[Biofuel] Trans Mountain Pipeline plan could be a casualty of slow spill response - The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/trans-mountain-pipeline-plan-could-be-a-casualty-of-slow-spill-response/article24024428/ [images in on-line article] Trans Mountain Pipeline plan could be a casualty of slow spill response MARK HUME VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail Published Sunday, Apr. 19 2015, 10:39 PM EDT Last updated Sunday, Apr. 19 2015, 10:39 PM EDT A drop of oil the size of a dime can kill a sea bird. Can 16 barrels of oil, spilled in one of Canada’s most beautiful ports, kill a pipeline? It’s beginning to look like maybe it can, when the cleanup response is unnervingly slow, and the waters despoiled surround Stanley Park. A little more than a week ago, the cargo vessel Marathassa accidentally discharged about 2,700 litres of oil while at anchor in English Bay. The ship was so close to the city’s shores that in about 15 minutes you could have rowed there from the Jericho Sailing Centre, but it would take more than 12 hours for oil spill responders to surround the vessel with a containment boom. The slow response, and the almost comical breakdown in communications between the Coast Guard and a very concerned public, may well have serious repercussions for Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project. The link between the spill and the proposed pipeline is a simple one for British Columbians to make. If the pipeline goes ahead, the amount of oil transported to Vancouver will triple to 890,000 barrels a day, raising the likelihood that there will be more spills, perhaps much larger than the Marathassa incident. With such an important energy project looming in the background, and a federal election on the horizon, you can understand why the spill took on political overtones. B.C. Mayor Gregor Robertson was on the beaches for a news conference the day after to say he wasn’t happy with the slow response. Premier Christy Clark was quick to follow. And that prompted the federal government to go into damage control, issuing a flurry of statements about how good the cleanup effort had really been. “Even before most British Columbians woke up, the boom was completely surrounding the suspect vessel,” said Coast Guard Commissioner Jody Thomas, who described the response as “exceptional by international standards.” Was it? Recreational boaters became aware of the spill at about 4:45 p.m. and within 15 minutes made calls to alert authorities. One of those boaters, Rob O’Dea, has said the Coast Guard called him back on his cell at 5:08, and he confirmed he was bobbing alongside an oil slick that was at least a half-kilometre long. They assured him a crew was responding. But when he headed into harbour at 7:30 p.m., passing by the stern of the Marathassa where crew members were frantically trying to dip up globs of oil with buckets, he couldn’t see any cleanup boats. According to the Coast Guard’s account, Western Canada Marine Response Corp., the agency responsible for responding under directions of the Coast Guard, was notified at 8:06 and arrived on scene at 9:20. The leaking Marathassa wasn’t completely boomed off until 5:53 a.m. – so that’s more than 12 hours after the Coast Guard was first alerted. According to standards established by Transport Canada, if a spill of up to 1,000 barrels takes place in the designated waters of the Port of Vancouver, cleanup crews are to be deployed in six hours. But under the regulations, the designated waters extend 80 kilometres from the harbour. So it should take six hours to get to the most distant limits, and common sense tells you they should have got to the Marathassa faster than that. The communications response was also lacking. The City of Vancouver wasn’t informed until 12 hours after the spill was reported. Moving crews and boats on to the water and setting containment booms might take hours, but calling the city should take seconds. Throughout the incident, the media were given too little information, often too late. One end-of-day update came so late it was really an end-of-yesterday update, and an invitation for media to attend a technical briefing came 16 minutes before the event started. Had the Coast Guard responded to the Marathassa oil spill that quickly, it really would have been world class. Instead, the response was so slow it left politicians fuming and British Columbians increasingly nervous about the prospects of more oil transiting Vancouver’s scenic harbour. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] 5 years after BP oil spill, oystermen losing hope | Fort Saskatchewan Record
