Army announces it will grant easement for DAPL, terminate further environmental review

This excerpt from a filing in a federal court in Washington, D.C. indicates the Trump regime’s determination to remove the last obstacle to completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday that it will grant Energy Transfer Partners, L.P., the developer of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the easement required to build beneath North Dakota’s Lake Oahe.

Further study of environmental impacts of DAPL will also be jettisoned.

A memorandum from a senior official temporarily serving as assistant secretary of the Army said that Donald Trump’s Jan. 24, 2017 executive memorandum demanded the move.

Opponents of DAPL denounced the Trump regime’s move to short-circuit further study of the $3.8 billion dollar pipeline’s impacts on the water supply of native Americans in the Dakotas.

“The Obama administration correctly found that the Tribe’s treaty rights must be respected, and that the easement should not be granted without further review and consideration of alternative crossing locations,” Jan Hasselman, an attorney with Earthjustice who is representing tribal opponents of the project, said. “Trump’s reversal of that decision continues a historic pattern of broken promises to Indian Tribes and a violation of Treaty rights. Trump and his administration will be held accountable in court.”

The decision removes the last hurdle to completion of the fossil fuel infrastructure project.

Work on the project was stopped by the Obama administration last September. Then the Army Corps of Engineers had decided in on Dec. 4, 2016 not to grant the easement beneath Lake Oahe. The agency instead determined that preparation of an environmental impact statement on DAPL was necessary to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

The period in which the public could comment on that EIS began on Jan. 18 and was not set to expire until Feb. 20.

Trump, the real estate developer and reality television star who occupies the White House despite losing last November’s popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and despite Russian interference in the Presidential election, owned Energy Transfer Partners stock worth at least $500,000 in 2015.

State Department releases EIS on Keystone XL pipeline

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline is one step closer to President Barack Obama’s desk, as the U.S. Department of State released Friday a final environmental impact study on the controversial project.

The Keystone XL pipeline would transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Morgan, Mont. to Steel City, Neb. About 85 percent of the oil would come from tar sands that extend across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and, especially, Alberta.

The process of removing that oil from tar sands and its use as an energy source could add as much as 93 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, according to a Dec. 2013 report by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

A July 2013 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that, during a 50-year period, the pipeline could cause at least 1 billion more metric tons of the greenhouse gas to be pumped into the atmosphere than would be discharged without it.

The EIS indicates that the State Department, at least, does not concur with opinions that the Keystone XL project will cause an increase in global warming.

“Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenarios,” it says.

The question is a crucial one because Obama has said that he will not approve Keystone XL if its construction would add to the problem of climate change.

The rest of the oil that would be transported by the pipeline would be drawn from the Bakken Shale Formation in western North Dakota.

Environmental advocacy organizations wasted little time before calling on Obama to reject the pipeline.

“Even though the State Department continues to downplay clear evidence that the Keystone XL pipeline would lead to tar sands expansion and significantly worsen carbon pollution, it has, for the first time, acknowledged that the proposed project could accelerate climate change,” Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the international program director for Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “President Obama now has all the information he needs to reject the pipeline.”

The publication of the EIS is the latest step in an odyssey that has lasted for nearly six years. President Obama rejected the developer’s first permit request in 2011 because of concerns about the impact on Nebraska’s Sand Hills and its underlying aquifer. The proposed route was later changed, which necessitated both a new permit application and a new environmental impact review of the project.

A 2004 executive order by former President George W. Bush requires a presidential permit for oil and gas facilities that cross U.S. international borders.

The release of a supplemental environmental impact statement triggers a 30-day comment period, which will commence on Feb. 5. Once the deadline for submission of those comments passes, secretary of state John Kerry will make his recommendation about whether the White House should grant the presidential permit required to build the trans-national conduit for oil extracted from Canada’s tar sands.

A coalition of environmental groups argued, in a Jan. 29 letter to Kerry, that the State Department needs to consider the cumulative climate change impacts of both the Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of the nearby Alberta Clipper pipeline. That project would,if expansion is approved, carry about 880,000 barrels of crude per day. An amendment to an existing presidential permit is required for Enbridge, Inc., the developer of both pipelines, to increase the Alberta Clipper’s capacity.

Construction of the southern half of the pipeline, which will carry oil from Cushing, Okla. to the Gulf of Mexico coast, has recently been completed.

Federal appeals court rejects U.S. plan for oil drilling in Chukchi Sea

The Obama administration’s plan to extract billions of barrels of oil from Arctic seas off the northwest coast of Alaska hit a roadblock in federal court last week.

The federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Jan. 22 that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulations, and Enforcement’s ‘s environmental impact study was flawed because it assumed a production level far lower than the potential oil production from the project.

The case centers on a lease sale advanced by the administration of President George W. Bush. Called Lease Sale 193, the 2008 decision affects about 30 million acres of the marine region, an area larger than Pennsylvania.

The sale of 487 exploration leases in Lease Sale 193 produced more than $2.6 billion in revenue for Washington, with about $2.1 billion of that coming from Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest energy companies.

Opponents of the BOEM plan to allow drilling in the area point to the risks it poses to the region’s diverse wildlife.

“The melting Chukchi Sea is no place for drillships,” Rebecca Noblin, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Alaska director, said in a statement. “It’s a place where polar bears hunt for ringed seals, where walruses socialize and bowhead whales make their way to rich feeding grounds.”

