Negative.
"The proposed route for Keystone XL crosses over the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the country’s largest sources of freshwater that provides drinking water and irrigation for millions of Americans.
There have already been
81 significant oil spills so far in 2013, according the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. A spill on the Ogallala Aquifer would be far worse than any of these spills because of the unique properties of tar sands that make clean up in water particularly difficult.
The 2010 Kalamazoo River spill revealed that tar sands oil sinks to the bottom of bodies of water, making it much harder to clean up. As Michigan State University Professor Steve Hamilton said on NPR “
It’s not quite solid, and it’s not quite liquid. You could pick it up and shape it into a ball practically.” The Kalamazoo cleanup effort has already cost over $820 million, and could top $1 billion."
"U.S. pipelines average 280 significant spills a year.
TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline experienced 12 separate spills in the United States in the first year of operation– nearly one every month. One of those spills alone released 21,000 gallons of dirty tar sands oil. Between the U.S. and Canada, the original Keystone pipeline had “over 30 spills” in its first year, according to a report by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute."
"The report did not address whether spills of diluted bitumen are harder to clean up than spills of conventional crude oil. If the Keystone XL pipeline gets the federal permit it needs for construction,
it will carry up to 800,000 barrels of oil a day across land above the Ogallala aquifer, the main source of drinking water for much of the Great Plains.
Cleanup continues of diluted bitumen that spilled three years ago into Michigan's Kalamazoo River. In another spill in late March, a pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Ark., gushing 200,000 gallons through a residential neighborhood and into a nearby lake. So far, somewhat more than half the oil spilled there has been recovered.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/28/nation/la-na-keystone-pipeline-20130629
"It's tougher than they thought," Terry Abel of the Energy Resources Conservation Board said Tuesday. "It's tougher than we thought, too."
Reclaiming mine tailings has been one of the industry's major environmental challenges.
Much of that waste material is composed of particles so fine they take years or even decades to settle out of tailings ponds. Without a way to hasten the process, oilsands tailings ponds have grown from 50 square kilometres in 2006 to 176 square kilometres now."
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/11/alberta-oilsands-cleanup-tailings-harder_n_3422814.html
"
Tar sands diluted bitumen spills are more damaging and difficult to clean. The 2010 Enbridge tar sands spill into the Kalamazoo River highlighted an industry that was unprepared to address the unique challenges associated with tar sands diluted bitumen spills. Nearly three years after Enbridge spilled a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed and almost a billion dollars has been spent on cleanup, and 38 miles of that river are still contaminated.
Tar sands diluted bitumen is a mixture of very light petrochemicals and very heavy bitumen. Once spilled
in a waterbody, the light petrochemicals – including toxins such as benzene and toluene - gas off, leaving the heavy bitumen to sink. As Inside Climate covered in Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of, during the Enbridge tar sands spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan, significant heavy crude sank below the water’s surface and traveled along the river bed. EPA’s on-site spill coordinator Mark Durno summed it up:
The Michigan and Arkansas accidents show "that
this material is very difficult to remove from water bodies and raise questions about its short- and long-term effects on the health of the people exposed to it after a pipeline failure,"
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/aswift/tar_sands_pipeline_safety_risk.html
