The website Midwest Energy News asks a very good question: When a ruptured pipeline spilled 20,000 barrels of oil into a North Dakota wheat field last month, a state health official said it was “the best place it could’ve occurred” — far from population centers and water supplies. But what if a similar spill occurs in the worst place? For better or worse, the year 2013 will be remembered as the...
What does it take to get people’s attention these days? How about blowing up a cornfield in rural Illinois and sending bright orange flames shooting 300 feet into the prairie sky? Folks who live for miles around the small town of Erie, Ill., were treated to that unexpected nighttime fireworks show this past Monday night, courtesy of a Texas company with the bland name of Enterprise Products...
The debate over the Keystone XL pipeline — which would take millions of barrels of oil extracted from the tar sands of Canada and ship them to refineries and ports along the U.S. Gulf Coast (where a lot would be shipped overseas, ironically) — has evolved over the last couple of years. At first, the worry was massive oil spills on U.S. soil, especially atop the environmentally...
How much oil can we dump atop the Gulf ecosystem before it simply collapses? At what point does the northern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico – once the source of 40 percent of all seafood caught in the continental United States – become, for all practical purposes, a dead zone? Well, we may be faced with that tragic outcome much sooner than many of us would care to believe. The oil...
