Lac-Mégantic oil train disaster is a corporate crime (and there's a TPP tie in)

[cali]

My two current brain worms; the Lac Megantic disaster and the TPP. Kind of a gruesome no degree of separation thing.

Quebec's Lac-Mégantic oil train disaster not just tragedy, but corporate crime

At the root of the explosion is deregulation and an energy rush driving companies to take ever greater risks

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But to simply call the Lac-Mégantic explosion a "tragedy" and to stop there, is to make it seem like an accident that occurred solely because of human error or technical oversight. It risks missing how we might assign broader culpability. And we owe it to the people who died to understand the reasons why such a disaster occurred, and how it might be prevented in the future.

So here's my bit of unwelcome sociology: the explosion in Lac-Mégantic is not merely a tragedy. It is a corporate crime scene.

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The deeper evidence about this event won't be found in the train's black box, or by questioning the one engineer who left the train before it loosened and careened unmanned into the heart of this tiny town. For that you'll have to look at how Lac-Mégantic was hit by a perfect storm of greed, deregulation and an extreme energy rush driving companies to ever greater gambles with the environment and human life.

The crude carried on the rail-line of US-based company Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway – "fracked" shale oil from North Dakota – would not have passed through Lac-Mégantic five years ago. That's because it's part of a boom in dirty, unconventional energy, as fossil fuel companies seek to supplant the depletion of easy oil and gas with new sources – sources that are harder to find, nastier to extract, and more complicated to ship.

Like the Alberta tar sands, or the shale deposits of the United States, these energy sources are so destructive and carbon-intensive that leading scientists have made a straightforward judgment: to avert runaway climate change, they need to be kept in the ground. It's a sad irony that Quebec is one of the few places to currently ban the "fracking" used to extract the Dakotan oil that devastated Lac-Mégantic.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/true-north/2013/jul/11/1

Let me add that there's tie in to the TPP here in that under chapter 11 of NAFTA. If the TPP goes through in its current form, we'll see a lot more of these tribunals which under other trade agreements, rule for corporations, 70% of the time.

<snip>

After Quebec passed a moratorium on fracking two years ago because it wanted to conduct an environmental impact assessment on the impacts of leached chemicals and gases from fracking, US-based company Lone Pine Resources demanded $250 million saying Canada violated its NAFTA obligations. The company had planned to frack 30,000 acres near the St. Lawrence River, injecting toxic chemicals into a critical watershed.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/310205-congress-needs-to-be-involved-in-trade-talks#ixzz2YmAHR4x5



Last week, we saw what happens when a province chooses prudence over profits when it comes to resource development. An American-incorporated company with headquarters in Calgary is suing the Government of Canada under NAFTA. Quebec became the first province in Canada to ban fracking last year. With a proposed investment deal with China that would have farther-reaching consequences, we ought to carefully examine the predicament the Quebec is now in.

The government of Quebec chose to take a precautionary approach to gas development to buy more time to understand the techniques used to extract shale gas and their impacts. Lone Pine Resources, the American corporation who holds permits to frack for shale gas in Quebec, says that the fracking ban is arbitrary and violates agreements under NAFTA.

Get this: Quebec puts the brakes on gas exploration to take the time to assess the full environmental impacts of development, and the Federal government gets slapped with a suit. After paying the settlement for NAFTA claim filed by AbitiBowater against the Newfoundland government in 2010, Harper vowed never to pick up the tab again for a provincial decision which puts the Federal government on the hook. So in the end, Quebec could be on the hook for the bill.

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http://forestethics.org/blog/fracking-and-fipa-what-can-canadians-learn-quebec

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[FarCenter]

2. Fairly dubious story from the Guardian

The crude carried on the rail-line of US-based company Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway – "fracked" shale oil from North Dakota – would not have passed through Lac-Mégantic five years ago. That's because it's part of a boom in dirty, unconventional energy, as fossil fuel companies seek to supplant the depletion of easy oil and gas with new sources – sources that are harder to find, nastier to extract, and more complicated to ship.

