New Report: "How the Oil Sands Got To The Great Lakes Basin"

As the price of oil has skyrocketed, new techniques of extracting oil are emerging. The tar sands of Alberta Canada are promising huge profits as the energy intensive oil extraction is now profitable. Right now 1.3 million barrels are being exported daily, this number is expected to increase to 3.5 million barrels a day by 2011 and eventually to 5 million barrels a day by 2030. This would turn Canada into one of the oil giants.

The problem with extracting oil from the tar sands is that it produces three times the amount of greenhouse gases than producing a regular barrel of oil. It is easily one of the dirtiest energy solutions around.

According to a report released today by The University of Toronto's Munk Centre entitled: "How the Oil Sands Got To The Great Lakes Basin," Canadian company Enbridge who is one of the major players in energy and oil transport are proposing a new network of pipelines and expansion of refineries to be located throughout the Great Lakes region.

This includes: "significantly expanding the refineries in Indiana, next to Chicago, as well as in other states and possibly Sarnia, Ontario." The Canadian oil industry has requested "more capacity out of the oil sands and into the U.S. Midwest markets." This would mean that crude oil would be piped to the Great Lakes region and would then have to be refined here, the results would mean more pollution in the Great Lakes region.

The report lists 17 major refinery expansions that are now either being considered, or already underway. Some of these include:

• Illinois (Conoco Phillips in Wood River, Exxon-Mobil in Joliet, and Marathon
Robinson in Robinson)
• Indiana (BP Products North America Inc. in Whiting)
• Kentucky (Marathon Petroleum Co. LLC in Cattletsburg)
• Michigan (Marathon Petroleum Co. LLC in Detroit)
• Minnesota (Marathon Petroleum Co. LLC in St. Paul Park)
• Ohio (BP Products North America Inc/Husky Energy Inc. in Toledo)
• Wisconsin (Murphy Oil USA Inc. in Superior)
• Ontario (Suncor in Sarnia).

One of the examples of increased air pollution is already being felt in Whiting, Indiana at British Petroleum's (BP) $3.8 billion refinery expansion. BP has applied for permits to increase daily discharges of suspended solids from 3,646 pounds per day to 4,925 pounds per day. Other byproducts that come with refining oil to gasoline is ammonia and sludge.

Other regional concerns included through the report are:

"the region already endures some of the worst pollution in Canada or 131,000 tonnes of air pollution a year. Industrial waste from Chemical Valley has feminized male snapping turtles in the St Clair River, turned 45 per cent of the whitefish in Lake St Clair 'intersexual' and exposed 2,000 members of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation to a daily cocktail of 105 carcinogens and gender benders. The Ojibway [members of a First Nation who live in the area] are not faring much better than the snapping turtles or whitefish. In fact the number of newborn girls outnumbers boys by two to one on the reserve. Two thirds of the children have asthma while 40 percent of the women experience miscarriages. Calls for a thorough federal investigation have gone largely unheeded. Environment Canada never bothered to do a cumulative impact study and probably no responsible authority ever will."

"In Wood River, Illinois, near St. Louis, Missouri, ConocoPhillips seeks to process Alberta Tar sands oil from EnCana Corporation as part of a $15 billion expansion that would also send processing to Texas. This project has been challenged by the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council; in June, 2008, the U.S. EPA determined that its Illinois counterpart didn’t adequately address air pollution questions raised during the permit process and reopened the project to further public comment."

"In Superior, Wisconsin, Murphy Oil is studying an oil sands-related expansion that citizens fear could damage 300 to 500 acres of wetlands. The project will consume 5 million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan and boost the refinery’s energy demand 12-fold; the filling of the wetlands, according to one environmentalist, will be 'the largest wetlands filling in Wisconsin since the passage of the U.S. Clean Water Act
of 1972.'"

"In Detroit, a Marathon refinery is awaiting its final expansion permits; unlike other projects, this refinery does not discharge directly into the Great Lakes, but pre-treats its waste and then sends it to Detroit’s municipal treatment system before discharge. However, Detroit is already among the worst 10 (ranked ninth) U.S. cities for short-term particle pollution (the microscopic solids and liquid droplets that are often linked directly with health problems). In Toledo, Ohio, BP has an agreement with a Canadian company to expand its refinery and split the profits from processing oil sands, although no official
permit applications have been filed yet."

