An Old Texas Tale Retold: the Farmer vs. the Oil Company

[Scuba]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/us/old-texas-tale-retold-farmer-vs-transcanada.html?_r=1&ref=us

“When you allow a pipeline to cross your land, you give up certain rights to it,” Ms. Crawford said. “You can’t use your land the way you want anymore. We didn’t want to do that.”

But TransCanada did not go away. Their people kept coming back, offering more and more money.

Then on Aug. 26, 2011, Ms. Crawford received a letter from Keystone, TransCanada’s American subsidiary. The letter made a “final offer” of $21,626. Then, it said, “if Keystone is unable to successfully negotiate the voluntary acquisition of the necessary easements, it will have to resort to the exercise of its statutory right of eminent domain.”

“In other words,” Ms. Crawford said, “sign or we’ll take it.”

[snappyturtle]

1. Thanks for posting this article. I have wondered what has happened

in this case. I did not know the land had been condemned. WOw!
Crawford is probably right saying they'll lose the appeal but I'm glad
she and her family are fighting it.

When I first heard about the case I also read an article about a leak
in a tar sands pipeline in Kalamazoo, MI, I think. Tar sand oil spills
are costly, more costly than cleaning regular spills and they reek
tremendous havoc in water as the oil sinks rather than floats. I'll
look to see if I can find a link to that. I can see why Crawford is
worried about a potential spill/leakage, whatever.

I have also been under the impression that eminent domain was advanced
in the interest of the public good. No public good is going to come to
the people other than $$$ to the pipeline and it's stockholders. Hell, we
won't even get any of the oil....let Canada build the refineries!


edit: Here's an article about the MI spill: http://www.onearth.org/article/tar-sands-oil-plagues-a-michigan-community

Here's a snippet:

"Surface skimmers and vacuums were no help, and a full year later, EPA officials and scientists are still working on a plan to remove submerged oil from about 200 acres of river and lake bottom. EPA officials had given Enbridge an August 31 deadline to get all the oil out, but they now say a full cleanup could take years. “Where we thought we might be winding down our piece of the response, we’re actually ramping back up,” said Mark Durno, one of EPA’s on-scene coordinators. “The submerged oil is a real story -- it’s a real eye-opener. … In larger spills we’ve dealt with before, we haven’t seen nearly this footprint of submerged oil, if we’ve seen any at all.”

Critics say that what happened in Marshall was a dramatic example of the potential environmental, economic, and public health risks of transporting tar sands oil long distances -- something that fossil fuel companies want to do in increasingly greater amounts as demand for their product grows in response to rising gasoline prices and concerns about U.S. reliance on oil from the Middle East. An Enbridge competitor, TransCanada, is pushing the Obama administration to approve a new 1,700-mile-long pipeline known as the Keystone XL in order to move tar sands oil from Alberta -- whose refineries can no longer handle all the bitumen being extracted from the ground -- to facilities in Texas."

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Enbridge has tried to take the Alberta oil westward in Canada as an alternative to the Keystone Pipeline but faced such opposition that I'm assuming that's why they are back here continuing to fight for passage through the U.S.