Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

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Oil spill in rural Kansas creek shuts down Keystone pipeline
Source: AP

By JOHN HANNA, HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH, and JOSH FUNK today
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An oil spill in a creek in northeastern Kansas shut down a major pipeline that carries oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, briefly causing oil prices to rise Thursday.

Canada-based TC Energy said it shut down its Keystone system Wednesday night following a drop in pipeline pressure. It said oil spilled into a creek in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City.

The company on Thursday estimated the spill’s size at about 14,000 barrels and said the affected pipeline segment had been “isolated” and the oil contained at the site with booms, or barriers. It did not say how the spill occurred.

“People are sometimes not aware of of the havoc that these things can wreak until the disaster happens,” said Zack Pistora, who lobbies the Kansas Legislature for the Sierra Club’s state chapter.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/oil-spills-b ... 41d24d66c2
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3 bald eagles die, 10 sick after eating euthanized animals
Source: AP

an hour ago

INVER GROVE HEIGHTS, Minn. (AP) — At least 13 bald eagles were likely poisoned by scavenging the carcasses of euthanized animals that were improperly dumped at a Minnesota landfill, and three of the majestic birds have died.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that state and federal wildlife officials are investigating after the eagles were found this month near the Pine Bend Landfill in the Minneapolis suburb of Inver Grove Heights.

Ten of the birds are in intensive care at the University of Minnesota Raptor Center. The center’s executive director Victoria Hall said she is optimistic those birds will recover.

Hall said when the eagles were found some of them were lying motionless, face down in the snow, and Raptor Center workers weren’t sure if they were still alive. Veterinarians suspect that the eagles that died had eaten part of a carcass of an animal that had been euthanized with pentobarbital, and investigators confirmed that some euthanized animals had been brought to the landfill on Dec. 2.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/health-eagle ... 4b0c0cedcc
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Include biodegradable plastic in English single-use cutlery ban, say campaigners
Wed 14 Dec 2022 11.00 GMT

Campaigners have urged the environment secretary not to exclude biodegradable plastic from a ban on single-use cups, plates and cutlery.

Thérèse Coffey is expected to announce a ban on single-use plastic items such as cutlery and stirrers in the coming weeks, according to the Financial Times. Campaigners have condemned the suggestion that she would allow so-called biodegradable plastic single-use items to continue to be used as an alternative.

The EU has banned single-use plastic items since July 2021 and its guidance is clear that “biodegradable/bio-based plastics are considered to be plastic”.

Steve Hynd, a policy manager for the campaign group City to Sea, called for Coffey to clarify her intentions, and said bioplastics must be included in any ban.

“It is incredibly alarming to read reports that these important, and frankly very minimum, environmental standards might be watered down to exempt ‘biodegradable’ single-use alternatives,” he said. “Many of these bioplastics are incredibly environmentally damaging and won’t break down in the natural environment and so will do nothing to tackle the plight of plastic pollution.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ampaigners
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Keystone pipeline rupture spilled diluted bitumen, complicating cleanup
Source: Reuters

Dec 15 (Reuters) - The oil spilled from TC Energy Corp's (TRP.TO) ruptured Keystone pipeline was diluted bitumen, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Thursday, adding complications to the cleanup. The 622,000 barrels per day (bpd) pipeline was shut since last week after it spilled 14,000 barrels of oil in rural Kansas, including into a creek.

The parts of the pipeline carrying oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois opened on Wednesday, leaving the ruptured part that extends from south of Steele City, Nebraska to a storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma closed. Bitumen from Canada's oil sands is a dense, thick form of oil that shippers dilute with lighter oils so it can move through pipelines. The resulting product is called dilbit for short.

A 2016 National Academy of Sciences study for the U.S. Department of Transportation examined whether transporting dilbit carries different environmental risks than other oils, following a 2010 spill in Michigan. The report said that when diluted bitumen spills, a thick, dense material forms as a residue after exposure to the environment. The residue tends to stick to surfaces, sometimes sinking to the bottom of a water body where it is difficult to recover.

“For this reason, spills of diluted bitumen pose particular challenges when they reach water bodies,” the report said. Crews are using equipment to skim water off the surface of Mill Creek in Kansas and to vacuum oil into trucks. Colder temperatures may hamper the cleanup, the EPA said.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 022-12-15/
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White House Begins Plan to Refill US Emergency Oil Reserves
Source: Bloomberg
The Biden administration is making good on a plan to replenish the nation’s emergency oil reserves, starting with a 3 million barrel purchase of crude. The purchase of barrels for February delivery follows a historic 180 million barrel release of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tame high gasoline prices amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other supply issues. 

