The U.S. State Department’s long-awaited final Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL pipeline seems to overlook some of the lessons from last year’s Enbridge tar sands spill.

The pipeline, planned by TransCanada, would transport 700,000 barrels per day of tar sands crude from northern Alberta through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Because the project involves crossing the U.S. border, it requires a Presidential Permit. The State Dept. (DOS) is in charge of deciding whether the project is in the national interest.

In a report released Friday, DOS acknowledged that a spill from the pipeline could kill animals but rejected the idea that it would harm people.

In considering the possible impact on wildlife, DOS wrote: “Some of the possible toxic effects include direct mortality, interference with feeding or reproductive capacity, disorientation, reduced resistance to disease, tumors, reduction or loss of various sensory perceptions, and interference with metabolic, biochemical, and genetic processes.”

It continued, “Crude oil spills are not likely to have toxic effects on the general public because of the many restrictions that local, state and federal agencies impose to avoid environmental exposure after a spill.

This confidence in the ability of other governmental agencies to protect the public contrasts with the experiences of the people who live around the Kalamazoo River system where more than 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude spilled from an Enbridge pipeline last summer.

In that case it took county health officials three days to issue a voluntary evacuation order for part of the affected area due to benzene contamination in the air.

A survey by the Michigan Department of Community Health, conducted three weeks after the spill found that 60 percent of nearby residents experienced headaches, trouble breathing, vomiting or other health problems that MDCH attributed to the spill.

So far no public agency has undertaken a study of the long-term human health effects from the spill.

Other DOS assumptions about how a Keystone XL pipeline spill would play out seem at odds with what happened in the Enbridge spill — one of the largest tar sands oil spills in U.S. history.

Tar sands oil is different from other forms of crude oil. It’s as thick as peanut butter and must be diluted with lightweight chemicals to be liquid enough to move through pipelines.

In considering how tar sands oil would behave in spill, the DOS says,“the diluents in dilbit [diluted bitumen] are integrally combined with the bitumen to form a crude oil that is a homogenous mixture that does not physically separate when released.”

DOS also asserts that the potential for groundwater contamination is limited because the tar sands oil would initially float on water if spilled.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has criticized past DOS environmental reviews of the Keystone project for failing to consider the special challenges that a tar sands spill might present. The final environmental review does not delve into this.

More than a year after the Michigan spill, 200 acres of river bottom remain covered with submerged oil and EPA officials say they are just beginning to learn about the unique difficulties of removing tar sands oil from a river environment.

A major concern of critics of the Keystone XL pipeline is its potential to leak into and damage the Ogallala aquifer which supplies 78 percent of the public water supply in Nebraska and a third of all the water used for irrigation in the U.S.

According to John Stansbury, University of Nebraska professor of environmental engineering who recently published an independent risk analysis of the pipeline: “Even a small, undetected leak from an underground rupture of the pipeline in the Nebraska Sandhills could pollute almost 5 billion gallons of groundwater with benzene at concentrations exceeding safe drinking water levels.”

The DOS report downplays the risk to the Ogallala. Though it acknowledges that the pipeline would be less than ten feet away from the aquifer for about 65 miles of the proposed route in Nebraska, the DOS said that no spill scenario involved the contamination of the entire Ogallala.

In comments on previous versions of the State Department’s environmental review of the project, the EPA asked DOS to consider the project’s environmental impacts on poor and minority communities along its route.

Though the DOS says that it’s unlikely that public health will be affected by a spill it acknowledges that lack of access to health care means that low-income and minority communities could suffer more than most in a spill scenario.

“Exposure pathways could include direct contact with the crude oil, inhalation of airborne contaminants, or consumption of food or water contaminated by either the crude oil or components of the crude oil,” according to DOS.

DOS writes that concern about this potential disparate impact was addressed by TransCanada promises to clean up spills and develop signs and emergency communications in Spanish.

EPA also asked DOS to consider how refining tar sands oil from the new pipeline would affect the poor and Latino residents that live around the refineries in Texas. DOS dismissed this issue by treating increased processing of crude oil as inevitable.

The refineries that are likely to receive oil transported by the pipeline are already configured to process heavy crude oil, and in the future would seek to continue processing heavy crude oil whether or not the proposed pipeline is constructed. The … proposed Project would not likely affect the overall quality or quantity of crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast region, and, as a result, would not likely effect refinery emissions.

Critics of the Keystone project point out that tar sands oil produces more greenhouse gas emissions than other types of oil.

