Tar Sands Oil Sinks When Spilled Into Rivers, Except In Oil Industry Slideshows At Conferences

[hatrack]

“Once the oil started to sink, it made things a lot more difficult on our recovery.” Those were the words of Greg Powell of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during his presentation on March 10th at the National Academy of Sciences conference on the Effects of Diluted Bitumen on the Environment. Powell was one of the people involved in the response and clean up of the Kalamazoo River tar sands dilbit spill in 2010 where an Enbridge pipeline cracked and spilled approximately one million gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River.

Powell presented a disturbing account of what happened at Kalamazoo with pictures showing a river with “bank to bank” oil and contamination for almost 40 miles. This damage took over four years and more than a billion dollars to clean up. And Powell explained the main reason was that diluted bitumen isn’t like other oil.

EDIT

And in Kalamazoo it wasn’t just that the bitumen sank, but the way it adhered to plants and surfaces and didn’t come off. “We had to remove all of the vegetation along the stream bank because that oil would not come off,” Powell explained. He later said that they would, “Pressure wash rocks with it directly on the rocks and we couldn’t break that oil loose once it adhered to the rock.” At one point he stated, “it was like roofing tar.”

In one of Powell’s summary slides he made several observations about the spill noting that the focus of the cleanup “switched to submerged oil about a month after the release” and that the bitumen sank “within 2 weeks of the spill.” What made Powell’s description of the behavior of the oil in the Kalamazoo spill particularly noteworthy was that it contradicted claims made in a presentation by the American Petroleum Institute (API) during Day 1 of the meeting. Peter Lidiak of the API said results from a new API-funded study about dilbit will be released in the near future but based on the preliminary findings, dilbit floats and doesn’t sink.

EDIT

http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/03/19/science-vs-spin-dilbit-sinks-real-world-not-studies-funded-oil-industry

[Nihil]

1. Kicking for reference when the pro-tar posters claim that it is safe to transport. (n/t)