Enbridge, the company that spilled at least 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River system last year, has announced that it is suspending efforts to scrape the remaining submerged oil from the river bottom.

UPI reports that the company said it made a “seasonal decision” to stop cleanup for the rest of the year.

The EPA recovered about 18,000 barrels of oil from the surface. Officials said it was unclear how the remaining oil would affect the environment because there is no spill with which to compare the Enbridge leak.

For more than a year, crews have worked to get oil removed from the bottom of the waterways. Heavy crude, unlike conventional crude, sinks and mixes in with the sediment.

According to Enbridge crews have recovered most of the oil.

An approximately thirty mile long stretch of the Kalamazoo River has been off limits to the public since July 2010 because of the oil contamination.

TransCanada, owners of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have agreed to reroute the pipeline to avoid the Nebraska Sandhills, a particularly sensitive ecosystem.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Sen. Mike Flood, speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, announced on the floor that TransCanada Corp. would move the pipeline to another area of the state. Sources in Nebraska said it would likely be located farther east, nearer an existing Keystone pipeline that already carries Canadian tar sands oil into the U.S…

“We were at the Capitol building, they were in special session, and Speaker Flood stopped everything and said that everything was over, and TransCanada has voluntarily moved the pipeline out of the Sandhills of Nebraska,” said Todd Cone, a rancher who has been one of many battling the route through central Nebraska.

The Nebraska legislature was considering legislation that could have forced the project to be rerouted.

Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.

EPA has set a Dec. 16 deadline for finalizing Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that would require coal- and oil-fired electric power plants to reduce mercury and other emissions by more than 90 percent.

Power plants are the largest source of airborne mercury emissions. When mercury settles into water it is converted by microrganisms into meythlmercury, an extremely powerful neurotoxin, which accumulates in fish and in those who eat fish.

According a recent Environment Michigan report that summarizes EPA data on power plant mercury emissions, in 2010, 80 percent of all airborne mercury pollution in Michigan came from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants.

DTE Energy’s coal-fired power plants topped the list of heaviest emitters. The company’s Monroe plant released 660 lbs. of mercury last year, and was the 14th largest emitter in the nation.

The Belle River power plant in China township emitted 335lbs, the St. Clair plant in East China Township released 236 lbs, and the Trenton chanel power plant released 172 lbs. According to Environment Michigan a drop of mercury is enough to make the fish in a 25 acre lake unsafe to eat.

When pregnant women eat mercury-contaminated fish, their children sustain permanent developmental damage and have reduced motor control, ability to pay attention and IQ.

According to a recent report issued by Environment Michigan, one in ten American woman now have blood mercury levels that are high enough to put their children at risk of brain damage if they become pregnant.

Schuette, however, has argued that the new rules are unacceptable because they would cause electric rates to increase.

“The new Michigan has to be about jobs and paychecks,” Schuette told the reported Sunday on data from the Department of Labor which shows that environmental regulation was only responsible for .3 percent of the layoffs in 2010.

And in fact, reducing the effects of mercury pollution may end up helping the economy.

According to EPA the nationwide implementation of new emission standards would avoid up to 17,000 premature deaths, 850,000 missed days of work, and 5.1 million days when people must restrict their activities each year, saving as much as $140 billion in health care costs each year.

A 2005 study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that mercury-induced intelligence loss costs the U.S. $8.7 billion in lost productivity each year.

Defenders of the Keystone XL pipeline have argued that the project is important for creating up to 20,000 new jobs in a struggling economy, but TransCanada, which owns the pipeline, said late last week that the number of permanent jobs would only number in the hundreds.

This is video of an interview on CNN with Robert Jones, VP of the pipeline for TransCanada:

Critics have argued that even the number of temporary construction jobs for the project have been inflated by the company.

The State Department’s decision to spend more time considering a permit for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline may boost the outlook for a competing pipeline planned by Enbridge, owners of the pipeline that burst in Calhoun County last year.

Over the summer Enbridge – the largest supplier of oil to the U.S. — announced plans to link existing and new pipelines into the “Monarch” line. The northern tier of the project would move tar sands crude and oil from the Bakken fields in North Dakota between the Chicago area and the oil storage hub in Cushing, Okla. The southern portion of the project involves a new line to move oil from Cushing to refineries around Houston.

By avoiding a new international crossing, this project could expand imports of tar sands crude without a State Dept. review. Enbridge says the project could be complete by the end of 2013.

Bloomberg reports that the State Dept. decision to order further study of alternative routes for the Keystone XL may help Enbrige win more customers for its new pipeline.

“Refineries can’t wait however-many months to make decisions about where they’re going to get crude,” Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, told Bloomberg.

The Keystone delay, “definitely improves the prospects of the [Enbridge] project going forward,” John Auers, senior vice president of Turner, Mason & Co., a Dallas-based pipeline and engineering consultancy, said in an e-mail yesterday.

Producers decide whether to commit to shipping their crude on new pipelines based on the fees charged and their perceptions of whether the project will get built, Auers said.

