will need to have large vehicles for the true needs that they have them for.
Winona LaDuke: I always thought you should need a Certificate of Need to drive an S.U.V. I would get one because I live on a dirt road in the middle of Northern Minnesota. So I’m good, I feel like I got it. But would I like a fuel efficient one?
Paul Blackburn: There are needs for vehicles that burn more fuel for big families and other kinds of reasons, but there are lots of people who don’t need gas-guzzling vehicles.
Winona LaDuke: Didn’t you drive up in a Hummer?
Paul Blackburn: We understand that there are reasonable and rational needs for different kinds of fuels, but there’s a huge difference between saying that we should do whatever we want and we should be wasteful for whatever we want versus being thoughtful about it. You hear some of the folks online talking about how the environmentalists want to live in a cave in the dark. The environmentalists say if the choice is between nothing and living like cave people, versus having whatever we want and having the vision of the oil companies. The truth is that there’s a big middle ground there, and I think we all know we can conserve and use fuel much more efficiently than we’re doing now. That will make us all wealthier at some level because we won’t be giving our money to Texas. We’ll have more energy security, and our lives will be healthier. There’s so many reasons to be conscious and thoughtful about saving our energy for our own benefits. The companies seem to say, “Let the party roll! Keep it going! Suck that soda as fast as we can out of the bottle, and then that means that we got a good drink today. So we’re going to get a good drink tomorrow.” That ain’t true.
Winona LaDuke: Yeah, and that’s kind of a little head in the sand. I had an interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago with the Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk. They say that when we oppose these projects, we are trying to send people to the Stone Age, which is kind of what you’re saying about the environmentalists – “Freeze in the dark.” She says that the problem is that their proposals are going to put us so we can’t even live like that. By the time they are done with the environmental impacts, the climate change impacts, the contamination of water, the fact that you can’t fish because there is too much mercury in the lakes. We will be set back so far we won’t even be able to live like we used to live.
It’s really important to say it’s not this battle between these two things. It’s saying that basically, one of the reasons that Minnesota 350, Sierra Club, a lot of environmental groups, and Honor the Earth are opposing things like the Alberta Clipper and the Keystone as another pipeline is because that’s so damaging. The tar sands is the single largest industrial project in the history of the world. This is not little stuff going through pipelines, and we just happen to watch the pipelines. This has a huge impact.
Paul Blackburn: This is a commitment from our society to tremendously damaging oil infrastructure projects that continue our near-term lifestyle choices to be wasteful at the expense of what happens to future generations, both in terms of their access to oil and in terms of their health and the safety and quality of our environment. It’s very easy for people to say, “Let’s party on today. Let our children and grandchildren deal with whatever the fall-out is tomorrow.”
I think that this comes down to a basic sense of belief about whether we believe that somehow human kind is going to continue whatever it wants and continue to live however it wants, burn as much oil, and consume as much of everything that everybody consumes. Or whether there are limits to what happens with this planet, and there are limits as to what humans can do before they seriously the ecosystem that we all depend on. I think that’s a matter of faith as much as anything because who knows what’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years?
I think a lot of your listeners probably think we should be thoughtful and careful about what happens because nobody really knows. I don’t think that a lot of people believe that there’s this infinite amount of wealth; that we’re all going to become Star Trekkian, going out into the universe and having infinite energy and infinite wealth going into the future. Personally, I don’t believe that’s the way the world works.
Winona LaDuke: Dr. Spock is not going to hang out here in downtown Park Rapids or Detroit Lakes any time soon.
Paul Blackburn: Yeah, probably not and that’s a question about what your listeners believe. Do they believe we should be cautious and careful with our resources and thoughtful about future generations? Or do they believe we don’t have any obligation to be concerned about them because they’ll take care of themselves, and the world is infinite?
Winona LaDuke: I would say is a kind of teenager approach.
Paul Blackburn: It’s a very adolescent approach that we’re young and strong now, so were going to be young and strong forever. And that ain’t true.
