Risks understated in tar sands pipeline proposal
Report: Oil pipeline firm too optimistic on spills
By JOSH FUNK
BUSINESSWEEK
OMAHA, NEB.
An engineering professor says in a report released Monday that a Canadian company has underestimated the potential for spills along the pipeline it wants to build to carry tar sands oil across the Plains to refineries near the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. State Department is reviewing the $7 billion Keystone XL project, which would double the capacity of the existing Keystone pipeline that runs from North Dakota to Oklahoma and Illinois. The State Department has said it would decide the project's fate by the end of this year.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineering professor John Stansbury said neither TransCanada nor the regulators evaluating the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have properly considered the risks.
"They presented what I thought was an unrealistically optimistic picture of the impacts from the pipeline," said Stansbury, an environmental engineer who specializes in water engineering and has been a consultant teaching the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers how to do risk assessments.
(More here. More also from New York Times energy/environmental blog and from guardian.co.uk.)
By JOSH FUNK
BUSINESSWEEK
OMAHA, NEB.
An engineering professor says in a report released Monday that a Canadian company has underestimated the potential for spills along the pipeline it wants to build to carry tar sands oil across the Plains to refineries near the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. State Department is reviewing the $7 billion Keystone XL project, which would double the capacity of the existing Keystone pipeline that runs from North Dakota to Oklahoma and Illinois. The State Department has said it would decide the project's fate by the end of this year.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineering professor John Stansbury said neither TransCanada nor the regulators evaluating the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have properly considered the risks.
"They presented what I thought was an unrealistically optimistic picture of the impacts from the pipeline," said Stansbury, an environmental engineer who specializes in water engineering and has been a consultant teaching the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers how to do risk assessments.
(More here. More also from New York Times energy/environmental blog and from guardian.co.uk.)
Labels: environment, oil pipeline
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