“This repurchase is an opportunity to secure a good deal for American taxpayers by repurchasing oil at a lower price than the $96 per barrel average price it was sold for, as well as to strengthen energy security,” the Department of Energy said in a notice Friday announcing the plan.

The announcement caps a year that saw President Joe Biden make unprecedented use of the SPR to help curb soaring domestic costs of fuel. The price of oil has come down in recent months and it’s now almost 40% off the highs seen in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. Even so, the administration has repeatedly said it reserves the right to do more sales if needed.

US benchmark oil futures initially pared some losses on the news before eventually settling down 2.4% at $74.29 a barrel. The Biden administration previously laid out a plan to repurchase oil for the approximately 700 million barrel-strong reserve when the price of crude hit around $70 a barrel. The SPR — the world’s largest emergency supply — was created in 1975 in the wake of the Arab oil embargo.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... cy-reserve
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Model shows extinction cascades caused by land use and climate change will wipe out more than 25% of world biodiversity
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-extinctio ... rsity.html
by Flinders University
A new tool developed by European and Australian scientists enabling unparalleled modeling of interconnected species loss shows cascading extinctions are unavoidable, and that the Earth will lose some 10% of its animals and plants by 2050, rising to 27% by 2100.

The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

Using one of Europe's most-powerful supercomputers, European Commission scientist Dr. Giovanni Strona also of the University of Helsinki and Professor Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University used the tool to create synthetic Earths complete with virtual species and more than 15,000 food webs to predict the interconnected fate of species that will likely disappear from the ravages of climate and land-use changes.

The tool presents a grim prediction of the future of global diversity, confirming beyond doubt that the world is in the throes of its 6th mass extinction event.

The two scientists say past approaches to assessing extinction trajectories over the coming century have been stymied by not incorporating co-extinctions—that is, species that go extinct because other species on which they depend succumb to climate change and/or changes to the landscape.
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South Australia’s incredible week: 104.1 per cent wind and solar over seven days

18 December 2022

South Australia aims to reach 100 per cent “net renewables” within a few years – over a full year – but in the past week it has already done better than that.

Our attention to the state was sparked by a tweet from Teal supporter and energy analyst Simon Holmes a Court, who tweeted on Friday that the state had average an “incredible” 99.8 per cent over the previous seven days.

When we checked before writing this story on Sunday afternoon, it had done better than that – averaging 104.1 per cent over the seven days (to 2.30pm AEST on Sunday).

To be clear, this 104.1 per cent relates to the amount of wind and solar compared to state demand. The state is connected to the rest of the grid so imports and exports are inevitable, so the figure is already a “net result.”

But it is still impressive. There was no coal and gas provided just a little over six per cent of demand over the week. Imports accounted for just 2.6 per cent and exports of wind and solar for 13.7 per cent of total production.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-austr ... even-days/


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Cop15: historic deal struck to halt biodiversity loss by 2030
Mon 19 Dec 2022 10.46 GMT

Governments appear to have signed a once-in-a-decade deal to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, but the agreement seems to have been forced through by the Chinese president, ignoring the objections of some African states.

After more than four years of negotiations, repeated delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic and talks into the night on Sunday in Montreal, nearly 200 countries – but not the US or the Vatican – signed an agreement at the biodiversity Cop15, which was co-hosted by Canada and China, to put humanity on a path to living in harmony with nature by the middle of the century.

In an extraordinary plenary that began on Sunday evening and lasted for more than seven hours, countries wrangled over the final agreement. Finally, at about 3.30am local time on Monday, news broke that an agreement had been struck.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s negotiator appeared to block the final deal presented by China, telling the plenary that he could not support the agreement in its current form because it did not create a new fund for biodiversity, separate to the existing UN fund, the global environment facility (GEF). China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and Mexico are the largest recipients of GEF funding, and some African states wanted more money for conservation as part of the final deal.

However, moments later, China’s environment minister and the Cop15 president, Huang Runqiu, signalled that the agreement was finished and agreed, and the plenary burst into applause.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... y-2030-aoe
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