Tag Archives: tar sands

New documents show Exxon knew of dangerous contamination from their Arkansas tar sands spill, yet claimed area was “oil free”

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On March 29 ExxonMobil, the most profitable company in the world, spilled at least 210,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from an underground pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas. The pipeline was carrying tar sands oil from Canada, which flooded family residences in Mayflower in thick tarry crude. Exxon’s tar sands crude also ran into Lake Conway, which sits about an eighth of a mile from where Exxon’s pipeline ruptured.

The cove of Lake Conway which Exxon claimed was “oil-free”

A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.

When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway…The water is all part of one body of water.” Furthermore, Exxon water tests confirmed that levels of Benzene and other contaminants rose throughout the lake, not just in the cove area.

Though Exxon was eventually forced to redact their claim that the cove specifically was  “oil-free,” the oil and gas giant has yet to publicly address the dangerous levels of Benzene and other contaminants their own tests have found in the body of Lake Conway. The Environmental Protection Agency and the American Petroleum Institute don’t agree on everything, but they do agree that the only safe level of Benzene, a cancer causing chemical found in oil, is zero. Benzene is added to tar sands oil to make it less viscous and flow more easily through pipelines.  Local people have reported fish kills, chemical smells, nausea and headaches. Independent water tests have found a host of contaminants present in the lake.

Dead fish in Palarm creek, which Lake Conway drains into. Palarm creek is a tributary of the Arkansas River.

According to Exxon’s data, 126,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from the pipeline spill is still unaccounted for.

Exxon’s spill emanated from the Pegasus Pipeline, which like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, connects the Canadian Tar Sands with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

One Week, Four Oil Spills. Exxon’s tar sands oil spill in Arkansas is not an isolated incident

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As many people who watch the oil industry know, oil spills are not avoidable, preventable, or unlikely. From extraction to combustion oil is a destructive and dirty business, based on sacrificing the health of environments and peoples for corporate profits.

Take action now and say “No to the Keystone Pipeline”, an oil spill waiting to happen.

Smoke pours from an Exxon Oil Refinery after an explosion in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1989

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14 questions for Exxon from an oil spill expert

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A dead American Coot covered in oil lies among leaves and branches near the Bell Slough Wildlife Management Area near Mayflower, Arkansas April 2, 2013.

Exxon’s tar sands pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas is highlighting concerns about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and raising questions about the risks of existing pipelines transporting diluted tar sands crude. In a familiar pattern for the oil industry, Exxon is impeding access to the spill, controlling information about the impacts, and threatening reporters with arrest; as Little Rock, Arkansas based journalist Suzi Parker put it, “the company has instituted something like martial law.” Continue reading →

Is Exxon trying to hide the damage from their Tar Sands pipeline spill?

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Oil seeps into a marshy waterway after Exxon's Arkansas pipeline spill

Sure seems like it. According to reports from the ground, Exxon is in full control of the response to the 12,000 barrels of tar sands oil that began spilling from Exxon’s ruptured pipeline in Arkansas last weekend. The skies above the spill has been deemed a no-fly zone, and all requests to fly low over the area to take pictures must be approved by Exxon’s own “aviation advisor” Tom Suhrhoff. Continue reading →

If the tar sands spilling from Exxon’s Arkansas pipeline isn’t oil, then what is it?

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I’ve been to a few oil spills in my day and, sad to say, my day seems like it hasn’t ended yet.  ExxonMobil’s latest oil spill, in Mayflower, Arkansas, is of Canadian heavy crude oil. Continue reading →

Keystone XL report makes Obama Administration look Gutless on Climate

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Don't worry. The U.S. State Department is okay with encouraging tar sands mining like this.

The U.S. State Department released its draft environmental assessment of the Keystone XL  tar sands pipeline last Friday afternoon as we entered our weekends. Some of us were stunned as we watched Congress do nothing to tame the indiscriminate cuts in public jobs from the “sequester,” including hundreds of millions of dollars cut from environmental programs and protections. The announcement was further buried by today’s highly-anticipated appointments of EPA administrator Gina McCarty and Dept. of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, whom some beltway insiders speculated would be appointed last week.

While the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement acknowledges that tar sands oil production is more carbon intensive than conventional oil, the 2,000 page document seems like an easy excuse for President Obama to approve the pipeline without seeming hypocritical for breaking his State of the Unions promises on climate change.

