oil spill 498 articles

Coal, oil, gas and other big industrial polluters are poised to make billions of dollars in added profits due to the Trump Administration’s environmental and safety rollbacks, but an Associated Press analysis of government records reveals the price Americans will pay in lives lost and health. The AP looked at 11 major rules on the Trump Administration’s chopping block and calculated the cost those regulatory rollbacks would have in terms of environmental and human health, using the administration’s own estimates. The news agency found an alarming upswing in the number of premature deaths, air-pollution-induced illnesses, climate-warming emissions, and severe train ... Read More

Cleanup of fuel from a gasoline pipeline that ruptured in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, last month is slow and deficient, state environmental officials warned at a County Commission meeting Jan. 22. The Kinder Morgan pipeline ruptured in the southern part of the county just a few miles north of El Paso, Texas, Dec. 13. The pipeline breach released about 294,000 gallons of gasoline into the soil and possibly the groundwater around the spill site. The contamination forced the evacuation of residents near the spill site, many of whom remain in hotels at the company expense. According to the Las ... Read More

The chemical oil dispersants BP used in its response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill did little to mitigate the massive spill and likely did more harm than good, researchers from the University of Miami found. A study led by a research team from the UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science analyzed polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most toxic components of petroleum, from samples taken within a six-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon blowout site. Despite 3,000 tons (about 770,000 gallons) of Corexit oil dispersants injected near the well head, substantial amounts of oil continued to surface ... Read More

A pipeline failure released more than 8,000 gallons of jet fuel into the St. Mary’s River in northeastern Indiana Sept. 7, and officials warned a cleanup could take several weeks to complete. Bernie Beier, Homeland Security Director for Allen County, Indiana, told The Journal Gazette that an employee of Buckeye Pipe Line Company, which owns the busted pipeline, detected a pressure drop and immediately went to check on the line. The company then shut down the affected pipeline, but not before 8,190 gallons of jet fuel escaped into the river. The spill prompted police officials in the city of Decatur ... Read More

Oil spills on land result in countless tons of contaminated soil being discarded in a landfill, but what if there were a way to treat the spilled oil in a way that benefits the land and eliminates waste? That’s the goal that Targa Resources, a North Dakota-based oil and gas services company, is working toward becoming a reality with a bioremediation system it has developed for oil spills. According to the Bismarck Tribune, Targa has recently completed a bioremediation project on the Fort Berthold Tribal Reservation, which isn’t under the same state and federal regulatory jurisdiction as non-tribal land. The ... Read More

Cleanup efforts are underway to remove tons of benzene contaminated soil and water from an Anadarko battery tank site in Dacono, Colorado, a community just east of Boulder. The Texas-based petroleum corporation notified the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the agency that regulates the state’s fossil fuels industry, of the toxic benzene spill, which it discovered when excavating an old pump earlier this month. Benzene is a cancer-causing chemical that is formed in natural processes, such as volcanoes and forest fires, but most exposures to benzene result from oil and gas production, factory waste, and other human activities. ... Read More

TransCanada Corp. grossly underestimated or understated its spill projections for its existing Keystone pipeline in documents it provided to regulators before the line became operational in 2010. Documents obtained by Reuters show seriously flawed risk assessments for the massive Keystone pipeline, which spans 2,147 miles across the middle of the U.S., connecting Alberta, Canada’s oil fields to refineries on the Texas coast. On Nov. 16, the Keystone pipeline spilled 5,000 barrels of highly toxic tar sands oil in rural South Dakota near the town of Aberdeen. Two other oil spills of about 400 barrels each preceded this month’s spill – one ... Read More

TransCanada’s Keystone Pipeline spilled about 210,000 gallons of oil Thursday, Nov. 16 in northeastern South Dakota, just days before regulators decide whether to allow another extension of the pipeline – the Keystone XL – to move forward. Brian Walsh, spokesman for the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, told CNN that Thursday’s oil spill was the largest to date in the state. The oil spill occurred about three miles northeast of Amherst, South Dakota. “It is a below-ground pipeline but some oil has surfaced above ground to the grass,” Mr. Walsh told CNN. “It will be a few ... Read More

Phillips 66 has agreed to drop its lawsuit challenging the California county of San Louis Obispo’s denial of a proposed oil train terminal the energy corporation wanted to build in the coastal town of Nipomo. Phillips 66 started pushing its Rail Spur Project in 2013, hoping to build the terminal in Nipomo that would have required oil trains to haul more than 7 million gallons of crude oil per week through California. Much of the oil train’s haul would have included tar sands crude, a highly viscous form of oil that oil companies treat with a multitude of toxic chemicals ... Read More

Chemical oil dispersants dumped in the Gulf of Mexico during BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill sickened thousands of cleanup workers exposed to them, a new study published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirms. For months and even years after BP tried to tame its massive oil spill with oil dispersants, many workers exposed to the chemicals complained of a multitude of symptoms, including cough, lung irritation, shortness of breath, burning eyes, memory loss, heart problems, bloody urine, liver damage, and a variety of skin disorders. But because the effects the oil dispersants BP used to break up the ... Read More