Why exactly do we not want pipelines that carry tar sands?

Well Keystone and Enbridge have been on my radar for nearly a year, but Michael Brune, of the Sierra Club has a hard hitting article on the subject that is rather damming!

Why is it that we here in America are driving some of the most fuel efficient cars ever thought of, yet the big oil companies want to shove these pipelines down our throats? The automakers are making these high mileage vehicles-- some even are making what is termed as zero gas mileage cars because they do not burn gas at all-- and our population is even buying them.

We are trying to move ourselves on a path to move us beyond oil. But then why does big oil, Exxon, BP and the likes seem so dammed determined to keep us hooked on the stuff for?

Pipelines have an abysmal record in this country. In 2010, more than 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River was transformed into an environmental disaster zone by a cracked tar sands pipeline and a tar sands pipeline company that neglected to turn off its pumps. Since then, a monumental $700 million cleanup effort has removed more than a million gallons of tar sands crude, along with 17 million gallons of polluted water, and 190,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris. Last week, after two years, the EPA officially reopened the affected section of the river.

But that is not all. Tar sands are even worse to clean up due to the fact that the tar sand is heavier than water. This means in laymen's terms that skimming devices cannot be employed to aid in the cleanup effort. Instead, remediators must try and recover this toxic sludge from the bottom of any body of water that these pipelines pass over the top of.

This would be bad enough if such spills were rare occurrences -- but they're not. In the past two months alone, three separate tar sands pipelines have reported spills in Canada. Enbridge Inc., whose pipe leaked into the Kalamazoo, reported a spill of 1,450 barrels of oil-sand crude in eastern Alberta just last week, while two other companies cited spills of 3,000 and 5,000 barrels respectively, the former into a reservoir used by a nearby small town.

And Canadian tar sands spills are not limited to Canada. Since May 2011, three major tar sands spills have occurred in North Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. The North Dakota spill was the twelfth from TransCanada's Keystone I pipeline during its first year of operation.

Why are tar sands pipelines to accident prone one might ask? Well that is such an easy question to answer-- tar sands are not oil per say and require very high pressure in order to move them, plus you are effectively sand blasting the inside of the pipe the whole time you are moving it. Such a recipe ends up in a higher rate of failure than what oil pipelines have.

What makes it worse is that these tar sands pipelines have virtually no oversight at all. This can become apparent if you factor in that most of the leaks that have occurred on Keystone I etal have been reported by the public. That is correct, virtually no tar sands pipelines which had leaks were reported by their respective companies who own them. To me this is a very sad fact, because I know we possess the technology to effectively monitor these pipelines. So the question would be, why do these companies not employ such technology to effectively monitor their pipelines?