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Date
You have proba
bly concluded, while we are realists and pragmatic (project managers) we have also dedicated significant time to sustainability issues, perhaps to someone, might seem like it could be a little incongruous. Au contraire, to us it is all about saving resources, whether those resources are people, planet, financial (profit) or any combination including all three.
Every once in a while, although it probably seems more like often, we come across projects that may be questionable in nature. They may not be protecting one or all of the triple-bottom line. George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I found this on reference.com in response to the Santayana quote. “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it is an old but oh so true saying. The times and players may change but the game always remains the same.That is why we still tell stories like the boy who cried wolf and the three little pigs. (It is) To teach a lesson. Those who have been there and done that before us have given us a valuable blueprint of human behavior. If we ignore the history behind it and refuse to see and apply the lessons they teach, then we doom ourselves to the same fate that they suffered. Live and learn and pass your wisdom down to others to help make their paths a little easier.”
So let’s look at an ExxonMobil/Canadian oil giant Enbridge project. We’ve all heard about tar sands oil. According to the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Programmatic EIS Information Center , “tar sands (also referred to as oil sands) are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous oil. Tar sands can be mined and processed to extract the oil-rich bitumen, which is then refined into oil. The bitumen in tar sands cannot be pumped from the ground in its natural state; instead tar sand deposits are mined, usually using strip mining or open pit techniques, or the oil is extracted by underground heating with additional upgrading.” It is highly toxic. A conventional oil spill is an ecological nightmare, but a tar sands oil spill is even worse — more corrosive, highly toxic and much harder to clean up. [1]
ExxonMobil and Enbridge want to pump that mixture through old oil pipelines from the 1950’s through a major watershed in Maine to reach Casco Bay so that the tar sands oil can then be exported. As a matter of fact, the pipeline comes within 1000 feet of Sebago Lake, a lake so pristine that it supplies drinking water to the greater Portland (Maine) area without needing to be filtered. [2] A spill, like the one that that occurred two years ago in Michigan, spilling 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River devastated the surrounding area. The EPA is still trying to clean it up.[3]
So sometimes, a project just doesn’t seem like it is worth doing, especially if you have considered the environmental risks associated with the project. However, we looked at the risk register that the team on the Macondo Well (Gulf of Mexico spill) and the only risk categories populated were in cost, schedule and productionsee www.boemre.gov/pdfs/maps/AppendixJ_RiskRegister.pdf. So, if that is any indication of addressing environmental risks, Sebago Lake is in potential trouble. And, to add to Mr. Santayana, let’s not only remember the past, but take our lessons learned and actually learn from them. "Live and learn and pass your wisdom down to others to help make their paths a little easier.”
[1] Lisa Song, "A Dilbit Primer: How It's Different from Conventional Oil," Inside Climate News, 26 June 2012.
[2] Portland Water District, Sebago Lake: State of the Lake 2012
[3] Elizabeth McGowan and Lisa Song, "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of," Inside Climate News, 26 June 2012.
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: December 20, 2012 05:52 PM |
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