June 15, 2013
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Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America
documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new
AlterNet project, Hitting Home. Follow her trip on Facebook or on Twitter.
A
few years ago most Americans had never heard of tar sands. Now, thanks
to mounting opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and a recent spill in
Arkansas, vocabularies have grown, and so has a movement.
Environmentalists have ignited a firestorm of protests over the
pipeline, prompting rallies in DC and states across the country,
resulting in high-profile arrests and media blitzes.
(click the image below to see the slideshow)
Keystone XL, which would allow more dirty oil from the
environmentally ravished boreal forests of northern Alberta to flow
through the U.S., has become a rallying call of sorts, a tangible way
for environmentalists and other concerned residents to fight the elusive
specter of climate change.
With all the focus on blocking the
Obama administration’s approval of Keystone XL, the general public has
mostly missed a project plugging along at 8,000 feet atop the Tavaputs
Plateau in Eastern Utah (part of the ever-larger Colorado Plateau), and
not far from beloved Arches and Canyonlands national parks. This fall a
Canadian company named U.S Oil Sands (formerly Earth Energy Resources)
leapt another legal hurdle on its multi-year journey to becoming the
first large-scale tar sands mine in the U.S. Local and regional
activists have been fighting the development for years, but it has
somehow missed the national conversation, which is odd because the
potential for tar sands and oil shale development in Utah could be
massive.
“We don’t want the unconventional fuel industry to gain a foothold on the Colorado Plateau,” said Taylor McKinnon of
Grand Canyon Trust. “The U.S. unconventional fuel carbon bomb is bigger than Alberta’s."
What’s at Stake
Tar
sands (also known as oil sands) are rocks that have bitumen (a form of
oil) mixed in with sand, clay and water. Tar sands are usually extracted
by strip mining an area to remove the rock, then crushing it and using
heat, water and chemicals to separate the oil, which is then diluted
with other hydrocarbons in order to make it liquid enough to be
transported to a refinery. (Sometimes in situ recovery is possible,
where steam and chemicals are pumped into underground wells to enable
the bitumen to come to the surface.) The process is energy- and
water-intensive and the waste massive and dangerous, at least as it has
been done in northern Alberta (see
photos here).
Utah
is the primary location of tar sands in the U.S., but oil shale abounds
in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Oil shale is similar to tar sands, but
when heated the rock releases kerogen, an oil-like substance. The
presence of oil shale in the West is no secret—Ute Indians referred to
it as “
rocks that burn.” What is new, however, is the economics of bringing these unconventional fuels to market and the green light from Washington.
The
federal government has approved 132,100 acres of land available for tar
sands development in Utah and another 687,000 acres in Utah, Wyoming
and Colorado for oil shale. (This is a scaled-back number, thanks to
pressure from environmental groups, from what was first proposed in the
Bush administration’s 2005 Energy Policy Act.)
U.S. Oil Sands
(which did not return interview requests) has already dug its shovel
into part of 32,000 acres it has leased in the Tavaputs Plateau. The
company started a 200-acre test mine and last October it received
sign-off from the state to continue its project following approval from
the Water Quality Division. The Division’s director, Walt Baker,
believed the company didn’t need a groundwater pollution permit. “He
concluded that there is no groundwater to pollute in the project site,
around 213 acres in the arid high country between Vernal and Moab,”
reported Judy Fahys of the
Salt Lake Tribune.
But the environmental group
Living Rivers disagrees. Ironically, the site of the test mine is referred to on U.S. Oil Sands’
website as PR Spring, the name of a nearby freshwater spring. Additionally, Jeremy Miller
reported for
High Country News
in July 2012 that the company actually plans to use groundwater from
the site to supply the necessary water for the process. As his
HCNcolleague Stephanie Paige Ogburn
wrote
in October 2012, “Apparently the groundwater is not too deep to drill
into as a water source, but still deep enough to be immune from
pollution runoff.”
The company anticipates that it will produce
2,000 barrels of oil a day once it is ramped up to full production. With
a seven-year project lifespan,
one estimate puts its contribution to the country’s fuel supply at
six hours.