The dirty unconventional energy would be the tar sands oil from Alberta. The shale oil from ND that was carried by the Lac Megantic train is light, sweet crude which is clean and easy to refine. It is true that it is pumped from the Baaken using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. That may raise polution concerns, but it is neither new nor dirty. It has been in use in Texas and elsewhere for a couple decades.

Also the statement that "fossil fuel companies seek to supplant the depletion of easy oil and gas with new sources" is wrong. Fossil fuel companies would love to produce easy oil and gas fields. The problem is that they have already produced the easy to produce fields and production from those sources have fallen. They are turning to the difficult and expensive fields and deposits only because that is the only way to keep up the roughly 85 million barrels a day that the world has been using since about 2008.

Production over the last 5 years has been essentially stagnant, and may actually have declined somewhat if you take out the fudging with refinerie gains and how crude condensates are accounted for.

[cali]

3. actually, the crude from the Bakken oil fields varies considerably

one of the things that they were trying to determine re the accident is what kind of Bakken crude were in the tankers. Some is much dirtier.

http://www.platts.com/IM.Platts.Content/InsightAnalysis/IndustrySolutionPapers/NewCrudesNewMarkets.pdf

and the statement that you're criticizing is perfectly accurate.

[FarCenter]

5. From the Platts Report --

New Crudes: Bakken Blend

Bakken Blend crude oil represents the light sweet crude produced from the Bakken Shale Formation in the North Dakota/Montana/Saskatchewan/Manitoba region.

Bakkan is particularly useful to east coast refineries that are designed to process light, sweet crudes, such as Nigerian.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. You have to add the environmental costs of extraction--

the long-term degradation of the aquifers, killing of the seas, random oil spills & explosions, etc. when you set out to determine how "dirty" a given type of energy actually is.

I don't care if they can refine that "light, sweet crude" into potable organic nectar; it's the total destructive impact of the entire process that matters.

[cali]

7. yes. I thought the article was spot on.

[cali]

8. you're nitpicking and all Bakken oil is not the same

putting that aside, you keep insisting that production has been stagnant over the past 5 years. It hasn't but even if that were true, the amount of it being shipped by rail has grown by some 3,000% just in the last 4 years and shipments this year will exceed shipments in 2013.

[FarCenter]

9. Global oil production has been stagnant since 2004

It is true that US oil production and Canadian oil production have increased. However, that has not done much more than offset declines in production in other places. For example, both the Alaskan North Slope and the English sector of the North Sea are in terminal decline.

http://crudeoilpeak.info/latest-graphs

Note that these graphs show roughly 75 million barrels per day since about 2004. Others show higher numbers, since they count other products as crude. However, all the graphs of global production show a similar shape since 2004. OECD countries, including the US, are generally decreasing their consumption, while developing countries are increasing their consumption. US shale oil and imports of tar sands oil from Canada are not quite offsetting reductions in imported crude.

[cali]

10. But this is about Bakken oil production and U.S. oil production

increasing and the complications that arise in transporting that oil.

[FarCenter]

11. You have more inland risk and less coastal risk

As the ratio of imported crude oil to US and Canada produced crude oil drops, you have less risk from tanker spills and more risk from pipeline spills and rail tanker spills.

Rail is probably the riskiest form of crude oil transportation, but since the construction of pipelines is blocked, it is what you do. It also had the virtue of flexibility in routing, since you can ship direct from the oil fields to east and west coast refineries. Otherwise the oil would go to Gulf Coast refineries and then the products would be pipelined out to the customers.

People vote for oil every time they use their credit card down at the gas station.

[limpyhobbler]

4. Oil industry are terrorists. Their terrorist ideology is a devotion to private profit,

at the expense of all else.

I don't think we could ever really measure the scale of damage and terror they have caused in pursuit of that deranged belief.