Week of November 20, 2008, Issue #683
FRONT
Everyone’s Downstream II: Tar sands, USA
Conference explores far-flung impacts of Alberta’s tar sands
Scott Harris / scott@vueweekly.com
They are stories that by now are all too familiar to Albertans. In one, First Nations groups worried about the health impacts of tar sands operations on their people, who are experiencing a rash of cancers in a small population, are desperately trying to compel both industry and government to take their claims seriously. Another sees community groups questioning the air and water quality in their communities facing off against the expansion of an upgrader in an already-heavily-industrialized corridor.
While the storylines could be coming out of the northern Albertan community of Fort Chipewyan or the upgrader hearings in the Industrial Heartland northeast of Edmonton, these are emerging from locales south of the 49th parallel that most Albertans don’t consider when they think about the impacts of the tar sands: Ponca, Oklahoma and Whiting, Indiana, just two stops on an increasingly continental grid of pipelines and upgraders being prepared to handle northern Alberta’s bounty of bitumen.
“We have on our reservation, on our Ponca land in north-central Oklahoma, a ConocoPhillips refinery which has been here for over 50 years,” explains Casey Camp-Hornik, a member of the Ponca Nation who works with the Coyote Creek Center for Environmental Justice. “One of the areas that they are beginning to explore—actually that they’re actively involved in—is the extraction of petroleum products from the oil sands in Canada and it being refined at this facility.”
It’s part of a $7 billion expansion plan by ConocoPhillips which, according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s Source Watch, will see the company refining tar sands oil at the Ponca facility and three other refineries by 2013. ConocoPhillips, the third largest energy company in the US, also has a stake in TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline projects which, when completed, will have the capacity to ship as much as 1.1 million barrels per day from Hardisty, Alberta to upgraders as far as the US Gulf Coast.
Plans to upgrade tar sands oil on Ponca land worry Camp-Hornik, who says that her nation is reeling from the pipelines, refineries and other industrial development that already surround them.
“We are saturated, we’re beyond saturation, with the pollution from that already. We have an extraordinarily high cancer rate, our groundwater is poisoned, the air from the refinery has toxic qualities to it and the earth itself, we’re not capable of growing anything on it anymore.
“We’re having a funeral a week and there’s probably 800 of us that live locally,” she continues, the frustration audible in her voice, “and I would say over 90 per cent of those are cancers.”
Despite what Camp-Hornik says her community is experiencing, there is little public outcry and no response from either the company or government to their claims.
“They simply say, ‘How do you prove it?’ And it’s very difficult. If you bring people with cancers to them and say, ‘They have lung cancer, they have respiratory systems that are ruined, they have heart problems,’ they’re like, ‘Well, does anybody in the family smoke cigarettes?’ Well, in the State of Oklahoma, unless you can visibly track a moat crossing that chainlink fence and arriving into your home it doesn’t count. So we’re having the state turn a blind eye, and the federal government has always, always failed to meet its trust responsibility to the native people.”
Like Camp-Hornik and a range of other activists and community members from across Canada and the United States, Steve Kozel is heading to Edmonton to share his story at the second Everyone’s Downstream conference, being held this weekend by the group Oil Sands Truth.
Kozel is the president of the Calumet Project, a labour-church-community coalition in Whiting, Indiana currently fighting plans by BP for a $3.8 billion expansion to its refinery on Lake Michigan to allow it to process heavy crude from the tar sands into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel by 2011.
A permit for the expansion—and increased pollution levels—was granted in May 2008, but the Calumet Project and other organizations are vying to stop the project from going ahead, challenging whether the permit issued for the expansion is valid.
“We have some concerns about water quality. That really kind of raised this issue here,” Kozel explains. “The thing with water, water you can see and if water changes colour we know something’s wrong with it. Air we breathe, and if it smells a little we know something’s wrong, but as far as all the other pollutants in there it’s very difficult to say. The air we breathe still looks clear, so how do we know what particulates are in there?
In July, the Chicago Tribune revealed that the refinery already exceeds pollution limits on its eight existing flare stacks, a problem which would be exacerbated when three more are added as part of the expansion to enable tar sands crude to be upgraded.
Kozel says groups like his are working to educate people in the area about what the expansion will mean for the environment in a region long-dominated by industry, and thinks connecting with other groups from around North America who are in similar straits related to the tar sands will help.
“You had the little crisis here where the price of gas went way up. And some people think, ‘Wow, that’s great that they can go ahead and refine and make oil out of sand.’ It’s like the lead-into-gold type of deal,” he says.
“I think a lot of them don’t realize the effect that this is going to have, because Indiana does not have any restrictions on greenhouse gas. And this is something we’re trying to explain—what the problems are going to be in the long run with this. Everyone just thinks they’re expanding the refinery and the majority of the people don’t really understand the long-term effects of what this tar sands refining is going to have.” V
Fri, Nov 22 & Sat, Nov 23 (9 am - 5 pm)
Everyone’s Downstream II
Edmonton Native Friendship Centre (11205 - 101 St)
Admission by donation, Free - $35, No one turned away for lack of funds
visit oilsandstruth.org for full schedule and details
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