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Scientific American: The fate of the Alberta’s tar sands mines—and the climate—may come down to the Keystone XL pipeline

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July 2013 Scientific American Magazine: Oil Sands May Irrevocably Tar the Climate

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OIL MINING: Alberta’s tar sands region is one of the few places in the world where oil can be dug out of the ground.
Image: GARTH LENZ

By David Biello

In Brief

Turning tar sands into oil and burning it as fuel produce enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
To prevent an average global temperature increase of more than two degrees Celsius, triggering potentially catastrophic climate change, cumulative carbon emissions must be kept below one trillion metric tons.
The earth’s atmosphere is already more than halfway to the trillion-metric-ton target; expanding production of even more tar sands would accelerate emissions.
If built, the Keystone XL pipeline will be a spigot that speeds tar sands production, pushing the planet toward its emissions limit.

Red lights are flashing, but Ben Johnson pays them no mind. The long, lean, weathered engineer rests against a counter lined with computer monitors, describing life in the tar sands mines of Alberta, Canada. His task is to take a mud made of ore and water and “liberate the bitumen,” a tarlike oil that can be refined into conventional crude oil. He and two colleagues man a monitoring station that sits near the base of a cone-shaped structure the size of a three-story building. Mud and hot water flow into the middle of the inverted funnel. Bitumen rises to the top and spills over onto surrounding grates.

One time in 2012 bitumen bubbled up so fast that it cascaded down the sides of the cone and flooded the building shin high. To keep this kind of thing from happening again, sensors track temperatures, pressures and other parameters, and if something is amiss, a warning goes off. This happens so often—“1,000 alarms a day,” Johnson says—that the engineers have taken to keeping the sound turned off. “It’s not going ‘bing, bing, bing,’” he says, “because that would drive us crazy.”

Suncor Energy’s North Steepbank mine, where Johnson operates one of many “separator cells,” is a tiny portion of the current output of Alberta’s tar sands, which underlie an area the size of Florida. High oil prices over the past decade have made such tar sands mines profitable, and Canada has rapidly expanded production. In 2012 alone Alberta exported more than $55 billion worth of oil, mostly to the U.S., so it is no wonder that Johnson’s crew does not pause for alarms.

The rush to exploit the Alberta tar sands is triggering alarms of another kind, however—from climate scientists. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are driving the world quickly toward a greenhouse gas threshold—an atmospheric concentration of 450 parts per million, which corresponds to two degrees Celsius or more of warming—beyond which some scientists fear that climate change could prove catastrophic. Coal constitutes a bigger source of fossilized carbon, but the Alberta sands require more energy to mine and refine than conventional oil, adding an extra overhead in greenhouse gas emissions. And the tar sands operations are growing far more quickly than most other sources of oil. Releasing the carbon now trapped in the tar sands would most likely dash any hope of avoiding the two degree C threshold.

The fate of Alberta’s tar sands—and the climate, for that matter—now seems to be converging on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Keystone XL, which would run from Alberta to refineries in Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, would serve as a primary conduit for tar sands crude. For a decade or more advocates of Alberta’s operations have argued that the tar sands constitute a much needed source of oil for the U.S. that is not subject to turmoil in the Middle East and abroad. All that was needed was a way to transport the tar sands oil from Canada to where it would be used—to the U.S. and beyond to Europe and Asia. And if a pipeline like Keystone XL could not be built, then other pipelines or rail could do as well. But independent experts suggest that Keystone XL is critical to the continued growth of Alberta’s tar sands industry.

None of this had come to light when President Barack Obama postponed a decision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline during his reelection campaign. When the issue comes up again, a great deal more will be riding on his decision.

The Trillionth Tonne

Exposed to the bitter chill of a northern Alberta winter at an overlook above Suncor’s mine, I can’t help but think that a little global warming might be nice. The mine is located in an industrial expanse of boreal forest some 30 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, a boom town where rents run as high as Manhattan’s and truck drivers make $100,000 a year. Down below, along a gravel road, I can see a parade of Caterpillar 797Fs, the world’s largest trucks, each carrying a 400-metric-ton load of clumped tar sands. (Women drivers are highly sought because they are easier on the equipment, but they are hard to come by because men outnumber women three to one in town.) The trucks shuttle back and forth between massive electric-powered shovels and Johnson’s separation facility, a 40-minute round-trip.