http://www.fortsaskatchewanrecord.com/2015/04/19/five-years-after-bp-oil-spill-some-gulf-oystermen-are-losing-hope [image gallery in on-line article] Five years after BP oil spill, some Gulf oystermen are losing hope Jonathan Kaminsky, REUTERS Sunday, April 19, 2015 2:28:32 MDT PM NEW ORLEANS - Five years after the largest oil spill in U.S. history spewed millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, many Louisiana oystermen are fearful that a once-bountiful population of the mollusks may never recover. "My kids are losing hope," said Wilbert Collins, 77, a retired third-generation oysterman in southeastern Louisiana with four sons who followed him into the industry. The family business has endured a 60 percent drop in yields in the past five years. The explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, left 11 workers dead and huge stretches of the Gulf fouled with petroleum that gushed from the site for 87 days. The accident has cost BP, the London-based oil major that owned the well, $42 billion in fines, cleanup and compensation costs. A judge is set to rule at any time on additional federal Clean Water Act penalties of up to $13.7 billion. The spill, which killed thousands of birds and hundreds of turtles while prompting temporary fishing bans, also has led to new rules intended to make the offshore oil and gas industry safer, despite its inherent dangers. BP has characterized its impact on marine life as unfortunate but not catastrophic. But oyster populations in the waters off southeastern Louisiana have been particularly slow to recover. The yield in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, once the engine of the largest oyster industry in the United States, plummeted by more than two-thirds from 2009 to 2013, the latest year for which state data are available. State data show that in 2009, the oyster harvest in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin fetched about $29 million, which dropped to $12 million in 2013, the latter figure buoyed by higher oyster prices. The decline began after the spill, but its cause is unclear. Scientists are studying possible culprits including the oil itself, overfishing and the large volume of fresh water released into the brackish areas where oysters live, part of an effort to flush crude off the coast. Citing government studies, BP has said the drop in oyster populations does not appear to have been caused by the spill. New regulations were announced last week to tighten safety requirements on offshore drilling equipment. U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a statement proposed regulations built on lessons learned from the BP spill. The American Petroleum Institute said it was reviewing the proposal, the third set of drilling-equipment rules put out by the Obama administration. Those safeguards are little comfort to Collins, who said he can only hope that oyster larvae will soon return to the waters he has worked for more than 60 years. "I've never seen it so bad," he said. "If it keeps on going down, I don't know what we're going to do." ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Trash-to-biofuel takes new turn in Marion | TheGazette
http://thegazette.com/subject/news/trash-to-biofuel-takes-new-turn-in-marion-20150416 Trash-to-biofuel takes new turn in Marion Fiberight will turn garbage to biogas in Marion, not ethanol in Blairstown Rick Smith, The Gazette April 16, 2015 | 7:36 pm MARION — No one has claimed that making biofuel out of garbage is as simple as tossing leftovers into the trash. So it is that Craig Stuart-Paul, president and chief executive officer of the Maryland-based Fiberight LLC, said this week that his company is shifting gears again on its two-year-old plan to build a trash sorting and shredding operation in Marion. The idea now is to make the Marion facility more than it was expected to be a year ago. The Marion project always has been tied to a small, shuttered ethanol plant in Blairstown, in Benton County west of Cedar Rapids, which Fiberight bought in November 2009 with an idea to turn the organic components of municipal solid waste and other garbage into ethanol. But Stuart-Paul said this week that the garbage-to-ethanol project has been put on hold for now. In its place, he said Fiberight will expand its plans for the proposed Marion facility, add a digester to the Marion project, and turn the digested organic material into a different biogas — compressed natural gas — instead of hauling the organic material to the Blairstown plant to turn most of it into ethanol. Stuart-Paul said he has not given up on the ethanol idea or the Blairstown plant. “The whole story of fuels from trash still is there,” Stuart-Paul said. “We’re not abandoning it (ethanol or the Blairstown plant.) We’re deferring it.” The latest shift in Fiberight’s plan, he said, comes because of the extension of what he called a “significant” renewable energy credit at the federal level for companies that create digester gas on-site. At the same time, the climate to attract investors for a project that turns garbage to ethanol is not favorable right now, he said. Stuart-Paul said creating biogas at the Marion facility always has been in the plans — though the idea dropped out of the initial phase of the project last year. It makes sense to look at biogas in Marion anew, he said, because Marion, with its commitment to become a “zero waste” community, has seen the Fiberight project as a way turn its city vehicles into ones that operate more cleanly and more inexpensively on compressed natural gas. Marion City Manager Lon Pluckhahn on Thursday said Marion continues to plan to convert its fleet of vehicles to compressed natural gas as the Fiberight project moves ahead in Marion. Private companies are converting their vehicles to use compressed natural gas where filling stations are located, Pluckhahn said. Stuart-Paul said he will create such a station in Marion to sell biogas to any vehicle equipped to operate on compressed natural gas. He said, too, that some of the biogas may be fed directly into the natural gas pipeline system. Garbage war Marion’s quest for a company to locate in the city to convert garbage to energy is a decade old and has been fueled by the city’s interest