Why it matters that spilled Michigan oil came from tar sands

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from Grist:




Why it matters that spilled Michigan oil came from tar sands
by Jonathan Hiskes

16 Aug 2010 2:58 PM


Brace yourselves for this: An energy executive has been caught bending the truth to downplay an environmental disaster. Shocking, I know.

The culprit here isn't BP's Tony Hayward or Massey Energy's Don Blankenship. This time it's Patrick Daniel, CEO of Enbridge Energy Partners, which owns the Michigan pipeline that burst in a Kalamazoo River tributary in late July.

The spill of more than 800,000 gallons near Battle Creek, Mich., looks positively dainty compared to BP's Gulf leak, but the type of crude oil spilled caught the interest of a few reporters.

Kari Lydersen reports for On Earth:

Environmental experts said it was likely tar sands oil -- the controversial asphalt-thick bitumen whose mining and drilling operations are causing major environmental destruction in the forests of Alberta, Canada.

While reporting on the spill, I asked Enbridge Energy Partners CEO Patrick Daniel several times whether his company's pipeline was carrying oil from tar sands -- or "oil sands," as the industry typically calls it. He definitively told me that it was not.

That turned out to be false -- the spilled oil did come from the Alberta tar sands, as the Michigan Messenger reports. Tar sands oil can be extracted by either strip mining -- clearing the forest and digging out the bitumen, the most common method -- or by pumping steam below the earth to melt it, then pumping it up. The stuff's the same either way. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08-16-why-it-matters-that-spilled-michigan-oil-came-from-tar-sands/

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