DOS acknowledged that displacing other oil with tar sands oil from the Keystone project would increase greenhouse gas emissions by “between 3 and 21 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.”

It added, “This range is equivalent to annual greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fuels in 588,000 to 4,061,000 passenger vehicles.”

DOS said this particular pipeline will not impact overall greenhouse gas emissions because market forces will demand increased use of tar sands.

It also suggested the greenhouse-gas gap between tar sands and other oil may diminish over time: “… [C]urrent projections suggest that the amount of energy required to extract all crude oils is projected to increase over time due to the need to extract oil from ever deeper reservoirs using more energy intensive techniques. However, while the greenhouse gas intensity of reference crude oils may trend upward, the projections for the greenhouse gas intensity of Canadian oil sands crude oils suggests that they may stay relatively constant.”

The release of the environmental review kicks off a 90-day public comment period.

A final decision on the permit for the pipeline is expected by the end of the year.

In order to get just five percent of its energy from biomass the 600 megawatt power plant planned by Wolverine Power Cooperative in Rogers City will burn 255,000 tons of freshly cut Northern Michigan trees each year.

This is among the issues that will be considered at a public hearing on a draft permit for the plant in Rogers City tonight.

Wolverine’s power generating plans and the regulatory environment in which they play out have shifted drastically since the company first proposed building a coal-fired power plant in a limestone quarry along the shore of Lake Huron in 2007.

In 2009 Gov. Jennifer Granholm issued an executive order requiring that coal plants demonstrate that they are the best way to meet the state’s power needs. Last year, after the Public Service Commission found that the plant was not needed, the DEQ denied the project a permit. Wolverine sued in Missaukee County court and in January the court ordered DEQ to reconsider the permit. Now the state has issued a draft permit and is in the process of taking public input before finalizing the air permit for the plant.

Federal rules for coal plant permitting have also changed since Wolverine first applied for a permit. Since January the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has required that major new stationary sources of pollution demonstrate how they will use “Best Available Control Technology” to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Wolverine’s project is the first test of how Michigan will interpret EPA’s new requirements.

Coal plants are the leading emitters of greenhouse gases and there aren’t many ways around that.

“EPA acknowledges in their guidance documents that the standard right now is going to be energy efficiency,“ Dept. of Environmental Quality Permit Engineer Rob Lemrouex said. “Most [carbon control] technologies are in demonstration mode and not cost effective.”

The DEQ’s draft permit for the plant has it burning 70 percent petroleum coke (the carbon-rich leftovers of the oil refining process), 25 percent Powder River Basin coal, and 5 percent local green wood. The plant is expected to release 6,050,090 tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Lemrouex said that the draft permit allows Wolverine to meet its greenhouse gas requirements with efficiencies such as using variable speed motors on equipment inside the plant and by burning 5 percent biomass, 255,000 tons of green wood sourced from within a 75 mile radius of the plant.

Michigan Technical University study of biomass availability in the area commissioned by Wolverine found that the company could get 20 percent of its fuel stock by using all of the biomass available within a 75 mile radius, he said.

Michigan’s 2008 renewable portfolio standards require power companies to use get 10 percent of their energy from renewable source by 2015 and biomass, including wood, is considered a renewable energy source.

The permit requires the company to come up with a biomass procurement plan, Lemrouex said, but it’s not clear whether the plan will involve specifications as to the moisture content of the biomass. Moisture affects burn efficiency.

Anne Woiwode, director of the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club, said that her group is planning to formally object to Wolverine’s biomass plan and argue that the permit should not be approved.

“The amount of wood is massive and one of the things that they have not accounted for is that there are already multiple other facilities that will be using wood in the Northern Lower peninsula and Eastern Upper peninsula.”

The Mascoma biomass facility in Kinross, a wood to ethanol project that has been heavily subsidized by the state, plans to use the wood from a 150 mile radius of its plant, and this area includes Rogers City. Woiwode said.

Woiwode also challenged the idea that biomass is a renewable, carbon neutral fuel.

Last year, in a study commissioned by the state of Massachusetts, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences found that wood burning releases more carbon dioxide than coal and that it can take generations for forests to reabsorb carbon from the atmosphere.

“This is a whole new area for all of us,” Lemrouex said about the greenhouse gas considerations. “Any comments are valuable.”

The DEQ will take comments on this aspect of the project at a public hearing on May 19th at 7 p.m. in the Rogers City High School Gymnasium, 1033 West Huron Avenue, Rogers City.

Comments will also be accepted via the DEQ website until 5pm May 19.