The trucks dump the ore into an industrial grinder the size of a compact car, which feeds an oversized conveyor belt that brings the tar sands to the separation cell that Johnson helps to oversee. A chunk of ore can go from truck to liberated bitumen in a mere 30 minutes. This black and sticky but free bitumen froths from the top of the separator, is collected and then flows down a pipeline to a mini refinery, where it is cooked at high heat to remove carbon and create a hydrocarbon stew similar to crude oil. Alternatively, the bitumen is mixed with lighter hydrocarbons in squat, huge storage tanks; the resulting mixture, known as dilbit (for diluted bitumen), is liquid enough to flow on its own through long-distance pipelines like Keystone XL, bound for refineries in the U.S.

Suncor’s North Steepbank is only a small fraction of the world’s first tar sands mine—and just one of the company’s complex of mines, which together produce more than 300,000 barrels of oil a day. Suncor’s holdings make up about 30 percent of the total production from mining of the Alberta tar sands, which currently comes to nearly two million barrels a day—equal to the output of more than 80,000 oil wells and one twentieth of U.S. demand. The mines, with their vast lakes of toxic water residue and blocks of bright yellow elemental sulfur, are already big enough to see from space—an industrial patch steadily spreading in the boreal forest.

The invisible environmental impact of the mines may prove the most challenging, however. Avoiding the two degree C warming threshold means that humanity faces what some scientists have called a carbon budget: an estimated one-trillion-metric-ton limit on cumulative carbon emissions.

The carbon budget is the brainchild of physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford and six other scientists. In 2009 the team assembled observations of rising temperatures and plugged them into computer models of future climate change, which accounted for, among other things, the fact that CO2 persists in the atmosphere, continuing to trap heat, for centuries. Their one-trillion-metric-ton budget encompasses all the carbon that human activity can safely generate between now and the year 2050, if we are to stay below the warming threshold. It doesn’t matter how quickly we reach that limit. What matters is not exceeding it. “Tons of carbon is fundamental,” argues now retired nasa climatologist James E. Hansen, who has been testifying about climate change since 1988 and has recently been arrested at protests against the Keystone XL pipeline. “It does not matter much how fast you burn it.”

The source of that carbon does not matter, either. The world can burn through only a set amount of carbon-based fuels, whether tar sands, coal, natural gas, wood or any other source of greenhouse gases. “From the perspective of the climate system, a CO2 molecule is a CO2 molecule, and it doesn’t matter if it came from coal versus natural gas,” notes climate modeler Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s department of global ecology at Stanford University.

To date, burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and other activities have put nearly 570 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere—and more than 250 billion metric tons of CO2 just since the year 2000, according to Allen. Currently human activities emit about 35 billion metric tons of CO2 (9.5 billion metric tons of carbon) a year, a figure that is steadily climbing, along with the global economy. By Allen’s calculations, at present rates society will emit the trillionth metric ton of carbon sometime during the summer of 2041. To stay on budget, on the other hand, emissions must drop by 2.5 percent a year, starting now.

Underground Treasure

Alberta’s tar sands represent a lot of buried carbon, the remains of countless algae and other microscopic life that lived hundreds of millions of years ago in a warm inland sea, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis. With today’s technology, about 170 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from Alberta’s tar sands, which would add roughly 25 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere if burned. An additional 1.63 trillion barrels of oil—which would add 250 billion metric tons of carbon—waits underground if engineers could figure out a way to separate every last bit of bitumen from the sand. “If we burn all the tar sands oil, the temperature rise just from burning those tar sands will be half of what we’ve already seen,” or roughly 0.4 degree C of global warming, notes mechanical engineer John P. Abraham of the University of St. Thomas–Minnesota.

Surface mining can reach deposits as deep as 80 meters, but that accounts for only 20 percent of the tar sands. In many places, the tar sands lie hundreds of meters underground, and energy firms have developed a method—known as in situ production—to melt out the bitumen in place.

In 2012 Cenovus Energy melted more than 64,000 barrels of underground bitumen every day at Christina Lake, a facility in Alberta named after nearby waters. The operation is one of the frontier camps of this latest tar sands boom. Clouds of steam rise from the nine industrial boilers on-site, burning natural gas to heat treated water into 350 degree C steam. Cenovus employees in a control room even bigger than Suncor’s inject the steam deep below the surface to melt the bitumen, which is then sucked back to the surface through a well and piped off for further processing. Greg Fagnan, Christina Lake’s director of operations, likens the complex to a giant water-processing facility “that happens to produce oil as well.” Every once in a while, a blowout shoots steam and partially melted tar sands into the sky, like one Devon Energy caused in the summer of 2010 by using too much pressure.

