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Keystone XL’s Northern Leg: A Fracked Oil Pipeline Along with Tar Sands

Huffington Post: On January 31, President Barack Obama's U.S. State Department released its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the northern leg of TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The State Department's FEIS argues that the northern half of Keystone XL, if built, "remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States." But flying under the media's radar so far, the State...

Federal Pipeline Regulatory Body Re-Opens Line Causing Biggest Fracked Oil Spill in US History

Huffington Post: A month after over 865,200 gallons of oil spilled from Tesoro Logistics' 6-inch pipeline near Tioga, North Dakota, the cause of the leak is still largely unknown to anyone but Tesoro. The pipeline resumed operations today. Carrying oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), the controversial horizontal drilling method used to capture oil and gas found embedded in shale rock basins worldwide, the Bakken Shale pipeline spill on September 29 was the largest fracked oil spill in U.S. history....

Obama’s Keystone XL Trade-Off: Executive Order Expediting Everything Else

Huffington Post: Large segments of the environmental movement declared a win on Jan. 18, 2012, the dawn of an election year in which partisan fervor reigned supreme. On that day President Barack Obama kicked the can down the road for permitting TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline's northern half until after the then-forthcoming November 2012 presidential election. "Northern half" is the key caveat: just two months later, on March 22, 2013 -- even deeper into the weeds of an election year -- President Obama issued...