The report defines this pipeline as a pollution delivery system and uses a conservative estimate that this will bring an additional 2.3 million tonnes of additional greenhouse gas emissions a year, as well as "large-scale sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions – the building blocks of acid rain – as well as fine particulate matter, which is responsible for premature deaths. In addition, refineries use millions of litres of water per day. It is also worth noting that these would be refinery expansions, not replacements – in many, if not most cases, the old refineries with increasingly antiquated abatement equipment would be running side by side with the new expansion facilities."

Report: How the Oil Sands Got To The Great Lakes Basin

Live Webcast from the University of Toronto on How the Oil Sands Got To The Great Lakes Basin

Globe and Mail story: Oil sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns

Should water be a commodity or a human right?

As the Great Lakes Compact works its way towards President Bush's desk, Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) has been getting a lot of press lately for opposing the compact.

Stupak is concerned with water being defined as a commodity. Language in the current compact allows water to be exported in containers no larger than 5.7 gallons.

While the current language protects large water withdrawals, the fear is that current U.S. free trade agreements could strike down this arbitrary limit to the amount of water that can be taken from the Great Lakes if water is seen as a commodity.

The bigger controversy worldwide is over whether water should be considered a commodity and opened up to the free market, or is a human right that everyone deserves access to. In other words, who delivers the water and should they be able to profit from it?

The Economist has a debate going on right now over the following proposal: "Water, as a scarce resource, should be priced according to its market value."

The debate is between market advocate Steve J. Hoffmann, Managing Director of WaterTech Capital and co-founder of Palisades Water Index Associates and water rights advocate Vandana Shiva, Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy.

Steve J. Hoffmann's opening statement.

Vandana Shiva's opening statement.

Participate in the debate.

The Water Front begins a Great Lakes tour on Friday at Marygrove College

Liz Miller's documentary The Water Front begins a 20 city tour around the Great Lakes when it premieres on Friday at Marygrove College in the Madame Cadillac Dining Room at 8425 W McNichols road at 6:30 pm.

In 2004 Highland Park was in the midst of state receivership, so the state sent in an emergency financial consultant. One of the solutions for getting Highland Park out of the red was to sell off the cities' biggest asset, their water plant. Highland park unlike most of the other surrounding Detroit areas has its own water intake pipe. The idea of selling the water plant was met with fierce resistance by residents. Many were angry by the steep increase in water bills. Some people were receiving water bills as high as $4500 and $9000. Many of the people felt that the financial consultants were trying to pass on the costs of years of mismanagement to Highland Park residents. When the people couldn't pay, their water would be shut off and this legally makes your house condemned. The film follows the issue and provides a balanced look at the issue, interviewing all sides: the activists, residents, and financial consultants.

Water Front Preview:


Here is a recent interview with Liz Miller about her documentary, The Water Front.



Food and Water Watch: Sponsor of the tour

WDET Detroit Today interview with Water Front Associate Producer Curtis Smith and local bluesman Joe Carter who wrote music for the movie

How the local waterways fared from last week's downpour

It has long been common practice for rainwater to be diverted to city drains. This is largely a consequence of urbanization and the accompanying pavement. Rather than have rainwater be absorbed back into the ground, it goes into the sewer system and becomes the cities' problem and must be dealt with by the local wastewater treatment plant. These systems get overloaded when large storms occur and the end result is that the sewers overflow sewage into the waterways. There are two types of overflows, Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) and Sanitary Sewer Overflows (SSOs).

CSOs are when sewer systems use the same pipe for raw sewage and rainwater. When there are heavy rains these pipes get overwhelmed and the sewage goes into our local waterways or goes into a CSO retention basin and is partially treated and then released into our waterways.

A good explanation of CSO retention treatment basins comes from the MDEQ Annual CSO Report (2000-2001):

“Many combined sewer systems have recently installed treatment facilities (called retention/treatment basins), which are designed to capture the combined sewage and rainwater long enough to provide initial treatment and disinfection. This initial treatment often involves allowing solids to settle, the skimming of floatable materials such as oils; and disinfection of disease causing organisms, often accomplished through the addition of chlorine. This combined rainwater and sewage wastewater, with chlorine disinfection is the typical treated CSO discharge in the state of Michigan; therefore, many CSO releases are considered partially treated sewage. The treatment provided significantly reduces the amount of pollutants discharged and the associated public health risk.”

SSOs are generally a broken pipe or equipment malfunction, unlike a CSO these are illegal and you cannot get a permit for these. SSOs generally releases raw sewage that gets no treatment at all.

Some areas in Metro Detroit received over 5 inches of rain last week, so how did the local waterways fair?

