Keystone XL Pipeline: The Wrong Kind of Change

The Obama administration has always been focused on how to improve climate conditions to mitigate global warming. During Obama’s first term, his plan to confront climate change failed, but he’s back with a renewed vigor. He plans to push down renewable energy’s costs and make natural gas burning cleaner. A recent Nature article, “Change for Good”, states that the clean energy research and development deserves more government investment. It further states that the nations should more strictly regulate the power plants to reduce their emissions.[2] However, the Keystone XL pipeline should not be approved because it would help develop the Canadian tar sands, a source of high emissions, which would be detrimental towards improving our climate.

The first thing to be addressed should be our nation’s coal firing power plants. Power plants work by burning coal in a boiler to heat up water which becomes steam. This steam turns turbines which rotate generators that produce electricity. A byproduct of this process is CO2 gas (carbon-dioxide), a very abundant pollutant and greenhouse gas. With the help of scrubbers, devices that remove some pollutants from the electrical generation process, carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced, but not by a large enough degree.[6][7]

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) needs to implement a proposed law that requires new power plants to reduce emissions to 1000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt of electricity produced or less, then go after existing power plants. The average coal-firing power plant produces 2,249 pounds of CO2 per megawatt compared to the average natural gas power plant, which produces 1,135 pounds of CO2 per megawatt.[8] Utility companies say the implementation of this law will raise production costs and reduce jobs which would hinder economic recovery. What if the utility companies are right and jobs are reduced because of the new regulations? That should not be a problem because more money needs to be put into clean energy research and development, which would create jobs.

China produces the most solar and wind energy and is the world’s leading user of wind energy currently. The Chinese government will soon force power companies to generate some of their energy from renewable sources, which is something to think about in our own country to lower emissions and at the same time use renewable energy. Although the Chinese renewable energy market is failing because their supply far exceeds demand, we as a country can learn from this and find better ways to manage the growth of our own renewable energy markets.[12] We have caught up to the Chinese, producing sixty gigawatts of electricity compared to China’s sixty-two gigawatts; however, there is still work to do. While we are advancing our energy technologies and producing more energy from renewable sources, we should not backtrack.

President Obama plans to approve the Keystone pipeline, an extension of the Keystone XL pipeline which will transport crude oil from Hardisty, Canada to the gulf coast snaking through Montana Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and a few other states. Tar sands are oil sands, a mixture of sand, clay, water, and bitumen, a very dense and thick oil. Once mined and extracted from the tar sands, the oil is then refined. The development of the tar sands sparks controversy because the processes used to mine, separate, and refine the oil use more energy than those for natural gas and drilled crude oil.[10][11]

 

Transforming tar sands to the finished products we use from oil like naphtha, kerosene, petrol, and diesel takes extra steps than the conventional drilling methods. Excavating the sands and producing the steam needed to separate sand and oil uses so much energy and produces large CO2 emissions. After this, the oil still has to go through the refining process. But how does a pipeline carrying oil produced in Canada affect us and why should we care?

Approving the Keystone XL pipeline not only increases pollution in Canada, but also increases our dependence on oil as a country. As the United States, we should be setting the example towards clean energy and trying to wean ourselves off our dependence on oil. Allowing ourselves access to more oil is detrimental to the efforts made to reduce air pollution caused by the production and consumption of oil based products thus far. Last year, 13,124 megawatts of wind power were installed which is 22% of the total wind capacity in the United States and was 42% of all new generating capacity which is up 10% from 2011’s percentages.[3] To put this all into perspective, the amount of wind capacity we currently hold is enough to power 15 million homes per year.


As a nation, we are heading in the right direction but we cannot regress now. We are using more renewable energy than ever before and we need to continue to push our government to funnel more money into renewable energy research and development, while also making sure to continue the reduction in our oil usage.



References

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1. TransCanada Keystone Pipeline; TransCanada Accessed 02-01-2013
2. "Change for Good"; Nature. Accessed 02-01-2013 
3. "INFOGRAPHIC: Wind Energy in America"; Department of Energy. Accessed 02-11-2013 
4. "INFOGRAPHIC: Offshore Wind Outlook"; Department of Energy. Accessed 02-11-2013 
5. "TransCanada, ConocoPhillips To Expand Keystone To Gulf Coast"; DOWNSTREAMTODAY. Accessed 02-01-2013 
6. "How Oil Refining Works"; HowStuffWorks. Accessed 02-02-2013 
7. "Oil refining and refineries"; BP. Accessed 02-02-2013 
8. "Natural Gas"; Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed 02-02-2013 
9. "Natural Gas and Its Uses"; American Petroleum Institute. Accessed 02-01-2013 
10. "Tar Sands Basics"; Oil Shale and Tar Sands Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. Accessed 01-31-2013 
11. "What are the Tar Sands?"; Rainforest Action Network. Accessed 02-02-2013 
12. "Power cuts China’s slumping renewable-energy industry should be learnt from, not dismissed."; Nature. Accessed 02-07-2013
13. Shogren, Elizabeth. "Deep In Canadian Lakes, Signs Of Tar Sands Pollution."; NPR. Accessed 02-07-2013
14. Austen, Ian. "Oil Sands Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level."; New York Times. Accessed 02-07-2013  
15. Before and After Photo; Watchdog Progressive. Accessed 2-26-2013