in making sure that the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency’s landfill at County Home Road and Highway 13 on Marion’s border doesn’t expand again. Marion has worked with Florida-based Plasma Power on a plan to zap garbage into energy and, when that prospect dimmed, the city signed on with Fiberight and its plan. In March 2014, the Marion City Council approved economic development incentives worth up to $850,000 to support Fiberight’s plan to build a $15-million sorting, shredding, and recycling facility in Marion’s “eco-industrial” park at 44th Street and Third Avenue. The facility was intended to prove that Fiberight’s small demonstration plant in Virginia could work on a larger scale. A year ago, Stuart-Paul said he hoped construction would start in June 2014 with the Marion facility operational by December 2014. This week, he said he now expected the Marion facility to cost $30 million with the addition to the project of a digester to create biogas. Construction should start this summer with operations to begin in 2016, he said. In February of this year, Fiberight signed a development agreement to build a similar but larger facility in Maine in 2018. That’s one reason, Stuart-Paul said, that it’s important to get the Marion facility up and running, he said. The Marion and Fiberight plan brings with it the prospect of a local garbage war of sorts as Marion, which is a member of the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency, and Fiberight steer garbage to the Marion facility and away from the Solid Waste Agency’s landfill on Marion’s border. The landfill takes in about 500 tons of garbage a day, and Stuart-Paul said the Marion facility will need 300-plus tons a day. He said there is enough garbage to go around, but Karmin McShane, executive director of the Solid
[Biofuel] Fuel Fix » Koch lobbyist to senators: Don’t reform biofuel mandates. Repeal them.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/04/16/koch-lobbyist-to-senators-dont-reform-biofuel-mandates-repeal-them/ Koch lobbyist to senators: Don’t reform biofuel mandates. Repeal them. Posted on April 16, 2015 at 1:40 pm by Jennifer A. Dlouhy WASHINGTON — A plan to overhaul the nation’s biofuel mandates — instead of repealing them altogether — would do more harm than good, a Koch executive warned Congress on Thursday. Philip Ellender, the president of Koch’s government affairs arm, took aim at legislation by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would strip away government mandates for refiners to blend in traditional corn-based ethanol, while preserving quotas for more advanced biofuels that have been slower to enter commercial production. “Feinstein-Toomey would . . . turn the Renewable Fuel Standard into a real mandate with real economic consequences for consumers by banning the only economic form of ethanol today,” Ellender said in a letter to senators. “Repeal the entire RFS instead.” The missive comes less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to finalize 2014, 2015 and 2016 renewable fuel quotas as part of a deal settling an oil industry lawsuit. That may have quelled some of the congressional push to alter the renewable fuel standard, which obligates refiners to add steadily increasing volumes of ethanol and other alternatives into the nation’s transportation fuel supply — as much as 36 billion gallons in 2022. Although Congress established the framework, the Environmental Protection Agency is tasked with establishing annual quotas for the four types of biofuels mandated under the law: traditional renewable fuel, advanced biofuels that aren’t derived from corn starch, biodiesel and cellulosic biofuel. Refiners already turn to traditional ethanol as a low-cost way to add octane to fuel, Ellender notes, but are hitting a blend wall where they no longer can incorporate enough ethanol to meet the volumetric RFS targets without exceeding a 10 percent threshold acceptable for use in all cars and trucks. Although new vehicles are being built and warranted for higher ethanol blends, warranty and liability concerns for older cars and trucks have helped diminish some retailers’ enthusiasm to sell a 15 percent blend known as E15. “Ethanol made from corn starch is by and large the most cost-effective way to achieve higher octane in gasoline,” Ellender writes. “The reality is that there is virtually no cellulosic ethanol being made today and very little other advanced biofuels (that) are more expensive than ethanol made from corn starch.” The Koch executive suggests that the Feinstein-Toomey bill — like its companion in the House — would make U.S. biofuels policy look more like the approach in California, which forces refiners to meet a low-carbon fuel standard. Although one Koch-cited analysis puts the cost of compliance with the California low-carbon fuel standard as high as $1.06 per gallon by 2020, Ellender insists “the actual cost could be much higher if the rest of the nation goes on a low-carbon fuel diet via the Feinstein-Toomey legislation.” Supporters of the Feinstein-Toomey approach insist that the goal of the RFS was to use corn-based ethanol as a pathway to more advanced renewable fuels made from algae and other non-edible plant materials. Toomey argues that the current mandate essentially pits corn starch ethanol against other renewable fuels. The result is that the RFS “has stunted the growth of environmentally friendly advanced biofuels like biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol,” Toomey said in February. “Once the mandate for corn ethanol is gone, the RFS program will be able to focus on those fuels that best reduce greenhouse gas emissions and don’t compete with our food supply.” Several petroleum refiners are also big ethanol producers. For instance, San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp. is the nation’s third-largest producer of renewable fuels. And Koch’s refining subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources, now owns seven ethanol plants, with Ellender insisting “we bought these ethanol plants despite the RFS — not because of it.” ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] The Canadian Ministry of "Truth": "Reality Is Whatever We Say It Is"
