Tesoro wants to build a 135-mile insulated pipeline connecting the Uinta Basin with the Salt Lake City-area refineries. The pipeline each day would move up to 60,000 barrels of black- and yellow-waxy crude. Because of its high paraffin content, Uinta’s waxy crude must remain warm in transit; black wax crude heated to 95 degrees, and yellow wax to 115 degrees.
If this pipeline is approved, it will be one more piece of infrastructure the state of Utah wishes to push forward in order to create an energy colony in Eastern Utah, and continue turning the area into a sacrifice zone. Utah has nearly completed a two-lane highway to nowhere, seeks to build a nuclear power plant and oil refinery on the Green River, and set up further infrastructure for US Oil Sands, Enefit, Red Leaf, and other fossil fuel extraction companies.
According to a recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune: “[The pipeline] would also ease a transportation bottleneck that state officials say is holding back development on Utah’s busiest oil patch and costing the state’s economy billions.”
Utah’s emphasis on being “business friendly” to a destructive extraction industry is at odds with our need to survive by protecting our land, air, water and communities, as well as the dire need to address the climate change crisis.
“This calls into question the state’s position on climate change. Ever-expanding fossil fuel industrialization is moving us in the opposite direction climate scientists say we should go,” said Taylor McKinnon, energy policy director for the Grand Canyon Trust.
One of the proposed pipeline routes follows a line over the Wasatch mountains, and crosses through neighborhoods in Bountiful, Woods Cross, North Salt Lake, and the University of Utah area.
“There are no safe ways to transport oil. Pipelines fail, just as trains and trucks fail,” McKinnon said. “That means more pollution for waterways and communities along the way.”
All pipelines leak. All of them. They leak. And leak. And leak.
HELP STOP THE UINTA EXPRESS PIPELINE PROJECT!
The Forest Service, Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, is “inviting” you to comment on the proposed action for the Uinta Express Pipeline (UEP) project.
The comment period closes March 17. Tell the Forest Service to STOP THE UINTA EXPRESS PIPELINE.
EMAIL (rich text format (.rtf) or Word (.doc)) comments to: uwc_info@fs.fed.us
When did uinta black wax crude get reclassified as as “TAR SANDS”? Your leftwing radical agenda seeks only to slow American progress through socialist and communist ideals. If energy policy was left up to the leftwingers we all would be cutting down trees for our fires just to cook our food with. I’m sure all the rich liberals in Park City, Utah wouldn’t like if they had to wash there clothes in the PROVO river because your agenda turned the lights off in the USA. Think man think.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about the reality of water resources in the PR Springs area and beyond. Development of tar sands, using methods that in the east of the US are known as mountaintop removal mining, would be a monumental disaster both for the Tavaputs Plateau and for the earth. That stuff MUST stay in the ground forever!
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Please do NOT develop this pipeline. Pipelines leak, they are ugly, and this appears to be an unnecessary encroachment. We need to think long term about renewal energy that is local and clean. We need to conserve, to be more efficient in our use of energy and water–we don’t need another pipeline that would inevitably leak onto valued lands. Let’s not trash our landscape.
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Please do not go through with this project, i love the state i live in and i really would be quite saddened to see it even more vandalized by pollution and carelessness. I believe that there are other ways that our state can make money, power and jobs other than the oily way we’re using currently. If this project does not come through, the benefits will be great as the real value we have lies in the natural beauty and rawness of it all rather than industry.