After using Detroit as a toxic waste dumping ground, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers are now piling their petroleum coke from tar sands oil refineries in Chicago.

Kiley Kroh of ThinkProgress writes that petroleum coke, or petcoke, "is building up along Chicago's Calumet River and alarming residents." The Chicago petcoke piles are owned by KCBX, an affiliate of Koch Carbon, which is a subsidiary of Koch Industries.

Petcoke is a high-carbon, high-sulfur byproduct of coking, a refining process that extracts oil from tar sands bitumen crude. The petcoke owned by Charles and David Koch is a byproduct of bitumen crude shipped to US refineries from the Alberta tar sands.

Midwest Energy News reports that "a mile and a half of the Calumet River shoreline holds big black piles," some of which rise "about five stories high." Locals say that the piles have grown recently, even as the BP Whiting refinery across the border in Indiana nears completion of a $3.8 billion upgrade to process more tar sands crude.

Detroit Mayor David Bing ordered the removal of the petcoke piles from his city in August, after protests by residents and local politicians concerned about the health and environmental impacts. Residents complained of "respiratory problems as the thick, black dust was blowing off the piles and into their apartments," reports ThinkProgress. The Detroit petcoke is being moved to Ohio.

A January 2013 report by Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International estimates that taking petcoke into consideration would raise annual Keystone XL GHG emissions "13% above the State Department's calculations" for the pipeline.

While petcoke can't be used as fuel in Canada and the US because of its high GHG emissions, the waste can be sold as a cheaper, more polluting alternative to low-grade coal in countries with looser environmental and health regulations. There is high demand for petcoke in countries like Mexico, China and India, where its emissions further exacerbate the effects of tar sands production on climate change.

The waste piles accumulating in the U.S. Midwest are only the beginning, should Keystone XL be approved. As this infographic from Oil Change International shows, if the pipeline is built, "the tar sands oil flowing through it would result in massive amounts of this dirty byproduct."

Credit: Oilchange International

Stockman's report calculates that diluted bitumen delivered to the US via Keystone XL would produce about 15,000 tons of petcoke a day, all waiting to be exported as dirty fuel in piles like the ones plaguing Detroit and Chicago.

Petcoke produces 10 to 15 per cent more CO2 than coal, bringing its additional emissions to "50,000 tons of CO2 every day or over 18.3 million tons (16.6 million metric tons) of CO2 a year."

"The Petcoke piles in Chicago are another symptom of Obama's flawed "All of the Above" energy strategy. It's time we actually made choices about the kind of energy we want rather than taking anything we can get," Stockman told DeSmog Canada.

Chicago can choose to follow Detroit's lead, fighting back against the Koch brothers' dumping of petcoke. But the fact remains that petcoke is a growing environmental threat directly related to tar sands production and expansion, and remains a dangerously overlooked threat when considering the full consequences of the Keystone XL pipeline.

President Obama would be wise to sit up and take notice of the petcoke piles already threatening health in US cities when weighing whether to approve the pipeline. 

Image Credit: Josh Mogerman / Flickr

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The misconception with 'west-to-east' pipeline proposals like Enbridge’s Line 9 or TransCanada’s Energy East is shipping western Canadian oil to eastern Canada means ‘Canadian oil for Canadian refineries.’ This assumption overlooks the fact eastern Canadian refineries cannot refine a certain type of Canadian oil – tar sands bitumen.

Bitumen is the heavy unconventional oil found in the Alberta tar sands (also called oil sands). Only a specialized refinery can process bitumen and turn it into refined products such as fuels. Few refineries in Canada can do it. None of the refineries in eastern Canada can refine large quantities of bitumen.

TransCanada and Enbridge claim their west-to-east pipelines will transport mainly conventional oil and only small amounts of bitumen. This is unlikely to be true in the long term as conventional sources of oil dry up in Canada and bitumen production continues to increase.

If no eastern Canadian refinery makes the massive investment to outfit their operation to refine bitumen, Line 9 and Energy East are destined to ensure more bitumen will flow to markets overseas, not Canadian refineries.

“Building more tar sands pipelines will lock Canada into a highly polluting carbon-based economy for decades,” says Adam Scott, a climate and energy program coordinator for Environmental Defence Canada based in Toronto.

“We cannot support any pipeline that furthers the ongoing reckless and unchecked expansion of the tar sands,” Scott told DeSmog Canada.

TransCanada's proposed Energy East pipeline route

Refineries Require an Expensive Coker Unit to Refine Bitumen

Bitumen is not the black liquid that many people think of when they think of oil. It is low-grade oil with the consistency of peanut butter and riddled with impurities.