The climate doesn’t care how any message is framed if we’re still dumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like a global industrial sewer. Greenpeace’s Point of No Return report includes Alberta’s tar sands among the largest carbon fuel reserves on the planet, with potential for 420 million metric tons in annual CO2 emissions by 2020.

State Dept. says Keystone XL won’t increase tar sands production…Oil Industry Says the Opposite Continue reading →

Students: The World Needs You – Apply for the Greenpeace Semester

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APPLY FOR THE GREENPEACE SEMESTER!

Me, on a decommissioned Duke/Progress Energy smokestack (see picture below). Arden, NC. Feb, 2012.

As humans, we sometimes find ourselves in positions that change the way we view the world, or how we fit into it. This week, as we focus on recruiting students for the Greenpeace Semester, I want to share some examples of how my own time in Washington, DC three years ago led me to many of the most profound and exciting experiences I have lived through.

Let me start backwards: I do research for Greenpeace’s PolluterWatch project exposing the lies of the bad guys. Think Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Duke Energy, and other coal, oil, chemical and industrial interests. In order to protect their relentless pursuit of wealth, power and prestige, the people who lead these companies bankroll a network of propagandists to hijack our perceptions and our politics. I was introduced to this network as the climate denial machine, although their corporate agenda includes everything from cracking workers unions to suppressing voters to privatizing education.

The Greenpeace Semester led me into a climate denier conference in New York City organized by the Heartland Institute. I looked into the eyes of men who hate what I do. I shook their hands. I listened to them gripe about Greenpeace’s work to hold them accountable. I made small talk…and mischief. Continue reading →

Arctic Drilling and Tar Sands: Two Faces of Extreme Oil Extraction

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extreme extraction

By Mark Worthing

If you thought that British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a horrific disaster, imagine that under meters of ice in waters only navigable for four months of the year. Imagine that where the temperatures would send hell through an ice age. Imagine that 70 kilometers from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But where the devil is afraid to go, Royal Dutch Shell is not.  And neither is Greenpeace.

We see the drive to drill for oil in the Arctic as yet another great leap backwards in to our dark cultural addiction to fossil fuels.  It is this irrational desperation that has led us to scraping the bottom of the ocean at the end of earth’s habitable and inhabitable reaches – the high arctic.

As a Canadian I am familiar with this desperation. The Alberta Tar Sands pushes the envelop in it’s own way. It’s another example of extreme-extraction methods that the oil producers of this world are willing to do in order to maintain an industrial status quo that is hooked on risky behavior.

4 years ago I took action to stop this risky behavior at Shell Canada’s Albion Tar Sands open pit mine. I suppose we drew a line in the sand when we shut down the operation for 31 hours. We were protesting the destruction of the largest remaining Boreal forest that Shell, and others, is carelessly carving off the surface of the earth to expose the sandy tar-like petroleum product called bitumen.

It is Bitumen that they hope to refine and pipe 1100 kilometers across the territory of many unwilling indigenous populations of British Columbia via Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project. Ultimately crude oil super tankers will endanger the Central Coast of British Columbia, where I live, to carry this dirty oil to the markets in Asia. By taking action, I suppose I was drawing a line in the sand.

I now find myself in the Gulf of Alaska aboard the MV Esperanza. The ship is heading to the Arctic where we’ll shine a spotlight on who and what Shell puts at risk as it begins to drill in the Alaskan Arctic. There we’ll add our voice to millions of others. Enough is enough. The age of oil is over.  It’s time to draw a line in the ice.

Mark is a volunteer with Greenpeace Canada.

U.S.Gasoline Use Declining – Keystone XL Pipeline Not Needed

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This is a guest post by Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge.

As the debate unfolds about whether to build a 1,711-mile pipeline to carry crude oil from the tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas, the focus is on the oil spills and carbon emissions that inevitably come with it. But we need to ask a more fundamental question.

Do we really need that oil? Continue reading →

Obama Stands up to Big Oil and Polluter Politicians

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Blogpost by Phil Radford, Daryl Hannah

Greenpeace protesters make their voices heard with regard to the XL Pipeline.

President Obama stood up to Big Oil and its puppets in Congress and denied a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline yesterday. This is encouraging news for the communities whose air and water would have been directly threatened by this pipeline, from Canada to Nebraska to the Gulf Coast. And it’s an important piece of the struggle to avert a runaway climate catastrophe. But since the Keystone XL has become a pitched political battle, this announcement is also an encouraging affirmation of the power of people, creative protest, and grassroots organizing in the face of the entrenched power and big bucks of the oil industry.

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