At Christina Lake, engineers inject roughly two barrels of steam to pump back out one barrel of bitumen. All that steam—and the natural gas burned to heat it—means melting bitumen results in two and a half times more greenhouse gas pollution than surface mining, itself among the highest emitters for any kind of oil production. Greater production by this melting method has caused greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s tar sands to rise by 16 percent since just 2009, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. In 2012, for the first time, underground production of tar sands in Alberta equaled that of surface mining, and thanks to efforts such as Christina Lake, it will soon become the primary mode of production.

In situ production works only for bitumen that is buried below 200 meters, however. That leaves a gap of 120 meters or so that is too deep for surface mining but too shallow for in situ. So far engineers have not figured out how to tap the gap, which means burning all the fuel contained in the tar sands deposits is an unlikely prospect at present.

Yet burning a significant portion of tar sands will go a long way toward blowing the planet’s carbon budget. The only way to do so and stay on budget would be to stop burning coal or other fossil fuels—or to find a way to drastically reduce tar sands’ greenhouse gas emissions. Neither prospect seems likely. Tar sands “emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020,” argues Jennifer Grant, director of oil sands research at the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental group.

Keystone Connection

This carbon budget explains why Abraham, Caldeira and Hansen joined 15 other scientists to sign a letter to President Obama urging him to reject the proposed 2,700-kilometer-long Keystone XL pipeline. Building the pipeline—and thus enabling even more tar sands production—is “counter to both national and planetary interests,” the scientists wrote.

Obama, who postponed approval of the pipeline just before the 2012 presidential election, struck a climate-friendly note in his second inaugural address as well as his 2013 State of the Union speech. His decision on Keystone XL will come after the State Department releases its final report on the pipeline.

In a first draft of its report, the State Department downplayed the pipeline’s impact, both on the viability of the tar sands operations and on the environment. Keystone XL, it said, would be “unlikely to have a substantial impact” on greenhouse gas emissions. But the authors of the report seem to have assumed that if Keystone XL were not built, Canada would find some other economical way of transporting the oil to consumers.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a response in April that cast the matter in a different light. According to Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for epa’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, the State Department report relied on faulty economics, among other oversights. The epa, drawing on past experience with big environmental assessments, suggested that alternatives to Keystone XL were either significantly more costly or faced major opposition. Having to get by without Keystone XL, in other words, might constrain tar sands development. In May the International Energy Agency (IEA) confirmed this analysis in its own prediction for the tar sands.

Tar sands oil is already traveling south by train, but this is a stopgap measure. Moving tar sands by rail is three times more expensive than by pipeline at current rates. As the tar sands operations ramp up, rail alone could prove a prohibitive cost barrier to further development.

What about another pipeline, should Keystone XL fail? Canada has the option of going west to the Pacific Coast to reach supertankers bound for China. Or it could go east, through existing pipelines, to the Midwest or the Atlantic Coast. These options are problematic. A Pacific pipeline—the least viable choice—would have to traverse the Rocky Mountains, passing through land owned by First Nations and other native groups in British Columbia, who have opposed a pipeline for fear of spills and other impacts. An Atlantic pipeline could be cobbled together from pipelines that now link Alberta to the eastern coast of North America. Engineers would have to reverse the flow of oil, much as ExxonMobil did for the Pegasus pipeline, which now carries crude from Illinois to Texas. But older pipelines that have been reversed may be more prone to leaks. Pegasus, for instance, sprung a tar sands oil leak in Arkansas this past April. And retrofitting existing pipelines is likely to elicit strong protest from environmentalists and others.

Given these obstacles, the tar sands industry needs Keystone XL to further expand, according to the epa and IEA reports. At present, Alberta’s tar sands produce 1.8 million barrels of oil a day. Keystone XL would ship another 830,000 barrels daily.