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/30270-the-canadian-ministry-of-truth-reality-is-whatever-we-say-it-is [If only it wasn't true, so overt, and so objectionable. I fear more and more for the future of this country. links and slogans in on-line article] The Canadian Ministry of "Truth": "Reality Is Whatever We Say It Is" Monday, 20 April 2015 00:00 By Fred Guerin, Truthout | Op-Ed One of the frightening aspects of ideology is how easy its governing principles can be obscured behind tautologies and reality-denying affirmations that are then effortlessly absorbed en masse simply through continuous repetition. Ideology articulated in tautological form is what Orwell captured in his novel 1984 when he reduced Ingsoc (English Socialism) to three infamous slogans intended to shape and discipline the minds of Oceania's citizens: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. These statements appear to say two different things, but they actually say the same thing twice. They cannot be factually or logically refuted because they are self-reinforcing statements that point back to themselves. However, they do play an essential role in what Noam Chomsky has called the "manufacture of consent." In Orwell's dystopia, such inversions of the meaning of words are precisely intended to render language, and indeed truth and reality, entirely malleable, subject to the arbitrariness of those who happen to be in power. During one of his torture sessions, Winston Smith objects that there is a real world outside the world of the Party. His torturer, O'Brien, assures him that "reality is simply whatever the party says it is." Today, there is no shortage of O'Brien-like politicians, bureaucrats, CEOs and media moguls who operate as if truth and reality are what they say it is. Of course, neither the fictional nor nonfictional O'Briens call what they do propaganda. In 1984, O'Brien refers to it as "reality control," or in newspeak, "double-think." Today we know it through individuals like Karl Rove as "reality-based community." In Rove's own words, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." Reason and reality-defying statements and slogans, the continuous repetition of big lies, the desire to rewrite the past to make it consistent with present mendacities, the endless false equivalencies, are all depressing reminders that we are not that far removed from the dystopic world of 1984. Let me offer a few concrete examples. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have been told over and over by famous economists and media talking heads that capitalism is the one true economic system - or as Milton Friedman might have said, in concise tautological form: "Capitalism is Freedom." It matters not in the least that really existing capitalism, to use Noam Chomsky's apt phrase, enriches the few, impoverishes the many and works to systematically undermine freedom. In other words, reality is whatever the powerful say it is. Europeans are likewise assured again and again by members of the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) that "Austerity is Abundance." Thus, it is not the redistribution of wealth through a graduated, fair tax system, the advocacy of living wages, reasonable working conditions or impartial labor laws that will lead to economic wealth and stability, but the imposition of brutal austerity measures directed wholly at the middle classes and working poor. The notion that austerity is necessary or inevitable does not derive its legitimacy from anything real or true about the world. It is "proof" by assertion - assertion that cannot be challenged or contradicted in mainstream media or official circles because doing so would not be in the interest of very powerful individuals and institutions. Again, it is continuously repeated to Americans that if they are "patriots" who want to preserve the strength, security and integrity of their country, they must never be made aware of the extent to which their privacy and civil liberties have been compromised by an elaborate system of intrusive surveillance. The notion that austerity is necessary or inevitable does not derive its legitimacy from anything real or true about the world. It is "proof" by assertion - assertion that cannot be challenged or contradicted in mainstream media or official circles because doing so would not be in the interest of very powerful individuals and institutions. Again, it is continuously repeated to Americans that if they are "patriots" who want to preserve the strength, security and integrity of their country, they must never be made aware of the extent to which their privacy and civil liberties have been compromis