The opponents, who include 12 conservation groups, one native Alaskan advocacy organization, and one native Alaskan village, argued that, by underestimating the amount of oil that could be extracted from the area if drilling occurred, BOEM was risking a huge oil spill that would devastate that pristine area.

“This mistake means that the EIS gives only the best case scenario for environmental harm,” Eric Grafe, an attorney with the public interest law firm Earthjustice, said. “All is based on the number of barrels produced. If they get the number wrong, they understate all those other impacts.”

Grafe said that, even if only 1 billion barrels of oil were produced in the area that is subject to the oil lease sale, there would be a 40 percent chance of an oil spill.

“Because it’s so remote and so inaccessible, the assumption is that you’d have to find a significant amount of oil to justify the infrastructure that would have to be put in,” he said. “Right now there’s nothing. No roads, no pipelines. It’s a pristine area. It’s precisely because of that absence of infrastructure that it’s so risky to drill there. If there is an oil spill, you’re not going to have the resources to respond to that oil spill and you can’t clean it up in an icy environment anyway.”

The federal appeals court panel that heard the case agreed that the government’s reliance upon an estimate of 1 billion barrels of oil caused its study of environmental impacts from the drilling activity  to be flawed.

“In the case before us, BOEM was fully aware from the very beginning that if one billion barrels could be economically produced, many more barrels could also be economically produced,” Judge William Fletcher, the lead author of the appellate panel’s opinion, wrote.

There may be as many as 15 billion barrels of oil that are economically viable to extract beneath the Chukchi Sea, according to 1 2011 BOEM analysis.

Environmentalists also point to the contribution to ongoing climate change that extracted oil would make.

“We can’t afford to burn the oil found there,” Grafe said. “We shouldn’t be getting more oil out to burn it if we are going to stay within climate change parameters.”

Shell commenced drilling in the Chukchi Sea in 2012 but experienced numerous problems. A  March 2013 report by the U.S. Department of Interior concluded that Shell committed a series of logistical and planning blunders in connection with its Lease Sale 193-related activities in the Arctic.

“They screwed it up really badly,” Grafe said. “Here’s a company saying ‘we’re ready to drill, we can do it safely’ and it’s a giant fiasco. Nothing goes right.”

Among those problems:

* a containment dome used to prevent the spread of oil spills that was being tested in Puget Sound was “crushed like a beer can,” according to a U.S. Department of Interior official who observed the test;

* a drill ship called the Noble Discoverer slipped anchor and nearly ran aground in Dutch Harbor, AK, then had to quickly be moved from Shell’s exploration site in the Chukchi Sea because an ice storm was rapidly approaching;

* U.S. Coast Guard inspectors found a litany of maritime regulation violations on the vessel and later referred its findings to the U.S. Department of Justice;

* the Noble Discoverer later caught fire and exploded while in port in the Aleutian Islands; and

* another drilling ship, the Kulluck, broke free of a tow and ran aground in Kodiak, AK in Dec. 2012. Shell was trying to move the ship to Seattle to avoid paying Alaska property taxes on vessels used for oil and gas exploration.

“Doing that in the winter when there’s lots of storms in the Gulf of Alaska is risky,” Grafe said. “But they did it.”

The incident involving the Kulluck drill barge remains under investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953 the U.S. Department of Interior has authority over oil and gas exploration and extraction on submerged lands along the country’s coasts. That cabinet department, in turn, includes a specialized agency – BOEM – to handle leasing of the submerged lands for oil and gas development activity. BOEM used to be known as the Minerals Management Service. The Obama administration changed its name in 2010, following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Chukchi Sea lease sale dispute will now go back before a U.S. district judge in Alaska. He will decide whether the holders of oil leases in the Chukchi Sea can proceed to drill after a modified environmental impact statement is prepared or whether the lease sales should be voided altogether.

Judge Ralph Beistline had previously rejected BOEM’s environmental impact statement in a 2010 decision. Later, after the Obama administration made changes to the EIS and proceeded with Lease Sale 193, Beistline upheld that decision. It was that 2011 order that was reversed by the Ninth Circuit last week.

Grafe said that the appeals court’s opinion gives BOEM time to decide whether to abandon the Chukchi Sea leases.

“They could put out a draft EIS and, while they’re doing that process to get a more accurate assessment, not allow any activities to happen on those leases,” he explained. “At the end of that EIS process, when we have a document that more accurately informs the public about the risks, they can reconsider the decision about whether the leases should be there.”

Grafe was referring to an environmental impact statement, which is the study of the environmental impacts likely to result from a “major federal action,” such as marine oil leases, mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

Shell announced this week that it would not attempt to drill in the Chukchi or Beaufort Seas this year.

The case is Native Village of Point Hope v. Jewell, No. 12-35287.

Top photo: Ice on Chukchi Sea (photo courtesy National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, photo by Karen E. Frey)

Second photo: Beluga whale pod in Chukchi Sea (photo courtesy National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, photo by Laura Morse)

Third photo: Walrus in Chukchi Sea (photo courtesy U.S. Geological Survey)

Fourth photo: The drill ship Kulluck aground in Kodiak, AK, Jan. 1, 2013 (photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard, photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Klingenberg)

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2014/01/22/3285973/appeals-court-rules-offshore-oil.html#storylink=cpy