Last year’s Enbridge pipeline rupture in Marshall spilled at least 800,000 gallons of Canadian tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River system and helped build opposition to TransCanada’s project which is slated to cross the sensitive Ogallala aquifer.

The Kalamazoo River remains closed to the public amid continuing cleanup of submerged oil.

A new law that prohibits the governor from adopting environmental rules that are stronger than federal standards will harm Michigan’s ability to protect the Great Lakes, environmental groups say.

This week the state Senate joined the House in approving such legislation.

Many environmental groups spoke out against the move:

“Federal water quality standards are designed to be the floor below which states are not allowed to drop,” said James Clift, of the Michigan Environmental Council. “This law assumes that rules written in Washington for waters in other states are good enough to protect our Great Lakes. They are not.”

“This legislation was not written by people who feel a stewardship responsibility to the Great Lakes, which contain almost 20 percent of the planet’s fresh surface water,” said Alexis Blizman of the Ecology Center. “We believe Michigan’s waters are best managed by Michigan. Not by Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.”

“Today’s action would eliminate Michigan’s ability to move quickly and proactively to deal with threats like the 1970s Lake Erie crisis,” said Dr. Grenetta Thomassey of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council. “Water protection is a responsibility shared by the state’s governor, the legislature and the people of Michigan. We must not voluntarily give away control over our signature resource.”

If the Senate version is approved by the House and the governor signs it, the new law will go into effect in February.

A Department of Energy advisory panel that was criticized by environmentalists for having too many members connected to the oil and gas industry has issued a second report calling for stronger regulation of hydrofracking by state and federal agencies.

Pro Publica reports:

A federal energy panel issued a blunt warning to shale gas drillers and their regulators today, saying they need to step up efforts to protect public health and the environment or risk a backlash that stifles further development.

“Concerted and sustained action is needed to avoid excessive environmental impacts of shale gas production and the consequent risk of public opposition to its continuation and expansion,” said members of the Energy Department’s Shale Gas Subcommittee in a draft report released today…

The report calls on the EPA to revise a proposed rule on air emissions to include limits on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and criticizes recent moves by the agency that have hindered efforts to get better data from the oil and gas industry, a crucial step toward improving controls.

The report also concludes that joint federal and state efforts to ensure water quality are “not working smoothly” and urges the EPA to move unilaterally to improve oversight as it carries out a study on potential effects of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water.

The panel’s recommendations are not binding, but Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said they carry significant weight.

The NRDC is calling on President Obama to issue an executive order forcing agencies to implement the panel’s recommendations.

An ongoing EPA investigation of possible contamination from hydrofracking in Wyoming has found significant amounts of cancer-causing fracking chemicals in a freshwater aquifer in that state.

ProPublica reports:

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there.

Last year – after warning residents not to drink or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered — the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.

The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade that the drilling — and hydraulic fracturing in particular — has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment, loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.

While the EPA has not claimed certainty that the contamination came from fracking at this point, the presence of 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE), a chemical used in fracking, and the lack of contamination with nitrates and fertilizers that would indicate an agricultural source, suggest a link.

The Nebraska legislature, meeting in a special session to deal specifically with the Keystone XL pipeline that would cross their state, may be on the verge of passing a bill that could give the governor control over the route that pipeline would take.

On Wednesday, the Natural Resources Committee voted 7-1 to send a bill to the full legislature that would require all oil pipeline companies to have the routes of their pipelines certified by a state panel headed by the governor before starting construction.

It is an open legal question whether the passage of such a bill would be legally viable, since the approval of the project is up to the federal government at this point.

As some observers predicted earlier this week, the Obama administration has decided to delay a final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election.

The Hill reports:

The Obama administration will announce Thursday that it is reevaluating the route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a move that will likely delay a final decision on the project until after the 2012 election, sources briefed by the administration said…

Sources briefed by the administration said the decision to consider a new pipeline route would likely delay a final decision on the pipeline until after the election. The administration initially planned to make a decision on the project by the end of the year, but the State Department recently acknowledged that the timeline could slip.

Environmentalists who are opposed to the project are praising the decision and hoping that it kills the project entirely. Bill McKibben, who organized the massive protests around the White House over the last few weeks, said in a press release:

A done deal has come spectacularly undone. The American people spoke loudly and today the President responded, at least in part. Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone XL. One month ago, a secret poll of “energy insiders” by the National Journal found that “virtually all” expected easy approval of the pipeline by year’s end. As late as last week the CBC reported that TransCanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted … We take courage from today’s announcement. It’s an unspoken salute to the power of people who come together in the open to demand action; it gives us some clues about how to fight going forward.”

But he also warned the Obama administration that the ultimate goal of the project’s opponents remains the same, saying, “The president should know that nothing that happened today changes our position–we’re unequivocal in our opposition. If this pipeline proposal reemerges from the review process intact we will use every form of nonviolent civil disobedience to keep it from ever being built.”