Kinder Morgan
Kinder Morgan is a company building a bitumen pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver on the BC coast and from there by tanker the rest of the world. The Canadian federal government and the Alberta provincial government are strongly promoting it on financial and jobs grounds. The BC provincial government is strongly opposed to it on environmental grounds. Alberta has banned some BC imports into Alberta to put pressure on BC. (This is illegal by the constitution. BC has not opposed them, nor taken countermeasures.)
Why is this pipeline a bad idea?
- There is no technology that can clean up a bitumen spill from a tanker. Bitumen immediately sinks. It is effectively balls of tar. All it would take is one spill to destroy the BC fisheries and the coast-based tourist industry.
- Bitumen the dirtiest and least desirable fossil fuel. It is extremely costly to mine. As a result, it costs twice as much as oil and natural gas to extract. In turn, natural gas costs more than clean solar and wind. Bitumen can only be sold when oil prices are high. Clean energy costs are dropping daily. Bitumen is a sunset fuel. It will become as easy to sell as cattle dung. This is not the time to invest long term in bitumen when it has only a few years left as a fuel.
- Bitumen in its extraction and burning is the dirtiest fuel in terms of CO₂ greenhouse gas emissions. We should leave it is the ground and use other cleaner fuels.
- Premier Notley has greatly exaggerated the financial benefits of the pipeline. In a few years there will be no market for bitumen. The pipeline and the entire tar sands project will go out of business. As a politician, Notley cannot acknowledge this obvious bad news.
- Notley and company are trying to bypass the legal process of getting BC and native approval using bullying.
If Premier Notley and Prime Minister Trudeau are so sure there is no danger whatsoever to the environment, let them put up a bond sufficient to compensate for the loss of BC’s fisheries and coast-tourist industry. Notley wants all the benefits for herself and all the risk to go to BC. This is selfish and unreasonable.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)