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tar sands
Keystone, 'Safest Pipeline in the World,' Ruptures—Again
President Donald Trump wants to revive Keystone XL, a highly controversial extension of the tar sands pipeline system, despite three massive leaks over the past eight years.
Apr 08, 2025
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates...
The Keystone pipeline—which carries hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil nearly 2,700 miles from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma daily—was abruptly shut down Tuesday morning following a rupture in North Dakota, marking yet another accident along what proponents have called the "safest pipeline in the world."
South Bow, the Canadian company that manages the Keystone system, said it shut down the pipeline—which transports an average of around 624,000 barrels of crude oil per day—after detection systems sounded the alarm on a pressure drop. The company said the spill is confined to an agricultural field about 60 miles southwest of Fargo.
"The affected segment has been isolated, and operations and containment resources have been mobilized to site," the company said, according to The Associated Press. "Our primary focus right now is the safety of onsite personnel and mitigating risk to the environment."
As the AP reported:
It wasn't clear what caused the rupture of the underground pipeline or the amount of crude oil released into the field. An employee working at the site near Fort Ransom heard a "mechanical bang" and shut down the pipeline within about two minutes, said Bill Suess, spill investigation program manager with the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality. Oil surfaced about 300 yards (274 meters) south of the pump station in a field and emergency personnel responded, Suess said.
A proposed extension known as Keystone XL would have carried more tar sands oil—widely considered the world's dirtiest fuel—to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Opponents warned of the danger of leaks, with a 2021 report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office noting that there were 22 accidents along the conduit between 2010 and 2020. These include leaks of more than 100,000 gallons per spill in 2017, 2019, and 2022.
"Keystone's incident history illustrates the problematic pipeline's systemic issues," Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement Tuesday. "The Keystone pipeline appears to be on track to hit its average of about a significant failure every year. It's time to address this pipeline's shortcomings."
Following more than a decade of pressure from climate, environmental, Indigenous, and other groups, then-President Joe Biden revoked Keystone XL's permit on his first day in office in January 2021. President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a "drill, baby, drill" platform, now wants to revive Keystone XL.
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Canada Must Switch Its Loyalty From Big Oil to Renewables
The only real hope of avoiding climate disaster lies in dramatically ramping up the transition to clean energy by building new wind and solar farms at breakneck speed.
May 22, 2024
The opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion this month—widely celebrated in the media—reminds us that Canada is still very much in the grip of Big Oil.
That $34 billion expansion was financed by Ottawa, and it amounts to a massive public subsidy for the oil industry—at a time when we should urgently be financing renewable energy, not fossil fuels.
The renowned U.S. climatologist James Hansen famously said the oilsands were such a “dirty, carbon-intensive” oil that if they were to be fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the planet.
Over the past four years, Ottawa has provided $65 billion in financial support for oil and gas, but only a fraction as much for renewable energy.
Yet here we are, applauding the tripling of the pipeline’s capacity to carry oil from the oilsands, even as that moves us closer to “game over.”
A report this month revealed that the world’s top climate scientists believe the world is headed in a frightening direction—toward more than 2.5°C degrees of warming, charging past the international target of 1.5°C, beyond which fires, floods, and heatwaves become seriously unpredictable.
Today, we’re at just 1.2°C of warming, and look at the mess we’re in. Already this season, wildfires are burning out of control in B.C. and Alberta.
Climate scientists have been clear: The only real hope of avoiding climate disaster lies in dramatically ramping up the transition to clean energy by building new wind and solar farms at breakneck speed.
But this isn’t happening, even though the price of wind and solar power has become very competitive. That was supposed to be the trigger point at which the market would begin working in our favour, with renewables cheaper than fossil fuels, facilitating the transition to clean energy.
Renewables keep getting cheaper. The price of solar power has plunged by 90%, yet Big Oil remains dominant.
