{"id":15199,"date":"2015-12-12T10:51:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-12T15:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15199"},"modified":"2015-12-12T10:51:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T15:51:36","slug":"u-s-not-prepared-for-tar-sands-oil-spills-national-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15199","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Not Prepared for Tar Sands Oil Spills, National Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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U.S. Not Prepared for Tar Sands Oil Spills, National Study Finds<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
Report urges new regulations, research, and technology to respond to spills of diluted bitumen.<\/em><\/div>\n
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\"China<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo courtesy Sam LaSusa<\/div>\n
Oil gathers in a sheen near the banks of the Kalamazoo River more than a week after a spill of crude oil, including tar sands oil, from Enbridge Inc.\u2019s Line 6B pipeline in 2010. It was the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.\u00a0Click image to enlarge.<\/em><\/div>\n
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Spills of heavy crude oil from western Canada\u2019s tar sands are more difficult to clean up than other types of conventional oil, particularly if the spill occurs in water, a new study by a\u00a0high-level committee<\/a>\u00a0of experts found. Moreover, current regulations governing emergency response plans for oil spills in the United States are inadequate to address spills of tar sands oil.<\/p>\n

The study<\/a>\u00a0by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine confirmed what scientists, emergency responders, and conservationists knew anecdotally from a major oil spill that contaminated Michigan\u2019s Kalamazoo River in 2010 and another spill in Mayflower, Arkansas in 2013. Tar sands crude, called diluted bitumen, becomes denser and stickier than other types of oil after it spills from a pipeline, sinking to the bottom of rivers, lakes, and estuaries and coating vegetation instead of floating on top of the water.<\/p>\n

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\u201c[Diluted bitumen] weathers to a denser material, and it\u2019s stickier, and that\u2019s a problem. It\u2019s a distinct problem that makes it different from other crude.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Diane McKnight,
\nChair
\nCommittee on the Effects of Diluted Bitumen on the Environment<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe long-term risk associated with the weathered bitumen is the potential for that [oil] becoming submerged and sinking into water bodies where it gets into the sediments,\u201d Diane McKnight, chair of the committee that produced the study and a professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Circle of Blue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Not Prepared for Tar Sands Oil Spills, National Study Finds Report urges new regulations, research, and technology to respond to spills of diluted bitumen. Photo courtesy Sam LaSusa Oil gathers in a sheen near the banks of the Kalamazoo River more than a week after a spill of crude oil, including tar sands oil, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[103,8098,4872,1523,690,781,827],"class_list":["post-15199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-canada","tag-circle-of-blue","tag-diluted-bitumen","tag-oil-spill","tag-risk","tag-tar-sands","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15200,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15199\/revisions\/15200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}