Trailbreaker Pipeline Project
• A bad deal for Maine
Jul 9, 2010 – Alex Briggs is a Pownal native who now studies engineering in Montreal. He considers himself a student activist who has returned home for the summer to grow a garden, enjoy the beauty of Maine's wilds, and try to raise awareness about environmental issues.
His opinion is that the Trailbreaker Pipeline Project will make Maine implicit in the Albertan Tar Sands agenda to exploit the land and its people whatever the environmental cost. Learn why he feels that way and what he's doing to educate the public about what he sees as the ill effects of the proposed project.
We are living at the end of the age of oil and the dawning of a new way forward, but the terms of this transition remain uncertain. On the one hand are environmental factors, and on the other are economic. Our environment demands that our fossil consumption declines as we develop clean renewable options, preventing catastrophic climate change and ecological disasters such as oil and tailings spills.
Unfortunately it seems to be economic concerns that guide our world. Economically, it is imperative to extract and sell every bit of recoverable fossil fuels available before renewable investment overtakes them in efficiency and profit. This puts the world in a very dangerous place as oil companies push their limits to meet a rising demand with a declining supply. The Gulf Oil Spill is a direct result of these conditions. The oil that remains on this planet is either depleting quickly or very difficult to retrieve: whether under miles of ocean or locked up in rock or in sand. Squeezing our oil supply will lead us only to ecologic and economic collapse when our technologies can no longer match our demands in a world of finite resources.
The Albertan Oil Sands project is a perfect example of these economic concerns put into place. They are the embodiment of inefficiency and environmental destruction. It takes energy to dig oil: conventionally 1 barrel of oil holds enough energy to pump 100 barrels out of the ground. However when the oil must be squeezed and melted out of sand (as in Alberta) this number drops to only 6 barrels retrieved for every one barrel burnt. Canada has considered building 32 power plants in northern Alberta just to provide this energy. In addition the process produces so much tailings liquid that by 2015 the ponds where the toxin is held will equal Lake Ontario in volume. In addition, these ponds leak more liquid every day than does the Gulf spill, and have done so for almost 30 years. The ecological toll of this intrusion is obvious to locals: tumors are frequent on food-source fish, sick and dead wildlife are commonplace, and Indigenous locals are dying of rare cancers at 100,000 times the normal rate. Still the hunger for profit prevails.
But here in Maine we are given a choice: to limit this destruction, or to allow business to continue as usual and endanger our habitat and families. What the Tar Sands need is production capacity, and the Trailbreaker Pipeline would provide just that.
The Trailbreaker would allow 200,000 barrels of unrefined bitumen to flow out of the Tar Sands every day. This would amount to 800,000 tons of earth displaced and up to 900,000 barrels of fresh water consumed, every day. The pipeline itself is 60 years old and is currently flowing from Portland to Montreal carrying crude oil. The Trailbreaker plan holds that this flow be reversed to carry Albertan Bitumen to Portland and then on to tankers to Texas and the Gulf coast. Not only would the fuel be flowing a different direction, it would no longer really be oil. Bitumen is a semi-solid sludge which must be diluted with the most distilled (and volatile) forms of hydrocarbons available in order to allow it to flow. Albertan bitumen also has extremely high percentages of corrosive sulfur, and this combination makes a pipeline break not only likely but devastating. And to make matters worse the company in charge of this operation, Enbridge, has allowed over 600 oil leaks and spills in the last 10 years; they average 61 spills leaking 2.1 million barrels of oil a year.
But we can prevent this! Development plans have been put on hold while oil prices have dipped (during the post-recession) in the past year. But with Peak Oil approaching it is a sure bet that the plan will regain the green-light, unless public pressure builds high enough to change our economic policies. Concerned activists have already began to organize around the pumping station being built in Quebec and a solid resistance based here at the Pipeline's end could close this project off for good.
For More Information!
Come to the First Congregational Church of North Yarmouth at Rts. 115 & 231
On Tuesday the 13th at 6:30pm
For a community informational talk on the Tar Sands, the Trailbreaker, and the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.