Mindful of the environmental opposition, Alberta and energy firms have tried to minimize greenhouse gas pollution in the tar sands operations. Royal Dutch Shell is trying an expensive alternative to breaking down bitumen into oil that involves adding hydrogen, rather than cooking off carbon into pet coke, to reduce CO2 emissions. The international oil giant has also begun developing plans for adding carbon capture and storage equipment to one of its mini refineries, a project dubbed Quest. When completed in 2015, Quest will attempt to annually store deep underground one million metric tons of CO2, or roughly one third of the facility’s pollution. Another similar project plans to capture CO2 for use to flush more conventional oil out of the ground.

Alberta is also one of the only oil-producing regions in the world to have a tax on carbon. Currently capped at $15 per metric ton, discussions continue to potentially raise that price. The province has invested the more than $300 million collected to date in technology development, primarily to reduce CO2 emissions from the tar sands. The tax “gives us some ammunition when people attack us for our carbon footprint, if nothing else,” Ron Liepert, then Alberta’s minister of energy, told me in 2011.

Efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the tar sands add further to the cost of extracting the oil and have not had a big impact on the carbon footprint. The 1.8 million barrels of tar sands oil a day produced in 2011 resulted in more than 47 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The IEA, in a 2010 analysis of ways to stay below the two degree C threshold, suggested that tar sands production in Alberta cannot exceed 3.3 million barrels a day by 2035. Yet mining already approved or under construction in Alberta could raise production to five million barrels a day by 2030. It’s hard to imagine how to mine the tar sands without blowing the carbon budget.

Breaking the Carbon Budget

Is it unfair to single out the tar sands? After all, other forms of fossil fuel add more to the world’s carbon budget, yet they do not draw as much ire. Perhaps they should. In 2011 U.S. coal-fired power plants emitted nearly two billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—roughly eight times the amount produced by mining, refining and burning tar sands. Many coal mines around the world create just as visible a scar on the landscape and an even bigger climate change legacy. Yet mines like those in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin are not the targets of high-profile protests such as those facing Keystone XL; protesters do not tie themselves to the tracks to block the kilometers-long trains that carry coal from the basin day after day. The U.S. Geological Survey suggests that basin alone holds 150 billion metric tons of coal that could be recovered with existing technology. Burning it all would send the world flying beyond any trillion-metric-ton carbon budget.

Australia’s plan to expand coal exports to Asia could add 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year when that coal is burned. That amount dwarfs emissions from even the most optimistic tar sands expansion. The U.S. and countries such as Indonesia are also planning coal expansions. Shutting down or even curtailing the U.S. coal industry would more than compensate for any tar sands development as a result of Keystone XL, although the two fossil fuels are used for different purposes—coal for electricity, oil for transportation.

Canada also offers a target of some convenience, given that it is a friendly democracy susceptible to environmental pressure. Producers of “heavy oil”—similar in pollution to tar sands bitumen—in Mexico, Nigeria or Venezuela do not find themselves under as much scrutiny despite high rates of CO2 pollution. In fact, scouring such heavy oil from an old field in California is the single worst CO2 polluter among all oil-extraction efforts in the world, including the melted tar sands. “If you think that using other petroleum sources [than tar sands] is much better, then you’re delusional,” says chemical engineer Murray Gray, scientific director of the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta. “Increasing coal use worldwide gives me a lot more pause.”

These other sources of petroleum are not growing anywhere near as fast as Alberta’s oil sands, where in the past decade production increased by more than a million barrels a day. To keep to the atmospheric carbon budget, the world must produce less than half of the known and economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves. That means much of the fossil fuel—especially the dirtiest forms of petroleum, such as that produced from the tar sands—will have to stay buried.

Economic forces may come to the aid of the global environment. Fracking for oil in North Dakota’s portion of the Bakken Shale has begun to depress U.S. demand for Canada’s dirty oil; in response, new infrastructure projects in Alberta’s tar sands, such as the $12-billion Voyageur mini refinery, have been dropped. New mandatory fuel-efficiency standards for U.S. cars will reduce demand as well, at least in the short term. Regardless, the tar sands will be there, waiting, an ever tempting target for future extraction once the easier oil runs out.

If the Keystone XL pipeline is approved or other means are built to get the tar sands oil to China, exports could continue to rise, accelerating the invisible accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Instead of reducing emissions by 2.5 percent a year, starting now—the effort Oxford physicist Allen calculates is necessary to keep the planet clear of the two degree C threshold—global greenhouse gas pollution will continue to increase. Every bit of carbon from burning fossil fuels—tar sands or otherwise—counts.

