U Nebraska Study - TransCanada Gave "Unrealistically Optimistic" View Of Tar Sands Pipeline Risk

[hatrack]

A study released by a University of Nebraska researcher says that TransCanada has presented American regulators with an “an unrealistically optimistic” portrayal of the consequences of a spill from its proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The pipeline is an expansion of an existing pipeline that delivers synthetic crude from Canada’s oil sands to the United States. Several environmental groups are urging regulators and the State Department not to approve Keystone XL, arguing that oil sands are a particularly dirty energy source.

At a news conference on Monday hosted by the group Friends of the Earth, John S. Stansbury, a professor of environmental and water engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said he anticipated that the pipeline would experience 91 spills producing leaks of more than 50 barrels of oil during its first 50 years of operation. TransCanada, by contrast, predicts only 11 spills of that size or larger, according to Dr. Stansbury’s analysis of its regulatory filings.

Dr. Stansbury also concluded that it would take 10 times longer to shut down the pipeline when a leak developed than TransCanada estimated, that the company’s systems for electronically sensing spills were not as reliable as it claimed and that a worst-case spill would release about six times more oil than the company anticipated. “You would not have to expect the worst-case spill, but you would have to plan for it,” he said. He noted that even if a spill only reached TransCanada’s much lower estimates, “it would be a huge problem.”

EDIT

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/transcanada-plays-down-keystone-xl-risks-researcher-says/