The state Dept. of Environmental Quality is asking people to weigh in on new aspects of the long-delayed plan to build a coal-fired power plant in Rogers City.

Last year the DEQ denied a permit for the proposed 600 megawatt power plant after finding that Wolverine had not demonstrated a need for the facility.

Wolverine sued, and Missaukee County Circuit Court ruled that lack of need is not a legal basis to deny a permit.

The state is now poised to finalize a permit for the project but new federal rules require that Wolverine first demonstrate how it will use the “Best Available Control Technology” to limit its greenhouse gas emissions.

According to state regulators the plant has the potential to emit 6,050,090 tons of carbon dioxide a year.

The company’s plan for dealing with greenhouse gas rules is available at the DEQ website.

The DEQ will take comments on this aspect of the project at a May 19th hearing scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in the Rogers City High School Gymnasium, 1033 West Huron Avenue, Rogers City.

The agency notes:

Interested participants are advised that hearing administrators will not dialogue during the public comment hearing, and only comments on the specific aspects noted above will be included in the record. All other aspects of the permit have been through the public process.

The Michigan Land Use Institute, which opposes the coal plant, is organizing carpools to the hearing.

A military veterans group is arguing that a Republican bill to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions would weaken national security by harming efforts to reduce dependence on oil.

Operation Free, a coalition of veterans and national security organizations focused on the security benefits of clean energy, is condemning the Energy Tax Prevention Act as a short-sighted bill that would support continued reliance on oil producers that fund terrorism and endanger U.S. troops.

“[House Energy Committee Chairman] Representative Upton continues to press his short-sighted agenda without taking into account the national security concerns and the innovative capacities of clean and sustainable technologies,” Steve Maddox, an Iraq War veteran who served ten years in the US Marine Corps, said in a statement. “If Congress won’t get their act together to regulate carbon emissions, the EPA must be allowed to do their job.”

Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute is celebrating the bill and promoting the arguments of another veterans group that says the U.S. should address the security problem of reliance on Middle East oil by approving the Keystone XL pipeline to increase imports of tar sands oil from Canada.

As the battle over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions mounts, a new report shows that CO2 emissions grew in 2010, and that a Michigan coal plant is one of the nation’s biggest sources.

From the Environmental Integrity Project report:

Carbon dioxide emissions from power plants rose 5.56% in 2010 over the year before, the biggest annual increase since the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking emissions in 1995. Electricity generators released 2.423 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2010, compared to 2.295 billion tons in 2009, according to information available on EPA’s “Clean Air Markets” database. While the increase is worrisome, power plant emissions are still below the high water mark of 2.565 million tons set in 2007. Last year’s rise was driven in part by a 3.0% net increase in overall generation for the 12 months ending in November of 2010, due to the economic recovery and unusually warm weather in some parts of the country.

Average global temperatures last year reached the 2005 level, the warmest year on record. CO2 is the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming; the combustion of fossil fuels for electricity generation in the U.S. accounts for more than one third of our nation’s total U.S. releases of CO2, and more than nearly 5% of CO2 emissions worldwide. Coal-fired boilers provided 45% of our electricity in 2010, but were responsible for 81% of total U.S. CO2 emissions from electricity generation last year.

According to the report, Michigan released 74,375,752 tons of CO2 last year — the 12th largest amount among states.

More than a quarter of Michigan’s total emissions came from DTE Energy’s coal plant in Monroe. The facility emitted 19,514,435 tons of CO2 and ranked as the sixth largest source of CO2 pollution in the county.

Last summer EPA filed suit against DTE for violating the federal Clean Air Act by failing to install pollution reduction technology at its Monroe plant.

President Barack Obama’s administration has told the United Nations that the U.S. is prepared to cut its emissions roughly 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Last year’s drop in emissions, the result of the weak economy, cut carbon dioxide more than half as much as needed to meet the 2020 goal.

In 2009, carbon dioxide emissions were 5.44 billion metric tons, or 8.8 percent below the 2005 level of 5.96 billion, the EIA said today. After a recession that began in December 2007, the U.S. economy grew at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter of last year and at 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter as factories ramped up production to rebuild depleted inventories.

Michigan’s industrial decline has reduced the state’s CO2 emissions, but the heavy reliance on coal for electricity means the state is still a major contributor to the nation’s CO2 output.

In 2008 Michigan’s electric utilities ranked 12th in terms of amount of CO2 emitted.

Here in Michigan the slower economy also helped reduce solid waste in 2009.