This article was originally published with the title Greenhouse Goo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David Biello is an associate editor at Scientific American.

MORE TO EXPLORE

Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions towards the Trillionth Tonne. Myles R. Allen et al. in Nature, Vol. 458, pages 1163–1166; April 30, 2009.

The Alberta Oil Sands and Climate. Neil C. Swart and Andrew J. Weaver in Nature Climate Change, Vol. 2, pages 134–136; February 19, 2012.

The Facts on Oil Sands. Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 2013. Available as a PDF at www.capp.ca/getdoc.aspx?DocId=220513&DT=NTV

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BP Spill, fossil fuels, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution, tar sands

Oilspillsolutions.co.uk: 2013: The Year of the Deadly Oil Spill?

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http://www.care2.com/causes/2013-year-of-the-deadly-oil-spill.html

by Beth Buczynski
July 14, 2013 5:00 am

As the age of coal and oil draws to a close, the “drill baby drill” crowd has become louder and more rambunctious than ever. No longer content to poison our oceans with offshore drilling platforms, tar sands oil has become all the rage.

For years those who see the futility of barreling head first down Hydrocarbon Lane have warned that unleashing Canada’s tar sands would be a climate death sentence. But who cares about the dumb old climate, right? Humans don’t act until it’s personal. Well, now it is.

In the past six months we’ve seen a rash of deadly oil spills, the most recent of which have resulted in multiple human fatalities. These disasters show that no matter how we attempt to extract, transport or consume it, oil is killing us. And it won’t stop until we realize the folly of our addiction.

Below are details of just a few of the major oil spills that have happened in the first half of 2013:
Minnesota
In early March a 26,000-gallon tank car (just one car in a mile-long train) transporting crude oil from Canada ruptured in Western Minnesota. The disaster leaked 30,000 gallons of crude something (the rail company refused to say whether it was tar sands oil or not, but you put the pieces together) onto the frozen ground.
Thanks to the cold conditions, the oil was as thick as molasses, making it nearly impossible to get up off the ground.

Quebec
Just days ago, a train moving crude oil to Irving Oil Corp.’s Saint John refinery in New Brunswick suddenly derailed right in the middle of the town of Lac-Megantic. The immediate explosion engulfed the center of the small town in a literal lake of fire that killed at least 13 people and left dozens more missing.
“This is another data point that shows how much costlier and riskier rail is compared to pipelines,” John Stephenson, a Toronto-based fund manager, told Bloomberg.com.
But before you believe himŠ

Arkansas
In April of this year, a 65-year-old ExxonMobil pipeline burst without warning, dumping Canadian tar sands oil all over the small town of Mayflower, Arkansas.
Within minutes, “the slick of noxious black crude” spewing from the pipeline “was eight feet wide, six inches deep and growing fast.”
Ultimately, 5,000-barrels were spilled from the 22 foot-long gash in the pipe, covering suburban lawns and roads in a toxic goo. Residents reported putrid smells and burning sensations in their eyes, noses and throats.
Exxon immediately went to work blocking any information about how or why the disaster occurred, public relations maneuvering that has since caused the State of Arkansas and the federal government to file a suit against the oil company.

Alberta
And just last month, heavy rain (that’s right, nothing more than rain) allegedly ruptured a pipeline owned by Enbridge Inc., Canada’s largest pipeline company. According to most reports, 750-barrels of synthetic crude oozed out of the pipeline before the company managed to shut it down.
The rupture occurred in Line 37, which serves CNOOC Ltd’s Long Lake oil sands project in northern Alberta and carries huge amounts of oil into America. Enbridge gloated in the fact that there were no human habitations or roads nearby, as if that simply wipes away the harm that hundreds of barrels of oil has on the eco-system.

These are only a few of the major oil spill disasters that have occurred this year, and we’re only seven months in. The truth is, there is no safe way to transport poison. Floods happen. Human error happens. And when these statistical certainties happen to a train or pipeline carrying thousands of barrels of toxic oil, death always happens next.
If the Keystone XL pipeline expansion is approved, however, the next time might be in your backyard.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

Nola.com: Louisiana Seafood: In wake of BP spill and river diversions, oysters show strain

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By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
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on July 13, 2013 at 5:00 PM, updated July 14, 2013 at 1:03 AM

oysters in the gulf

It’s difficult to talk about Louisiana seafood these days without the BP oil spill working its way into the conversation. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that television screens were filled with high-def images of fouled coastal marsh and angry fishermen forlornly staring at their idled fleet.