Bitumen is high in carbon and low in hydrogen. High quality oils such as light sweet conventional crude oil are just the opposite. Much of the carbon in bitumen needs to be stripped in order to convert bitumen into refined products that can be sold.

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Refineries usually require a coker unit to remove the carbon from bitumen. To remove the carbon, bitumen is heated in large steel coke drums at higher temperatures (480 degree Celsius) and for longer periods of time than typical conventional oil refinery is capable of. Hydrogen is added afterwards to make bitumen more like a liquid-fuel.

Suncor’s Montreal Refinery May Refine Bitumen if Line 9 is Approved

A few refineries in Alberta and one in Ontario have coker units. A massive investment $2 billion is required to install a coker. None of the three eastern Canadian refineries – Suncor, Valero, and Irving – have publicly announced their intentions to make this investment.

“Suncor is the most likely to install a coker because the company has tar sands projects in Alberta. Irving and Valero do not,” says Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International (OCI) in the US.

“There is plenty of lighter, easier to refine oil coming out of new sources such as Bakken oil shale in the US. Irving and Valero will probably to stick to processing lighter oils for the time being,” Stockman told DeSmog Canada.

Neither Valero nor Irving appears interested in buying a coker at the moment. Irving, which has equipment to process small amounts bitumen, is investing in a $300 million marine terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick to export oil from the proposed Energy East pipeline. Valero announced earlier this year oil from Texas will be sent to its Quebec City refinery.

“Suncor may make more of a profit supplying its Montreal refinery with bitumen than by selling bitumen to its competitors,” says Stockman. 

There is speculation Suncor will announce its plans to construct a coker unit at its Montreal refinery after the National Energy Board (NEB) – Canada’s independent energy regulator – makes its decision on Line 9. The NEB decision on Line 9 could come as early as January 2014.

The US Has the Most Capacity to Refine Bitumen in the World

The probable destination of Energy East's or Line 9's bitumen is a refinery somewhere in the US, although some bitumen refining capacity does exist in Europe as well as China.

In the US, 59 of the 134 refineries are equipped with coker units. Approximately 30% of the US's bitumen refining capacity is in the nine Gulf of Mexico refineries TransCanada seeks to supply through its controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Sea-faring oil tankers traveling from Saint John, Quebec City or Montreal could also access these refineries.

Pet coke: the Coal Hidden in the Tar Sands

A major problem with refining bitumen is it has a rather nasty byproduct called petroleum coke or ‘pet coke’. Pet coke contains most of the heavy metals, sulphur and other impurities removed from bitumen during the coking process. Approximately 15% of a barrel of bitumen will become pet coke.

The research and clean energy advocacy group Oil Change International describes pet coke as “the coal hiding in the tar sands” because it has emerged as an inexpensive alternative to coal since the bitumen boom in Alberta began ten years ago.

“Pet coke is providing coal-fired power plants with a cheaper and dirtier source of fuel. It is breathing new life into the industry, which is cause for concern as the world desperately tries to reduce its carbon emissions output,” says Stockman of OCI.

The majority of pet coke produced in North America is sold to Asia and Latin America where regulations on sulphur releases from coal-fire power plants are lax. Pet coke produces 5-10% more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than coal per unit of energy.

In Canada, pet coke is largely being stockpiled in Alberta. There are some exports of Canadian pet coke to Asia via ports near Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

Last August, the mayor of Detroit ordered the removal of pet coke piles sitting uncovered along the Detroit River. The piles were three-storeys tall. Dust particles containing the toxic heavy metals in pet coke were blowing off the piles and into the air and river.

The pet coke piles were from Marathon's refinery in Detroit. The refinery began refining bitumen in November 2012.

Oxbow Corporation is one of the largest sellers of pet coke in the world. The company is owned by William Koch, brother of the infamous pro-fossil fuels billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Image Credit: Northern Rockies Rising Tide, TransCanada, Enbridge, Oil Change International.

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It seems Koch Carbon, who own the mound of petroleum coke waste piling up on the side of the Detroit River, need to look no further than Canada to sell their high-polluting industrial waste as fuel. Of course, the irony here is that the petcoke is itself a byproduct of imported Canadian tar sands crude being refined in a Marathon Petroleum plant down the river.

Ian Austen writes in the New York Times, that a "Canadian electrical power plant, owned by Nova Scotia Power…is burning the high-carbon, high-sulfur waste product because it is cheaper than natural gas."  

Residents have reported "regular visits to the coke pile by two self-unloading, oceangoing bulk carriers owned by Canada Steamship Lines of Montreal." Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) is owned by former Prime Minister Paul Martin's sons, Paul Jr., David and James.

Tracking websites confirmed that one of the CSL ships, Atlantic Huron, "made several trips this year from Detroit to a coal terminal in Sydney, Nova Scotia" which services two petcoke-burning Nova Scotia Power plants.