According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment:

Waste disposed of by Michigan residents and businesses decreased by 5,284,953 cubic yards, about 13 percent, to 34,751,326 cubic yards, and waste imported from other states and Canada also decreased this fiscal year by 4,119,906 cubic yards, approximately 24 percent, to 13,086,354 cubic yards. Imported waste made up 27 percent of all waste disposed of in Michigan, down from 30 percent the prior year.

Marc Gerken, AMP President/CEO said in a statement:

The conversion of this project from coal to natural gas combined cycle would reduce capital costs and fit well into AMP’s carbon strategy. With AMPGS, we found ourselves in the unique position of having a project that was solid from the participant, permitting and policymaker support perspective, but the new target price resulted in price projections with little or no margins compared to market power, calling into serious question the project’s economic benefit to participating communities.

Jackson-based Consumers Energy is also planning a new coal plant for its Karn-Weadock facility in Bay City, though the project has not yet been granted an air permit by the Department of Environmental Quality.

Coal power development is strongly opposed by environmental groups that point out that coal plants are the leading emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and of the neurotoxin mercury which has contaminated fish throughout the Great Lakes. The dangers associated with disposal of coal ash is also receiving increased attention by regulators.

Earlier this year Governor Granholm directed the Michigan Public Service Commission and the Department of Environmental Quality to consider whether coal plants the most feasible and prudent way of meeting the state’s declining need for electricity.

The Jackson Citizen Patriot reports that Consumers Energy estimates it will have to spend $1.32 billion over the next eight years to come into compliance with new emissions rules.

The utility has 12 coal-fired units at its four complexes across the state. They burn about 10 million tons of coal annually, representing 70 percent of Consumers’ electricity. That amount of coal use creates 700 to 900 pounds of mercury.

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University is the author of a recent article on this problem in the journal Science.

“Even if you were to cut down the world’s forests and turn them into a parking lot, and take the wood and put it in a boiler — which obviously releases enormous amounts of carbon from the trees — that is treated as a pure way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Searchinger says. “And that’s obviously an error.”

And that error isn’t trivial. It’s now enshrined in European law as well as the Kyoto climate treaty.

“The problem is that when the world agreed to a treaty that limited the amount of carbon that goes up the smokestack, they didn’t agree to limit the amount of carbon released by cutting down trees,” he says.

While activists have focused on stopping the development of new coal plants as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there has been little focus on the need for policies to preserve forests which sequester carbon. This weekend as people around the world gather at events designed to educate on the need to reduce CO2 emissions it will be interesting to see if biofuel policy emerges as a priority.

“This action will give our auto companies some long-overdue clarity, stability and predictability,” Obama said Tuesday in a speech at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

The new rules unify the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals to reduce the emissions from automobiles and the Department of Transportation’s rules on fuel economy. The proposed program will cover model years 2012 through 2016, increasing fleet-wide fuel economy by 5 percent per year. This means by 2016, the fleet-wide average would hit 35.5 miles per gallon, and would need to meet a new limit on emissions per gallon. The new rules will need to go through the traditional approval process before they are finalized, which needs to happen by March 2010. But the administration estimates that they will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 950 million metric tons.

More importantly, it will be the Obama administration’s first action toward meeting its stated goals of reducing emissions and complying with the Supreme Court’s directive to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The real question is whether the administration will follow through with its threat to move onto setting limits for stationary sources of carbon dioxide emissions, like power plants, refineries, and manufacturers. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson declined to offer much information about their progress on that front at a press conference on Tuesday.

“EPA will continue to do it’s job, which is to respond to the now 2-plus-year old ruling about the Clean Air Act,” said Jackson. “I think it is fair to say that today’ announcement is path-breaking … It is the beginning of regulation. We should expect the EPA to continue to do its job.”

But she also made it clear that the administration would still prefer not to write the regulations. “I hope that doesn’t come to pass,” she said. “I believe that legislation is the preferable route.”

Coal power plants are the biggest emitters of the greenhouse gas CO2. Last year the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that CO2 is an air pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act, which sets standards for regulating air pollutants.

The successful appeal, brought by the Sierra Club, argued that the EPA failed to comply with provisions of the Clean Air Act when it granted a permit for a 110-megawatt coal-fired power plant proposed by the Deseret Power Electric Cooperative. The plant was expected to release 3.37 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Earlier this year, opponents of coal power in Michigan filed suit against the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality for failing to consider CO2 emissions as part of the air permitting process. There are currently four coal-fired power plants in the planning stages in Michigan.