Corporation Exploiting Major Loophole to Quickly Build 600-Mile Tar Sands Pipeline

Feb. 27

Unlike Keystone’s northern leg, which has been mired in legal challenges, Flanagan South is already in the works.


Photo Credit: Andrea Slatter/Shutterstock

In the five years since TransCanada submitted its first application to build the Keystone XL pipeline, protesters have held marches and vigils, chained themselvesto pipeline trucks, interrupted a presidential speech and gotten themselves purposefully arrested, all in the name of stopping the pipeline.
For Debra Michaud, director of Tar Sands Free Midwest, getting these activists to just take notice of the pipeline her group has been working to stop since early last year would be a victory.
“Nobody’s heard of it,” Michaud said. “People know Keystone, but nobody’s heard of Flanagan South.”
Unlike Keystone’s northern leg, which has been mired in court challenges and political skirmishes since 2008, Flanagan South is already in the works, after about two years of negotiating with landowners along the route and going through its permitting process. Once completed, it will pass over approximately 1,950 wetlands and waterways, including the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
But it’s not the threat of spills or the ever-present worry of climate change that concerns Michaud most about Flanagan South. It’s the ease and speed by which the pipeline was approved, using a tactic that Michaud — and a pending Sierra Club lawsuit — says allows companies to bypass certain environmental protection laws to fast-track pipeline projects.
‘Piecemealing’ Pipelines
Once constructed, Flanagan South, an Enbridge project, will be a 589-mile pipeline that will carry tar sands and Bakken crude from Pontiac, IL. to refineries in Cushing, OK. The pipeline, which workers began constructing last fall, will have an initial capacity of 600,000 barrels of oil fromCanada, North Dakota and Montana per day — by comparison, Keystone XL will be 1,179 miles in its entirety and have a capacity of 830,000 barrels per day.
FlanaganSouth
Since Flanagan South doesn’t cross an international border like Keystone, its approval fell under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, not the State Department. For Flanagan’s approval, the Army Corps used a permitting process called Nationwide Permit 12, a process that gives expedited approval to projects like access roads and pipelines that do not “result in the loss of greater than 1/2-acre of waters of the United States for each single and complete project.”
In Flanagan’s case, the Corps treated each of Flanagan’s water crossings — about 1,950 wetlands and waterways — as a single and complete project, thus allowing a pipeline that will impact about 25 acres of streams and 38 acres of wetlands in Missouri alone to qualify for the NWP 12 process.
That practice of breaking up the pipeline into separate waterway crossings allows it to avoid a project-specific analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), says Doug Hayes, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club. Last year, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court claiming that the Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline without adequate environmental review or public notice.
“This whole idea is that these are single and complete projects, that each water crossing along a pipeline is a single and complete project — it just sort of goes against what your normal understanding of the words ‘single’ and ‘complete’ are,” Hayes said. “None of the parts of the pipeline that could go through federal waters could exist on their own, none of the easement sections could exist on their own. They all depend on each other for the success of this project.”
The Sierra Club requested that work on Flanagan South stop while the lawsuit was underway, but in November a judge denied that request, saying that the Sierra Club didn’t adequately make the case that the Army Corps’ usage of NWP 12 was inappropriate, or that it violated any NEPA or Clean Water Act rules.
Source: http://www.alternet.org/environment/corp-exploits-loophole-quickly-build-tar-sands-pipeline?

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