Austen quotes Neeta Ritcey, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power, as confirming that the company bought fuel from the Detroit stockpile for "competitive reasons."

North American petcoke is often sold to countries like China, India and Mexico, where emissions regulations are relatively lax. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will not allow the burning of petcoke in the US.

While Nova Scotia Power does burn cleaner fuel like natural gas from offshore fields, Austen notes that "the company produced 59 percent of its power from coal and petroleum coke [in 2012], an increase of two percentage points from 2011."

In a blog post, Wayne O'Connor, Nova Scotia Power's executive vice president for operations said that because of rising natural gas prices, "the switch to coal help save our customers money over continuing to use gas, while still allowing us to meet emissions requirements." His phrasing lumps petcoke in with coal, and fails to mention that the former is even more polluting.

A report by Lorne Stockman for environmental group Oil Change International found that a "ton of petcoke yields on average 53.6 percent more CO2 than a ton of coal." Stockman also notes that petcoke emissions are "not included in most assessments of the climate impact of tar sands or conventional oil production and consumption."

This means that petcoke isn't taken into account when assessing the impact of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Should the Obama administration approve Keystone XL, the increased imports of tar sands bitumen crude into US refineries will only replicate the Detroit stockpile in various locations around the country. And with fresh petcoke waste waiting to be sold and shipped by industrialists like the Koch brothers and the Martin family, this carbon-rich, dirty fuel could end up right back in coal-fired power plants all over Canada.

In the meanwhile, even without Keystone XL boosting petcoke production, the Detroit pile shows no signs of disappearing. As Austen observes, despite the petcoke being shipped away regularly, "the oil sands bitumen refinery there is producing the material at a rate which means the waterfront pile continues to grow."

Image Credit: Suncor Energy / Flickr

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A black mound of solid waste is piling up in Detroit, making visualizing the environmental impact of the Canadian tar sands boom a little easier for everyone.

The waste, which is carbon-rich petroleum coke, is a direct result of the Albertan tar sands. Ian Austen writes in the New York Times, that the "three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the…side of the Detroit River" is the "long overlooked byproduct of Canada's oil sands boom."

The coke is waste from a refinery down the river, owned by Marathon Petroleum, which started processing exported Canadian oil from the tar sands as recently as November. The plant refines 28,000 barrels of bitumen crude a day from the tar sands. Already, the results are showing. But even this mountain of what is essentially sulphur and carbon-infused industrial refuse is less a concern than another way to make money for some. The petroleum coke is bought and owned by Koch Carbon.

Koch Carbon is run by brothers Charles and David Koch, industrialists who back "activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change." Their company sells the coke as cheap fuel, usually overseas, where it releases more pollution into the atmosphere.

Petroleum coke, or petcoke, is a byproduct of coking, a refining process that releases oil from thick bitumen crude from the tar sands. Canada reportedly has 78.9 million tons stockpiled, some "dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta." As the Detroit stockpile demonstrates, the petcoke travels further afield as well.

Austen observes that "Detroit's pile will not be the only one," since the Harper government is putting all its support behind expanding the tar sands oil industry via exports to the US. Part of this push is its championing of the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline.

If Keystone XL is approved by the Obama administration, even more petcoke will be produced by refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, which will receive diluted bitumen straight from the tar sands via the pipeline. These refineries will probably ship it to Mexico and China as fuel. There is also a high demand for petcoke in India, where it's used as fuel for cement-making kilns. Petcoke is used as an alternative to low-grade coal.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will not allow the burning of petcoke in the US.

Austen quotes Tony McCallum, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), as insisting that most Canadian oil exports to the US Gulf Coast will "replace declining heavy oil imports from Mexico and Venezuela that produces the same amount of petcoke, so it doesn't create a new issue."

A study on petcoke by Lorne Stockman for environmental group Oil Change International reports that "a ton of petcoke yields on average 53.6 percent more CO2 than a ton of coal."

Stockman also mentions that the "proven tar sands reserves of Canada will yield roughly 5 billion tons of petcoke — enough to fully fuel 111 U.S. coal plants to 2050." This will boost the coal-fired power industry while also making it cheaper and more polluting. Emissions from petcoke byproducts have been excluded from the US State Department's emissions estimates for Keystone XL. Taking petcoke into account, Stockman notes, would raise annual Keystone XL emissions "13% above the State Department's calculations."

Because petcoke is in high demand in other countries as well, this excess waste will also help raise CO2 emissions globally. The Detroit stockpile is one more reminder that Canada's plans for the tar sands are looking more short-sighted by the day.

Image Credit: Oil Change International report Petroleum Coke: The Coal Hiding in the Tar Sands

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