Canadian Oil Waste Blackens Detroit
2013/05/23
graphic: I Heart Climate Scientists
*
The Koch brothers are about their usual dirty business, this time in Detroit:
WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.
Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom. Read the full story on NYTimes.com
More links:
Petroleum Coke Piles On Detroit River Should Be Investigated, Urges Congressman Gary Peters
Koch Carbon piling up mountains of potentially toxic petroleum coke on banks of the Detroit River
2 Comments
leave one →
350 or bust 
What are they going to do with all that pet coke? It can only be burned which would release extraordinary volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere, or bury it … the latter is not in the business plan … it will be shipped away by barge or bulk cargo vessel … but there is no “away” so it must be kept on our shores and put back into the ground whence it came. What do you think about that? Here’s what I think: http://bit.ly/RexBar17May13
That coke mountain is from a relatively modest, 28,000 bpd bitumen pipeline. Harper and Enbridge, however, want to move 800,000 bpd through Kitimat and Christy Clark seems to like a proposal to refine it on site. Imagine the mountain of pet coke that would create right at the head of the Douglas Channel not to mention the emissions problem BC would face from refining that crud.
It obviously would be loaded straight onto a bulk carrier to be shipped to Asia where there are plenty of buyers/burners for the stuff.