All of these incidents occured between September 13-15, the counties that were looked at were Macomb, Oakland, Wayne, and St. Clair.

This list is for releases of partially treated sewage into our local waterways:

Lake St. Clair: 208.05 million gallons
Milk River: 86.199 million gallons
Rouge River: 71.67 million gallons
St. Clair River: 14.75 million gallons
Clinton River: 1.16 million gallons

This list is for releases of raw sewage:

St. Clair River: 3.75 million gallons
Clinton River: 1.92 million gallons
Rouge River: .517 million gallons

The Detroit Waste Water Treatment Plant released 62.41 million gallons of blended effluent into the Trenton Channel.

1 Million gallons of diluted raw sewage was released into the Detroit River.

New economic plan could bring over half a million jobs to the Great Lakes states

A new report by the Center for American Progress details an economic plan that would help turn around the ailing economy and provide much needed green infrastructure and investment.

This program would create nearly 2 million jobs nationwide and would reduce the unemployment rate from 5.7 percent to 4.4 percent. The plan focuses on six different areas: Retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency, expanding mass transit and freight rail, constructing 'smart' electrical grid transmission systems, wind power, solar power, and next-generation biofuels.

According to the report: "This economic recovery program combines the $100 billion fiscal stimulus with an additional credit stimulus-through a federal loan guarantee program to boost private-sector investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy." The plan would be about the same cost as the economic stimulus checks that went out last April.

Other key benefits identified throughout the report are: Widespread employment gains, lower unemployment, renewed construction and manufacturing work, more stable oil prices, and self-financing energy efficiency.

The new Center for American Progress report can be found here:

Green jobs: A program to create good jobs and start building a low-carbon economy

Find out how your state will benefit: State fact sheet

40 percent of all North American freshwater fish face extinction

A new report led by the United States Geological Survey finds that 40 percent of all North American fish face extinction. The research was published in the journal Fisheries.

The report lists 700 species as imperiled, this is a 92 percent increase since the previous 1989 report that listed 364 species as imperiled.

The USGS has a very useful interactive map of all of the imperiled fish species that can be viewed by ecoregions or by political boundaries.

USGS and the American Fisheries Society interactive map

ENS Story: North American Freshwater Fishes Fading into Extinction

Using Green Infrastructure to Stop Combined Sewer Overflows

The Canadian environmental organization Ecojustice released a report on Tuesday focusing on preventing rainwater from entering our sewer systems. Most big cities had their sewer systems built in the early 1900's. When they were built raw sewage and storm water used the same sewer, this is called a Combined Sewer. Most are serving larger populations than was ever originally intended, so as a consequence, when it rains they overflow and release sewage into our waterways.

Though the report focuses primarily on Ontario, the suggestions of green infrastructure which they define as “an interconnected network of natural areas that maintain natural ecological processes,” can be applied anywhere. Many of the solutions presented in the report are alternatives to hard infrastructure solutions that are often prohibitive due to high costs. An example of a costly hard infrastructure solution is overhauling a large cities' sewer system. It gets real expensive real fast.

Another problem identified in the report is Canada's lack of public reporting. In Michigan, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) reports every Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) that happens. That is not the case in Ontario. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) collects some information on CSOs but the data is often inconsistent and rarely provides a full and accurate picture of what is going on. Some of the federal and provincial government data does not even contain volumes for the amount of the CSO. This distorts the overall effect of CSOs on the Great Lakes since it is somewhat of a mystery of the total number of sewage entering the Great Lakes.

A 2006 report by Ecojustice graded Windsor the third worst in CSOs for major cities in the Great Lakes basin. So all we really know is that the problem is bad. We can only guess just how bad it is.

The Ecojustice report is using an innovative way of tackling the problem since it aims at a more direct solution of limiting the amount of water that gets into the sewer systems, and provides options that are affordable and practical and provide aesthetic value to communities.

Many of the solutions suggested are beginning to be implemented in many big cities across the country such as Chicago, Toronto, and Portland that have implemented on a large scale many of the Ecojustice suggestions such as green rooftops, rain barrels, permeable sidewalks and roads, and bio-retention areas. The aim of all those measures is to "get the rain out of the drain" as the report succinctly put it.

Even locally people are starting to implement some of these suggestions as well. The Detroit Free Press recently reported that a green roof is being constructed in Auburn Hills over the gun range at the Public Safety Department.

The report provides several case studies of what cities are doing to reduce water from overwhelming sewer systems and water treatment plants and leading to CSOs.

Green Cities, Great Lakes: The Green Infrastructure Report