FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Keystone XL Will Release More Carbon Pollution Than Greece

The oil carried by Keystone XL would release up to 93 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year for 50 years—far more than proponents thought.
An oil sands operation in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Via Kris Krüg/Flickr

Building the Keystone XL pipeline will send 830,000 barrels of Canada's bitumen oil a day onto the global market, slightly lowering oil prices while increasing global consumption. That means far more carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere than proponents claim, according to a new supply and demand analysis of the pipeline plan.

The bottom line: The oil carried by Keystone XL would release up to 93 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year for 50 years. If Keystone XL was a country, its 93 million tons of CO2 would edge out Greece as the world's 33rd largest CO2 polluter out of 178 countries.

Advertisement

This finding is crucial because President Barack Obama has said he will only approve Keystone "if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."

The US State Department ought to address the potential emissions from the increase in the global supply of oil, said study co-author Michael Lazarus of the US office of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an independent international research institute.

"It's remarkable that State does not appear to have explicitly addressed the impacts on global oil consumption," Lazarus told me.

The proposed Keystone XL route, via Sen. Mike Johanns's site

A State Department study previously pegged Keystone XL's environmental impact as essentially negligible, arguing that the oil it provides will only serve to replace oil from elsewhere, a net zero effect on carbon emissions. But the new SEI study states that Keystone XL will actually increase oil consumption.

"The classic supply and demand impacts of Keystone do not seem to have been part of the State Department's environmental review," he said.

SEI's analysis by Lazarus and Peter Erickson shows Keystone XL's contribution to CO2 emissions will be far higher than the State Department has previously acknowledged.

"This is an important gap that needs to be addressed if President Obama is to make a fully informed decision about the pipeline," said Erickson.

The decision remains largely in Obama's hands because Keystone XL crosses national borders. The current plan is for a 1200 mile, 36-inch diameter pipe to be built from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. The $7 billion pipeline will bring tar sands bitumen from under the frozen forests and lakes of northern Alberta to the world market, and will help the region's booming oil operations expand even further. XL is part of a larger 2500 mile Keystone pipeline system that terminates on the Texas Gulf Coast and is owned and operated by energy company TransCanada of Calgary, Alberta.

Advertisement

In 2012, Obama rejected TransCanada's application because the pipeline route was through Nebraska's environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region. A few months later TransCanada re-applied with a new pipeline route. The State Department is now doing an environmental review using the energy consulting company Environmental Resources Management, which is expected to be completed next year.

This week Politico reported that Environmental Resources Management is a member of several energy industry groups that have urged the government to support the project. The State Departments inspector general is investigating possible conflicts of interest.

Amidst that investigation, a simple fact is lost: Building more oil infrastructure is exactly the wrong thing to be doing when the world is struggling to reduce CO2 emissions. The SEI report pegs global investment in oil and gas infrastructure at $700 billion per year for the next 20 years, based on data from the International Energy Agency, along with considerable investment in coal.

That investment will only burn through our carbon budget faster than we are now. According to the IEA's 2013 World Energy Outlook, which is one of the top energy reports annually, some two-thirds of our proven fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid crossing the critical 2°C warming threshold by 2050.

Despite that, the CEOs, board members, bankers, and government officials who make the decisions to build new infrastructure rarely, if ever, consider the climate implications, said Lazarus. Along with his work on this recent SEI report, he's part of an SEI project called the "Risks of and Responses to the New Fossil Fuel Economy," which will look at the climate implications of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Advertisement

"It seems to be off limits to talk about cutting back on fossil fuel extraction," said Lazarus.

The SEI study found that Keystone XL will increase carbon emissions by bringing new oil sources to market.

If the Earth warms by two more degrees Celsius in the next half century, the destabilizing effects of climate change are expected to be disastrous. It's impossible to quit oil immediately, as building new energy infrastructure takes time. However, it makes less-than-zero sense to build new pipelines to increase access to tar sands bitumen, the world's dirtiest form of oil. The State Department assessment says 17 percent more CO2 is emitted per barrel of bitumen than light crude.

"That's a considerable underestimate based on newer data," says Anthony Swift, a West Texas attorney at the National Resources Defense Fund's International Program.

"Many tar sands projects require more energy than they produce," Swift said in an interview.

A forthcoming 2014 study from the University of Calgary, which is in Canada's oil-soaked heartland, will document the enormous amounts of natural gas used to pump super-heated steam deep underground under high pressure to melt the sticky bitumen and pump it to the surface he said.

The huge differential between the price of gas and oil makes this burn-more-energy-to-get-less absurdity profitable. But it also means bigger CO2 emissions than previous estimates he said. Keystone XL is the big pipe to unlock Pandora's bitumen box.

"The tar sands are land-locked. A Keystone approval will send a strong financial signal that tar sands growth is a safe investment," Swift said.

If Keystone XL is not approved little bitumen will go by rail. Swift said rail transportation is too expensive and lacks capacity, which will make tar sands development economically unsound, a conclusion Goldman Sachs agrees with.

And in the end, the project has little benefit for Americans, who are currently seeing low energy prices thanks to the natural gas boom. With extremely high costs of production, Canada's bitumen needs to be sold for the highest possible price, which means much of it is likely to be exported.

"There is no credible case for Keystone contributing to US energy security or lower gas prices," Swift concluded.