Last Thursday, the Senate passed a bill 62-36 approving construction of Keystone XL, a 1,179 mile long pipeline transferring oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas. Once the House passes the bill as GOP leaders stated Tuesday, the bill will reach President Obama who holds steadfast in his promise to veto the bill.
When looking at the pipeline through a purely economic lens, one could see why Congress would want to push it through; a sudden creation of thousands of jobs is a powerful motivator.
But these jobs, which have been projected to be anywhere from 2,500 to 20,000 strong, are very temporary. As soon as construction of the pipeline would be completed, there would be only 35 permanent jobs, as predicted by a State Department study.
I will admit, the project would be a boost to the economy; however big a boost is impossible to tell, as there seems to be a different claim on every site for or against the pipeline.
But even with a nudge to the economy and short-term job creation, is Keystone XL worth it?
In a June 25, 2013 speech at Georgetown University, President Obama had this to say on the matter: “… our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”
This is why Keystone XL receives a fail in my book.
As America slowly starts the process of moving away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable energy, Keystone XL would be an enormous step backwards. The oil taken from the Canadian tar sands is not your typical crude oil; over its life cycle, from being mined out of the ground to pumped into your gas tank, tar sands oil produces 17 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than normal crude oil due to the energy-consuming nature of its production.
Another downfall of the oil gleaned from tar sands is that you don’t simply drill into the earth and pump it out. The black sand is either surface mined after the trees and topsoil are removed, requiring an average of two tons of tar sands to create one barrel of crude oil, or it is brought to the surface after blasting steam hundreds of feet underground to liquefy the tar. After being mixed with water and natural gas to make the tar less viscous and dumping the toxic leftovers, the gas is ready to move through the pipeline.
The amount of resources used to make even one barrel of tar sand oil is just absurd; and what’s left over is even worse. After the water is used in the refining process, it is so polluted that it has to be dumped in massive toxic sludge pits held back by a series of dams; a similar barrier used to hold back the coal ash in Kingston. These pits, which cover a total of 176 square kilometers, are not watertight by any means. A previous federal study shows that a single pond will leak 6.5 million liters of toxic waste daily into the groundwater and the nearby Athabasca River.
As for the pipeline itself, the proposed route for Keystone crosses over several hundred miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of America’s largest underground sources of freshwater. While TransCanada claims that top-of-the-line technology will be used that will prevent or better mediate spills, how can we trust them when their Keystone 1 pipeline leaked 12 times in its first year of operation alone, including a valve failure that dumped 21,000 gallons?
The Keystone XL project, and tar sands mining in general, is the wrong move for the future of America. We should be focusing our resources on the development of cleaner energies, not resorting to one of the dirtiest sources of fuel on the planet.
Digging up and burning all of the fossil fuels we find will have disastrous consequences on our planet if we don’t do something about it now. As Bill McKibben said in a New York Times article, “… if we’re ever going to tackle global warming we actually have to leave some carbon in the ground.”
Keystone XL represents a waste of time and resources on a severely outdated source of energy. Instead of attempting to solve the energy crisis with one short-term fix after another, America needs to start focusing our resources on developing real, long-term solutions. Our future depends on it.
Kevin Ridder is a senior in environmental studies. He can be reached at [email protected].