But some scientists and fishers say it remains impossible to gauge the 2010 spill’s precise environmental and biological toll. Asked about a 15-percent drop in the statewide oyster harvest in the two years following the spill, experts say the spill definitely continues to be a potential factor, but is only one of several.

Perhaps as damaging as the oil and the temporary closures of thousands of acres of Gulf waters in the wake of the disaster three years ago, they say, was the millions of gallons of fresh Mississippi River water that flowed into the Lake Pontchartrain Basin east of the river in 2010 and 2011. Oysters, essentially immobile and unable to withstand the torrents of fresh water, bore the brunt.

A closer look at the preliminary data from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries reveal wide variation from area to area. But in terms of oyster production, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin east of the Mississippi River saw the worst of it.

Before the oil spill, Louisiana regularly led the nation in oyster production, with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin traditionally the state’s most productive harvest grounds.

From 2002-2009, the Pontchartrain Basin averaged 7.2 million pounds of oyster meat annually. But beginning in 2010, that production took a nose dive – falling to 2.6 million pounds that year, then to 2.4 million pounds in 2011 and, finally, to 1.8 million pounds in 2012.

Overall, just in 2011 and 2012, oysters in Pontchartrain Basin saw a 71-percent drop compared to the 2002-09 average.

While oyster production showed an increase in the Terrebonne Basin, east of the Mississippi River, the decline in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin was so pronounced that it pulled the overall statewide numbers down in all three years.

“It’s been really down. ŠNormally we always put 400 sacks on the trucks but the last three years or so, we have only been able to put on 150, 130, 140 sacks,” said Shawn Assavedo, an oyster harvester in Pontchartrain Basin out of eastern St. Bernard Parish. “That’s exactly what it’s been since they opened that siphon.

“That freshwater, it goes into Lake Borgne and it has killed a lot of oysters there, really a massive amount of oysters.”

Now the measly haul of oysters in Pontchartrain Basin often is dwarfed by the expanse of the 18-wheeler trucks’ beds.

Brad Robin Sr. talks about how one of the most production areas in the country for harvesting oysters is still struggling to recover.

Brad Robin Sr., a fellow St. Bernard oysterman who typically harvested out of Lake Borgne, said that his old stopping grounds have had “zero percent come back.”
“There is no life left there,” Robin said. “The east side of the river is way down and still trying to recover, trying to get some sort of normalcy out of it all.”

But the fears is that the decline east of the river could continue for an extended period: The Pontchartrain public harvesting grounds in the Breton and Chandeleur sounds provided the majority of the oyster seed that harvesters transplanted to grow oysters in private leases across the state.

“Our public reefs on the east side of the river, that was our mother seed ground,” said John Tesvich, chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force. “That is basically wiped out right now.”

The freshening of the water
While the oil spill is an easy fall guy – and many scientists continue to study its impact, often in secrecy for future oil-spill litigation – scientists and some fishers also point to the Mississippi River diversions in 2010 and 2011 as major culprits for the plummeting oyster haul.

“Freshwater is the biggest killer of oysters in the world,” said Greg Voisin, an eighth-generation oysterman who helps run his family business, Motivatit Seafoods, in Terrebonne Parish.

Ken Brown, a Louisiana State University biologist, said he and his colleagues haven’t seen any major effects from the oil on adult oyster mortality rates, but when fresh water dilutes salinity levels “below 10 parts per thousand, and especially if you get below 5 parts per thousand, then oysters have problems.”

Hoping to keep the oil that was spewing from BP’s Macondo well away from Louisiana’s fragile inshore marshes and estuaries, the state in 2010 ran the Davis Pond and Caernarvon river diversions at full speed for several months to push the oily Gulf waters away. The diversions did appear to help drive out some of the oil but they also dropped salinity levels in much of that Pontchartrain Basin to levels unsustainable to oysters.

Then in 2011, when Mississippi River levels in New Orleans approached the 17-foot flood stage because of heavy rainfall in the Midwest, the Bonnet Carré Spillway west of the city was opened from early May through mid-June, further freshening the basin.
That fresh water that poured from Bonnet Carré into Lake Pontchartrain eventually pushed into the surrounding waters of Lake Borgne and the Mississippi Sound.

