Palin's Pipeline: Clean Energy for the Lower 48 or Power for the Tar Sands?

Where the natural gas from the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline will end up is a murky question tied up in a 30-year-old treaty, expansion of Canadian tar sands operations, and trends in natural gas supplies both in the United States and in Canada.

Environmentalists fear at least half of the relatively clean-burning Alaskan North Slope gas will end up fueling tar sands operations in Alberta, where the pipeline will end, instead of coming to the lower 48 states to replace carbon-intensive coal in power plants. The tar sands operations already consume about 20 percent of Canada’s natural gas, and they are expected to need as much as twice that by 2035.

Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network calls the pipeline "a stealth dirty oil mega-project … conceived by Big Oil.”

“Under Plan Palin, ExxonMobil and TransCanada would construct a 1700-mile natural gas pipeline from the Arctic, heading south,” Brune writes. “About half of it is likely to be siphoned to help produce the dirtiest oil on earth.”

It might not be that simple, though.

Where the natural gas ends up may depend on a 1977 treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would require gas equal to the amount produced in Alaska be exported to the Lower 48.

The 1,700-mile pipeline, which appears to be moving forward more than 40 years after 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas was discovered in the Alaskan North Slope, is viewed by policy makers as a way to boost domestic production of a relatively clean fuel at a time the U.S. is trying to move to a cleaner energy economy and to wean itself off foreign sources of oil.

In February, President Obama told the Anchorage Daily News that the pipeline was “promising” as a national energy source.

But nongovernmental organizations, including the Rainforest Action Network and Corporate Ethics International, expect at least half the natural gas flowing through the pipeline will remain Alberta, where the pipeline ends, rather shifting to other pipelines bound for the Lower 48. That’s because Alberta is home to most of Canada’s tar sands operations, which rely heavily on natural gas to mine, process and upgrade sticky, thick bitumen into synthetic crude oil.

Converting tar sands, a mixture of clay, sand and bitumen, into oil creates 5% to 15% more greenhouse gas emissions than the average crude oil, according to IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (IHS-CERA).

Tar sands production is also associated with a host of environmental problems, including the mining of pristine Boreal forests and the creation of huge “tailings ponds” filled with toxic materials. Environmentalists call tar sands a “dirty” fuel, and note the irony of using natural gas in its production.

“While natural gas is a little cleaner than oil, if it’s being used to produce dirty oil, it just doesn’t make sense,” says Kenny Bruno, campaign coordinator at Corporate Ethics.

U.S.-Canada Treaties

One factor in whether the gas makes it to the Lower 48 may depend on interpretation of a 1977 treaty between the U.S. and Canada that was a precursor to the Northern Pipelines Act. The treaty guarantees “whatever volume of gas comes from Alaska must result in an equal volume being exported,” says Joseph Balash, intergovernmental coordinator to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The principles of the treaty, however, may not apply given that the treaty was written more than 30 years ago and a different pipeline is now under consideration. The U.S. State Department will make that determination.