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Environmentalists Take Aim at TransCanada Pipeline Project

Natural Resources Defense Council

Environmental groups in Maine, Canada and around the country are sounding the alarm about a massive pipeline project they say would threaten East Coast fisheries, imperil marine mammals and exacerbate climate change.

In a new report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the groups warn that TransCanada’s proposed 2,800-mile Energy East pipeline poses a greater threat than its Keystone XL project, rejected by President Barack Obama last year.

According to the New York-based NRDC, TransCanada plans to move up to 1.1 million barrels a day through the proposed pipeline, which would cross Canada from Alberta to St. John, New Brunswick. From there, the group says the tar sands oil, also known as diluted bitumen, would be shipped by as many as 300 supertankers down the Eastern Seaboard to Gulf Coast refineries.

According to the report, the tankers are large enough to carry the equivalent of 130 Olympic-size swimming pools full of tar sands oil. And Anthony Swift of the NRDC says an accidental spill could create a marine catastrophe.

“Earlier this year the National Academy of Sciences finished a long-term study concluding that diluted bitumen tar sands has unique properties that current spill response techniques and technologies are simply not equipped to address,” he says.

Speaking to reporters in a telephone news conference, Swift says there is no clear-cut strategy or appropriate equipment for preventing or cleaning up tar sands spills. Case in point: the 2010 Enbridge pipeline spill of more than a million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

“Emergency responders found that their spill response tactics were ineffective,” Swift says. “In the end, nearly 40 miles of the river was contaminated with tar sands crude and the spill would become the most expensive in U.S. history, costing $1.2 billion.”

According to the NRDC’s analysis, the Energy East tankers pose a threat to commercial fishing along the East Coast, including Maine’s lobster industry in the Gulf of Maine. And it concludes that recovery of marine mammals like the endangered right whale, the fin whale, dolphins, sea turtles and other species could also be jeopardized by ship strikes and noise pollution in addition to oil spills along the coast.

Swift and others say Canadian regulators are not considering these risks.

“We need Congress to step up and act to stop the expansion of pipelines and the shipment of dangerous sources of oil,” says Laura Dorle of the group Environment Maine.

Dorle says congressional action is needed not only because of potential regional and global effects but because whenever local communities try to protect themselves, the industry fights back.

A prime example, she says, is in South Portland, where the city council passed a Clear Skies ordinance that prevents the Portland-Montreal Pipe Line Co. from using its pipeline to carry tar sands oil to South Portland for export. The pipeline company has since filed suit.

“The city is left to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend an ordinance with wide public support,” Dorle says.

A spokesperson for TransCanada says the company is still reviewing the environmental group’s report. But in an email, Jonathan Abecassis points out that TransCanada is a pipeline company. It does not own or operate ships for the delivery of oil.

“Our customers,” he wrote, “determine the destination of their oil.”

Still, Abecassis says safety remains the top priority, and he says the company is working with local authorities and first responders to make sure it has adequate resources to respond quickly in the unlikely event of an emergency.

The NRDC, meanwhile, says consumption of oil from the Energy East project would emit as much annual greenhouse gas as 54 million passenger cars. And environmentalists say that is the last thing the planet needs in the face of climate change.