The state had anticipated the impact from the Bonnet Carré opening. The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission chose to open oyster reefs within portions of the Pontchartrain Basin area before opening the spillway, allowing oyster fishers to take oysters from those grounds and move them to private leases in higher salinity areas.

Oysters thrive when the salinity is 15 parts per thousand, about half the salinity of seawater. They struggle when it falls below 10 parts per thousand and die off when it dips below 5 parts per thousand.

Parts of Pontchartrain Basin fell to less than 3 parts per thousand during periods of 2010 and 2011, according to state and federal data.

Oyster growth problems
Because fresh water diversions carry so much sediment – they often are envisioned as land builders – the diversions in 2010 and 2011 also buried or at least partially covered much of the cultch in Pontchartrain Basin, according to a Wildlife and Fisheries assessment.

Oysterman Brad Robin Jr. explains how small pieces of chopped concrete made from the slabs of flooded Hurricane Katrina homes helps oysters grow.

Cultch is the broken stones and oyster shells that form the reefs upon which oyster larvae attach and grow into adult oysters. Lose the cultch, and the oysters have nothing to latch onto.

Also, in some areas east of the river, much of the oyster shell was covered with an unidentified algae that seems to have prevented oyster seed from taking hold on the reefs.

Some oyster fishers pointed to that algae as an indicator that the oil spill had ruined their crop, but scientists say it also might have been created by the excess nutrients in the river water that poured into the basin.

While nutrients carried by freshwater play an important role in the high productivity of the Gulf systems, they also bring algae blooms, which consume oxygen and create “dead zones” with fish- and oyster-killing low oxygen levels.

Tesvich said he and others also worry about the quality of that river water and whether problems with oyster reproduction on the existing cultch could be tied to the oil.

“Was there some sort of industrial waste or agricultural runoff in that river water?” he asked. “Or is it something from BP in addition to the river water that is causing something? There are a lot of things we just don’t know about these oysters coming back.”

But it wasn’t all bleak where the oyster harvest is concerned.

State Wildlife and Fisheries Department data show that in 2011 the Barataria Basin, to the west of the river, harvested 23 percent more oysters than its pre-spill average and then, in 2012, harvested 44 percent more.

And because the price of oysters continued to rise, the Wildlife and Fisheries numbers show that Barataria oyster fishers earned about $18 million in 2012 – about 116-percent more than they had earned on average between 2002 and 2009.

In 2012, the average price statewide was about $3.70 per pound at the dock, or about 30 percent above the pre-spill average of about $2.80 per pound.

Nonetheless, Al Sunseri, who owns P & J Oyster Co. with his brother Sal, thinks the Wildlife and Fisheries numbers are wrong when it comes to the amount of oysters that have been harvested in Barataria the past few years.

“I’m not a scientist, but I just have some common sense,” Sunseri said. “There is something going on, because we are not seeing the oysters come back like they always did.”

Still, Mitch Jurisich, who harvests a large chunk of the oysters in Barataria, recently said that the last few years have been “the best crop in our family’s history.”

“Jurisich and others in the area did extremely well,” Tesvich acknowledged, but he added that other parts of the Barataria “have been having trouble because of so much fresh water.”

And then there is Terrebonne Basin, which was hopping the past few years, according to the state landings data and discussions with oystermen.

A basin that on average harvested 2.3 million pounds of oysters between 2002 and 2009, Terrebonne produced 4.4 million pounds in 2011 and 4.3 million pounds in 2012. That’s about an 85-percent increase.

Most of that increase in Terrebonne Basin actually could be tied to decreases elsewhere, as oystermen relied on that area to cover declines. For instance, the number of trips oyster fishers took in the basin grew from an average of 7,814 between 2002-2009 to 16,928 trips in 2012 – a 116-percent increase.

“Our oysters being available, it allows the areas east of the river to rest and go through whatever cycle they are going through,” Voisin said. “You have to utilize the resource here when it’s not there, and there when it’s not here, and that’s just the way that we’ve be doing things throughout history.”

Looking forward
Despite the 15-percent drop in statewide oyster production the past couple years, the state’s oyster fishing industry as a whole doesn’t appear to have fared too bad financially.