Winona LaDuke: I know that one of my friends and colleagues, his name is Mike Wiggins, he’s the tribal chairman of the Bad River Reservation, and he’s fighting a big mine. The proposed mine in the Penokee Hills is interesting because it’s not that different than the pipeline because the taconite and iron ore that’s in there is headed for China. It’s like most of the mines in Northern Minnesota. It’s contracts for foreign countries, and you’re talking about the Enbridge lines. Most of these are export lines. He said: “Winona, it doesn’t seem like people want to hang around another thousand years.” That’s part of what we’re talking about is what’s our responsibility?
I want to get back to the Certificate of Need versus the Certificate of Greed. I’m thinking that Enbridge is here, the Public Utilities Commission is going to decide on the Alberta Clipper, and then they’re going to decide on the next proposed line, which is the Sandpiper line. As you said, the amount of oil that’s in the Bakken and the Three Forks, which underlies the Bakken, is less than a year’s consumption at present consumption levels for the United States. One more time so everybody gets that: You can basically do a whole bunch of oil boom in western North Dakota, have a pretty big environmental impact we’re starting to figure out, and it’s going to be the equivalent of a year’s consumption in the U.S. economy.
You can put it through a pipeline that you want to basically shove through Northern Minnesota, called the Sandpiper. All of those decisions are right now at the Public Utilities Commission in Minnesota, in which case the Enbridge Corporation needs to prove that it has a need for this pipeline. That need would be, in its case, to meet customers’ demands in a set of refineries that would be on the Great Lakes that they would either ship to by rail, or ship through pipeline, or ship through tanker. They’ve also said in their intervention was for American energy security for this country, but it turns out aren’t we exporting that oil every day?
Paul Blackburn: Turns out the United States in the past few years has set significant records in exporting large amounts of not crude oil but gas and diesel fuel from the United States. It’s quite a remarkable change. Sure, the industry will say, “Well, it helps with our balance of trade and that it creates a lot of wealth in the Gulf Coast because the refineries are selling all this crude oil overseas.” Again, Minnesota’s not seeing a lot of benefit from that. In any case, other people believe that shipping oil out of North America to overseas locations isn’t really increasing our energy security. It may increase the profits for the oil companies, but that’s not the same as energy security. I think sometimes the oil companies say that whatever is good for them is good for the rest of the country, and that isn’t so.
Winona LaDuke: Yeah, and these pipelines would set up Enbridge for more exports.
Paul Blackburn: Yeah, for more exports. The United States, as I said, has decreased its amount of gasoline, diesel fuel, and other refined petroleum products that have been consumed by Americans and American industries. What the companies have done with their excess refining capacity is to refine, and there appears to be no significant increase in the amount of oil that’s being consumed in the U.S. Department of Energy predicts that the consumption of oil in the U.S. will basically be flat for the next couple of decades and probably thereafter. So that means that additionally the oil supplies coming to the United States aren’t really for American energy security needs, energy demands. It’s really so the industry in the Gulf Coast can become the refiner for a large part of the world and make a lot of money on the refining process.
Winona LaDuke: I was looking at the proposal for where the pipelines will be located. Whether you start with the Keystone or you look at the Clipper and the new proposals for the Sandpiper, they were very clear that going through rural areas was preferable to going through high population zones because of the risk factor –
Paul Blackburn: And the land is cheaper.
Winona LaDuke: The land is cheaper, and people are maybe less aware of what’s going on. So basically what you’re saying is that we are bearing the risk and the interest is really going to be benefiting someone else.
Paul Blackburn: And that’s what the people who have been fighting the Keystone XL pipeline have been saying for years too. It’s all risk and no reward. The states that the Keystone XL pipeline go through get some tax benefits. The permanent jobs are just a handful: two, or three, or something like that per state. At the same time, there’s the ongoing risks of oil spills and what that could do to water resources like the Missouri River or the Oglala Aquifer. The pipeline systems in Minnesota, especially the Sandpiper, will be crossing the Mississippi River many times.
Winona LaDuke: Those are spring-fed lakes.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, and the lakes, all the wetlands, and the St. Louis River. All that water in Minnesota, which is such a part of who we are, the well-being of our culture –
Winona LaDuke: Actually, water is kind of essential to life.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, a lot of it’s put at risk by these pipelines, the trains, and the oil tanker proposal to move oil out of Duluth harbor through the Great Lakes through large oil tankers. This is a new world, and the new world is one of oil coming through Minnesota and putting Minnesotans at a much greater risk than they’ve been in the past. We think that people all up and down the pipeline routes and the railroad routes should be involved in a variety of different efforts that we’re taking and other groups are taking to express their concern about this new world to ensure that their communities, their families, and their environments are safe.
Winona LaDuke: So how do rural Minnesotans, who just might come to learn about these two proposals for the Sandpiper or the Clipper, how do they get involved?
Paul Blackburn: Well, there are several groups working on this issue, but I think that a big part is neighbors talking to neighbors. In rural areas folks know their neighbors, and they should talk to people that they know and especially people who are along the pipeline or railroad routes. They should talk to people about what’s going on with this. They should go online and research the risks and learn more. There’s a lot of information online about the tar sands, about the Bakken developments, about the risks of railroad explosions, the risks of pipeline ruptures, and of course oil tanker risks. The more that people know about this, the better they’ll be able to protect themselves and their communities.
Winona LaDuke: So the Sandpiper for instance, Enbridge Corporation needs to secure 2,000 easements and right-of-ways. A lot of those are private landowners. Each of those would require consent or, if they get the P.U.C. to approve them, could they condemn our land?
Paul Blackburn: Yes, these are foreign pipeline companies –
Winona LaDuke: This is a foreign corporation, so we’ve got that one more time.
Paul Blackburn: They have the right to condemn property. The government granted them the right to use eminent domain and condemn private property for private benefit. That’s a thing a lot of rural landowners find to be very disturbing, that a company like Enbridge can have the right of the government to take property. If somebody’s building a road or the government’s building a school –
Winona LaDuke: Like a public benefit.
Paul Blackburn: If it’s a public benefit, then folks understand that that’s just the way the world works. Sometimes the government needs to take property for all of our benefit. When you have a pipeline company taking property at market value for the same rate the government would get private property to create a private pipeline that creates private profits for a company out of state, there’s something wrong about that. Although the oil does benefit everybody, the benefits are not the same as would be for a real public project like building a highway or something like that. Yet Enbridge gets the same deal the government gets.
Winona LaDuke: Landowners can get informed and oppose it. They’re at the Public Utilities Commission now, and you guys being Minnesota 350 and Sierra Club have intervened. I know Honor the Earth has intervened.
Paul Blackburn: Enbridge is basically wanting to minimize the amount of information they provide to the public, and the state government said they didn’t provide nearly enough information in their application to justify moving ahead with the process. Again, the oil companies essentially want to say, “Trust us. We know what’s in your best interests, and let us just build. Everything will be fine.” We think that the government should go through a very rigorous process, and if the government’s going to give away people’s property and it’s going to put people at risk from these pipelines, then there should be a rigorous process so that people fully consider whether it’s truly needed or it’s just needed for short-terms profits, also ensure that as many safety controls are put in place as possible.
Winona LaDuke: So in that, sometimes people do defeat or move pipelines, is that right?
Paul Blackburn: Yeah, they’re relatively rare to defeat to tell you the truth, but it is still possible to stop them. And it is possible to move them. A pipeline came through Minnesota, down through the Twin Cities and went past an organic garden called the Garden of Eagan, and that was moved out of the way. It’s hard to say what will happen over the long-term in these cases, but if citizens aren’t involved, then guarantee you that the amount of safety controls and the consideration of the route, and the impacts on citizens’ lives will be greater. But if citizens aren’t involved, then guarantee you the amount of safety controls, consideration of the route, and the impacts of that pipeline will be greater than if citizens are involved.
Winona LaDuke: But in the case of the pipeline that brings the Bakken oil, you’re talking about a pipeline for basically 20 years of oil, if that.
Paul Blackburn: Something like that, yes. The pipelines they’re building for the tar sands. They’re planning to develop the tar sands to damage an area the size of Florida. So really damage an area that big and bring oil down here for 40 or 50 years. The Bakken oil is not projected to be lasting anywhere near that long. It’s expected to peak sometime in early 2020s. So the pipelines for the Bakken will be used for a shorter period of time. Truth be told, the industry’s been looking at rail, not just because there’s a limit. Actually, the amount of oil that’s been moving out of North Dakota by pipeline has decreased substantially in the past year.
Winona LaDuke: It’s almost all moving on rail.
Paul Blackburn: There’s about 100,000 barrels per day or a little bit more coming out of North Dakota right now by pipeline, an existing pipeline in the Enbridge system. And that pipeline dropped from around 250,000 barrels per day a couple of years ago. It’s because they prefer to move by rail for a variety of economic reasons to move that oil by rail. Even if they build more pipeline capacity, they may still prefer to move by rail for a variety of economic reasons.
Winona LaDuke: Enbridge is saying that it’s safer to move by pipeline, and the fact is that if you have a rail spill, it’s a smaller spill.
Paul Blackburn: Right. Typically, the risks of rail spills, especially with the Bakken crude which is so explosive, is the explosion. But the amount that goes into rivers, or lakes, or on the ground is typically less because it burns. Or if it doesn’t burn, usually only a few cars come out. There are more spills for rail, but most of them are much smaller. If one of these big pipelines, then –
Winona LaDuke: You’ve got a lot of damage into the water and into the land.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, risk has to do with the likelihood that something bad will happen, and then how bad those impacts are. If something is very likely to happen, but the impacts are horrible. For example, a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant, very low likelihood of that happening. But when that happened in Japan, it was a tremendous disaster. Because it’s unlikely doesn’t mean you don’t do something.
Winona LaDuke: And Enbridge has over 800 spills.
Paul Blackburn: Yes, because the damages are so high. This talk about risks. You can’t just look at the frequency. You also have to look at the potential damages that are done by that spill. In that regard, it’s much harder calculus to figure out what’s safer or which is more dangerous because the truth is that they’re all dangerous at some level. Rather than arguing about which one is more dangerous or less dangerous, we should be trying to figure out how to make them all safer.
Winona LaDuke: All safer and then we should be questioning why we’re spending so much money on such extractive industries with such a huge environmental impact.
Paul Blackburn: The safest pipelines, the safest railroad, and the safest oil tanker in the world are the ones you don’t need.
Winona LaDuke: Right. So we’ve got a couple minutes left, but I know a lot of people are concerned also about if we don’t have the pipeline, then we’re going to have the rail. I was visiting with some people in La Crosse a couple days ago, and they said that actually the energy companies, not the railroad, owns all those cars. Burlington Northern or whoever owns the rail line. We do have aging rail lines. That was a problem before, and we need to fix our rail lines and we need to fix our aging infrastructure in this country. We need to spend more money fixing all of the infrastructure in the country, but those tankers they’ve been using, the Lac Megantic tankers and I think the Casselton tankers that blow up, are these ones that are not the safest tankers because that’s the majority of what’s actually still on the line. They don’t have the new tankers that are a double-hull or a super-resilient tanker. So part of it, which I think there’s a lot of national look at now with the National Transportation and Safety Board, is to make those companies, if they are moving stuff by rail through these small towns, have the safe tankers.
Paul Blackburn: These tankers, the DOT-111s, were designed I guess back in the late 1960s or early 70s. Even back then, it was understood they created a risk. So these are kind of like the Ford Pintos of the rail cars. They are dangerous.
Winona LaDuke: The exploding gas tank, for those of