That’s because, with its long-established monopoly and extensive government support, Big Oil is far more profitable—and therefore more attractive—to major financial investors than the struggling, competitive firms that make up the budding renewable sector, notes Brett Christophers, a political economist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Clearly, given the climate emergency, we can’t just leave the vital task of transitioning to renewables up to the whims of financial investors, whose only interest is maximizing their returns.
Governments must become a lot more involved, and they have to switch their loyalty from Big Oil to renewables.
The Biden administration has moved in this direction, with sweeping measures aimed at doubling renewable capacity in the U.S. over the next decade. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government is locked into serving the immensely powerful oil industry.
Over the past four years, Ottawa has provided $65 billion in financial support for oil and gas, but only a fraction as much for renewable energy. Its main program for subsidizing renewables provides less than $1 billion a year, says Julia Levin, an associate director with Environmental Defence.
The extent of Ottawa’s willingness to accommodate Big Oil became clear in 2018 when it took over the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, rather than let the project collapse after its original backers threatened to pull out amid intense environmental opposition.
Now Ottawa is planning to spend $10 billion, possibly much more, subsidizing Big Oil’s futile but costly efforts to reduce its carbon emissions through “carbon capture and storage”—despite ample evidence the technology is highly ineffective at reducing such emissions.
This enables Big Oil to pretend it’s serious about reducing emissions, lulling Canadians into believing we’re making progress on climate, when we’re really just spinning our wheels and wasting a lot of public money in the process.
For years, there was the comforting thought that, when the horrors of climate change truly became clear, humans would be smart enough to figure out a solution. That turned out to be true. It’s just that we haven’t figured out how to override the powerful so we can implement the solution.
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Air Pollution From Canadian Tar Sands Up to 6,300% Worse Than Industry Reports
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels," said a Greenpeace campaigner, "these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades."
Jan 26, 2024
Aircraft measurements of pollutants over the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada show levels exceeding industry reports by 1,900% to more than 6,300%, scientists revealed Thursday, underscoring the need for humanity to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
While the Canadian government requires air quality monitoring around oil sands operations, industry figures focus on certain compounds. For this research, published Thursday in the journal Science, experts from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government, accounted for a wider range of emissions.
After collecting data from 30 flights around 17 tar sands operations in 2018, "what we saw were very large emissions of total gas-phase organic carbon from these facilities," said co-author and Yale professor Drew Gentner in a statement. "On average, the majority of the total gas-phase organic carbon was from often overlooked compounds, which are typically outside of the scope of routine monitoring."
"This report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Co-author John Liggio of Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that "the magnitude of the observed emissions from oil sands operations was larger than expected, considering that it was roughly equivalent to the sum of all other anthropogenic sources across Canada when including all the motor vehicles, all the solvents, all the other oil and gas sources, and everything else reported to the inventory."
Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, a University of British Columbia atmospheric chemist who has worked with Liggio but was not involved with this study, told Nature that "I'm concerned by how big this number is."
"You want to be measuring all this carbon. For air quality, for health, but also for climate," she said, explaining that some of the molecules are oxidized to planet-heating carbon dioxide.
Thanks to the tar sands deposits across northern Alberta, which are estimated to contain 1.7-2.5 trillion barrels of oil, Canada trails only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of total known reserves.
As Inside Climate News detailed Thursday:
The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds, and refinery-like "upgraders." The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region. The mines have stripped away an area larger than New York City, lands that had long been occupied by people from several Indigenous First Nations. One of those First Nations, Fort McKay, is now surrounded by mines.
Jean L'Hommecourt, an enrolled member of the Fort McKay First Nation, told Inside Climate News she wasn't shocked by the new findings.
"I was just like, eh, I knew all along," said L'Hommecourt, who has worked to clean up nearby operations. "We feel the physical effects here."
Jesse Cardinal of the Indigenous-led group Keepers of the Water similarly said to The Guardian, "We are told this is all within the limits and OK but this report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Asked to comment on the research, Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, wrote in an email to The Independent, "I suppose 'Holy s***' isn't printable."
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades," Stewart added. "This is making people sick, so our governments can and should require these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they've made."
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