Because the price per pound has risen since the spill, the overall amount earned by oyster harvesters across the state in 2011 and 2012 actually rose by about 10 percent compared to the pre-spill average, according to the Wildlife and Fisheries’ at-the-dock price and landings data.

Also, the state’s 2012 basin-by-basin data and the statewide 2012 data from the federal Fisheries Service remain very preliminary. Often, the federal data rise by several million pounds when finalized.

The Fisheries Services is expected to release more official 2012 statewide catch numbers this fall.

The conventional wisdom is that two or three years after a major fresh water event, oysters will grow back strong. Often in history, it creates a boom crop. With less salinity, for example, there often are fewer predators that eat the oysters.

So some oyster fishers are waiting, fingers crossed, hoping that in the next few years there will be a bumper season.

Count Assavedo among them. Assavedo is among those oystermen plowing ahead in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, spending money to put down new cultch in the hope that better days are ahead.

It’s a risk he feels he has no choice but to take.

“If it is not fresh cultch material, you are not getting anything. But my new stuff out there, that I laid down, it seems to be doing good,” Assavedo said. “The oysters stuck to it and are growing. I haven’t lost any of them yet. ŠI just hope that continues.”

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Wayne Gordon, an employee with P&J Oyster Co., loads up a delivery truck on Oct. 28, 2010, with the first load of oyster that Pete Vujnovich harvested near Port Sulphur since the closure of area 13 back on May 20, 2010.
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics, natural resource management, tar sands

Environmental Action: Support the Walk for Our Grandchildren against Keystone XL

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https://secure3.convio.net/engage/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=8031

Elders March: click on the site above to sign up to support the 2013 Walk for our Grandchildren as they walk the 100 miles from Camp David to the White House to Say “No on Keystone XL!”

This elder-led, intergenerational march will begin July 21st and culminate in a rally July 27th in DC and is part of the Summer Heat series of climate actions. It will also feature the voices of youth like Nelson Kanuk, a Yup’ik native from Kipnuk, AK.

Add your message to the Walk participants, tell them how and why they are walking for you. Then stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted with their stories from the road.

climate change, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, national ocean politics

Common Dreams: Fracking: Causes Water Pollution, Global Warming, and now… ‘Earthquake Swarms’

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/12-4

Friday July 12th, 2013
New research shows that extent of damage caused by controversial gas drilling practice is worse than previously known
– Jon Queally, staff writer

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Filmmaker Josh Fox (C) joins a protest against fracking in California, in Los Angeles in this May 30, 2013 file photo. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Though the main concerns of most anti-fracking activists continue to be the devastation to water quality, community health issues, and the role hydraulic fracture drilling plays in planetary global warming, a new study reveals that the practice can also have much larger impacts on another dangerous phenomenon: earthquakes.

It’s not news that gas drilling causes small, localized tremors around fracking sites, but new research presented by one of the top seismology labs in the world on Thursday shows how “swarms of minor earthquakes”—as Reuters reports—can lead to subsequent and larger ones with much more dire consequences.

Geologists have known for 50 years that injecting fluid underground can increase pressure on seismic faults and make them more likely to slip. The result is an “induced” quake.

A recent surge in U.S. oil and gas production – much of it using vast amounts of water to crack open rocks and release natural gas, as in fracking, or to bring up oil and gas from standard wells – has been linked to an increase in small to moderate induced earthquakes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, Texas and Colorado.

Now seismologists at Columbia University say they have identified three quakes – in Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas – that were triggered at injection-well sites by major earthquakes a long distance away.

“The fluids (in wastewater injection wells) are driving the faults to their tipping point,” said Nicholas van der Elst of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, who led the study. It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey.

As news of the the latest scientific findings reverberated in the news cycle, filmmaker and anti-fracking activist Josh Fox appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss their significance and discuss his latest film, Gasland 2, which takes an up-close look at the global fracking boom and the political economy of the gas industry that supports it.

Beyond the deeply troubling destruction that gas fracking has done to the communities where drilling has occurred—including the potential damage caused by earthquakes and injection wells—Fox emphasizes that the global impacts of natural gas on global warming should be of paramount concern.

“Moving from coal to fracked gas doesn’t give you any climate benefit at all,” Fox said in a pushback to claims that gas is less damaging to the climate than coal or oil. “So the plan should be about how we’re moving off of fossil fuels and onto alternate energy.”

Watch the full interview:

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"Be the change you want to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi