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Palin’s Pipeline from Hell
Opinion | Huffington Post | by Michael Brune & Kenny Bruno | June 17, 2009
There’s a stealth dirty oil mega-project sneaking into the United States. It’s arriving piece by piece, pipeline by pipeline, refinery by refinery, and permit by permit — but it’s a singularly immense monstrosity conceived by Big Oil. It’s called the Canadian Tar Sands, or as the oil industry prefers, Canadian Oil Sands.
And it’s being brought to you by Sarah Palin and ExxonMobil.
Yes, the former beauty queen who inspired thousands to chant “Drill Baby Drill” last summer apparently also believes that a Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste. Under Plan Palin, ExxonMobil and TransCanada would construct a 1700-mile natural gas pipeline from the Arctic, heading south.
But this gas won’t be heading straight to the Lower 48, perhaps as a temporary alternative to America’s greenhouse gas-belching, coal-fired power plants. No such luck. Instead, the pipeline will run to Alberta, where, based on current projections, about half of it is likely to be siphoned to help produce the dirtiest oil on earth.
There’s a tricky thing about producing oil from the tar sands: the oil there really isn’t oil. It’s called bitumen, and it’s so thick and heavy — tar-like, if you will — that it can’t be drilled in conventional ways. About 20 percent of this bitumen is dredged up in some of the largest strip mines on the planet. Creating enough waste to fill Yankee Stadium every two days. As I wrote in my book, Coming Clean,
“To get oil from Canada’s tar sand, more landscape must be excavated than was moved for the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and the ten largest dams in the world — combined.”
Tagged with: pipeline, natural gas, energy demand, sarah palin
