Oil Spill Spotlights Keystone XL Issue: Is Canadian Crude Worse?
An Arkansas pipeline spill is focusing new attention on a question that may be decisive in the Keystone XL debate: Is oil from Canada’s tar sands more damaging than conventional crude?
David Hatfield, an Arkansas wildlife photographer and minister, rose before dawn on Monday and headed to Lake Conway.
Even though he had lived nearby for 25 years, Hatfield never knew of the threat now oozing near this 6,700-acre habitat 25 miles north of Little Rock, the largest game and wildlife commission reservoir in the United States.
"It surprised me that we had a pipeline here," he said.
But ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline has been buried here for more than six decades, quietly propelling oil between Texas and Illinois beneath the backyards of Mayflower, Arkansas. Pegasus' years in obscurity ended March 29, when it ruptured, spilling at least 12,000 barrels (504,000 gallons/1.9 million liters) of heavy Canadian crude oil and water into the neighborhood. (See