And the process won’t be easy. Miller
describes what it would look like:
Heavy
machinery would scour bitumen from the pit around the clock … The sand
and mineral fines remaining after the oil has been removed will be
combined, shoved back into the pit and covered with topsoil. But
processing expands such wastes by as much as 30 percent. The overflow
will be dumped into surrounding ravines—a method starkly reminiscent of
Appalachia's mountaintop coal mining. And the project will create miles
of light pollution, illuminating one of the country's last great "dark"
regions.
The company claims the next part of the
process makes its version of tar sands mining environmentally friendly
by using a citrus-based solvent (although there is much
disagreement
about this). As Neal Clark of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said,
“We don’t feel it’s an appropriate use of public lands to vet these
unproven technologies that have wide-ranging impacts on air and water
quality and habitat to companies that haven’t proven the technology
whatsoever.”
But the story doesn’t end with the solvents, as Miller
continues:
In
order to utilize the solvent, the sands must first be sent through a
series of on-site crushers. Hot water is added to the resulting slurry,
generating a "froth" of oil, solvent and fine sand particles. This
mixture is then passed through a series of separation towers, where the
crude oil is isolated. It's then trucked to refineries in Salt Lake City
for processing. Unlike conventional light crude oil, the heavy crude
generated from PR Spring—like Canada's—requires extra, energy-intensive
refining steps to remove impurities, such as sulfur and heavy metals,
before it can be turned into anything useful.
State
and local governments have largely welcomed the project and the county
is quite literally paving the way, turning dirt roads into asphalt to
speed things along. But opposition of another sort is mounting.
The Fight
“The kids, bless their hearts, don’t want to file lawsuits, they want to stand in front of bulldozers,” said John Weisheit of
Living Rivers. “But that’s cool, I support that.”
Weisheit’s organization, along with the environmental law firm
Western Resource Advocates,
has been leading the charge in litigation to halt tar sands and oil
shale development in the region. While they haven’t had a lot of success
in court, with the U.S Oil Sands project they have managed to
substantially delay development and the company is still searching for
investors. Weisheit considers that a win for his side.
In May,
Living Rivers, Grand Canyon Trust, Center for Biological Diversity,
Sierra Club and Rocky Mountain Wild filed a 60-day notice of intent to
sue the BLM. The groups contest that the government agency failed to
consider the impact to endangered species that would result from making
800,000 acres of land available to tar sands and oil shale development.
“PR
Springs, that is real wilderness up there,” said Weisheit. “There are
roadless areas nearby, bald eagles forage up there, and some golden
eagles. Sometimes I see so many I can’t believe it.”
The area is home to deer, elk, bear, and the threatened Mexican spotted owl,
and
it straddles two critical watersheds, the Colorado River (which 30
million people depend on) and the Green River. Nearby Desolation Canyon
and its rivers give refuge to three endangered fish species and PR
Springs sits just northeast of Moab, Utah, a destination town for
recreation enthusiasts and nature lovers, surrounded by national and
state parks of prized beauty.
Activist groups like
Before It Starts
are mounting education camps at the site and doing direct action, but
they know PR Springs is just the tip of the iceberg. Another tar sands
project at Asphalt Ridge has also been green-lighted near the town of
Vernal, Utah, just to the north.
But the largest deposit of tar sands is further south in the state, in an area known as the Tar Sands Triangle,
wedged between
Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and the
Dirty Devil River Watershed. In essence, it’s prime canyon country.
And tar sands development would be dwarfed by the impacts of oil shale development.
What’s
the price of pursuing these unconventional fuels? Well, the BLM said it
would "completely displace all other uses of the land."
Kurt Repanshek, writing in 2010 for
National Parks Traveler said, according to the BLM’s own
Oil Shale and Tar Sands Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, that the agency believed its plan (now slightly scaled back) would mean that the air nearby could be:
…
contaminated with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and
other pollutants, while air close to the site could be contaminated with
benzene, toluene and formaldehyde. More than 100,000 acres of
wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of
reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and
herbicides could cause 'chronic or acute toxicity' in wildlife and
habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost.
And that’s coming from the agency giving the go-ahead.
Grand
Canyon Trust's McKinnon said he doesn’t believe it’s possible that the
already-stretched Colorado River Basin could support that level of
industry without “unacceptable impacts.”
“The notion of mining
climate disaster fuels in a region that is ground zero for global
warming impacts is itself alarming,” said McKinnon. “It’s bad land use
policy, it’s bad water policy and it’s bad public policy.”
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