Here’s one more sign we may not need to tear up good prairie and surrender land rights to a foreign corporation with the Keystone XL pipeline: TransCanada is thinking about converting an existing natural gas pipeline to carry tar sands oil to eastern Canada:

The giant pipeline is TransCanada’s original business and is one of Canada’s nation-building infrastructures. For decades, it is has moved natural gas from Empress, Alta., down to the U.S. northeast and into Ontario and Quebec.

But the pipeline is running at half capacity because of the discovery of big new shale gas deposits such as the giant Marcellus in the United States that are pushing new supplies into the pipeline’s historic market. The new supplies are so abundant they have depressed natural gas prices to decade-low levels, while pushing up transmission costs for producers and customers.

…If technically feasible, the conversion would be nation-building in new ways.

The pipeline could potentially carry between 300,000 barrels a day and 800,000 b/d, [TransCanada CEO Russ] Girling estimated, making it a significant channel for growing oil sands production in Alberta that risks being stranded as a result of activists opposing new pipeline plans to the United States and to Canada’s West Coast [Claudia Cattaneo, "TransCanada Mulls Switching Natural Gas Mainline to Oil Service," Financial Post, 2012.04.27].

Now tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems there would be less environmental and land-rights impact from working on an existing pipeline than from laying an entirely new pipeline. Reusing existing infrastructure instead of building new means less infrastructure to maintain and less taxes for TransCanada to pay, which I would think would mean less cost to the oil companies and ultimately to us.

TransCanada has converted natural gas pipeline to oil pipeline before. The Keystone 1 pipeline running through eastern South Dakota gets its flow from a stretch of converted natural gas pipeline south of Winnipeg.

A trans-Canada TransCanada route keeps Keystone XL from fouling South Dakota’s land, water, and property rights. By all means, CEO Girling, make it so!

Around 150 people are expected to attend the Black Hills Bakken Conference here in Spearfish today and tomorrow. I’d be interested in attending as well to hear all the tarry-eyed oil-boom boosters tickle our fantasies of petro-wealth and asking if anyone is worried about the potential erosion of education and democracy.

However, I can’t make it, because (a) I have to work, and (b) I wouldn’t pay $500 to sit and chat with people. 150 people at $500 a head… that’s $75,000. When I was treasurer of the South Dakota Speech Communication Association, we were able to run our annual convention for a similar number of attendees at fancy-schmancy places like Cedar Shores for under $4000. The Black Hills Bakken Conference has more guest speakers than we did, but I’m thinking somebody’s making some money.

Also unlikely to be able to cover the $500 registration fee: North Dakota trailer park residents being evicted by developers to make way for oilpatch worker housing:

Forced evictions, of local residents from their mobile homes in the New Town area, to provide housing for predominately out-of-state oil workers has reached a new low. On Monday, April 16th, Four Native American residents of the Prairie Winds Mobile Home Park, including a 9-year old child, were forced to leave their home when landlord, Leroy Olsen, removed Heather Youngbird and Crystal Deegan’s front door. Olsen then cut the electricity and turned off the propane to the home, and told them they had to leave their home immediately.

…Residents of 45 trailers have until August 31st to move after the mobile home park was sold with plans to develop it to house oil workers. Future Housing LLC bought the property and plans to construct housing for employees of United Prairie Cooperative, formerly Cenex of New Town.

John Reese, the CEO and general manager of United Prairie Cooperative and agent for Future Housing LLC, has said the company is trying to work with the residents. Initially, the eviction deadline was set for May 1, but it’s been postponed until Aug. 31.

…Reese said in an interview last month the housing shortage in the area makes it difficult for him to find employees. Available land to develop housing is also difficult to find, he said [Kandi Mossett, "Front Door Stripped off Mobile Home As Forced Evictions Reach New Low in Bakken Oil Fields," press release, Indigenous Environmental Network, 2012.04.18].

I can live with movers and shakers keeping their networking sessions exclusive with high registration fees. But I hope Rep. Charlie Hoffman and his fellow interested parties will talk about the shaken movers who can’t afford to live in their homes around the North Dakota oil patch any more. Does new wealth really justify telling an entire class of workers they can no longer live in a community? The displacement of local long-time residents is as much an externality of the oil business as pollution, and we need to discuss how the cold-eyed corporations drilling our earth compensate us for that social cost.

A couple of weeks ago, as I reviewed the numerous items proposed to the South Dakota Legislature’s Executive Board for summer interim study, I noted a proposal by Rep. Patty Miller (R-16/McCook Lake) to study language-learning software by Imagine Learning. Her proposal sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch:

Study of education and student accountability

The owner and creator of the “Imagine Learning” program created this for student achievement and accountability by developing an environment that makes it easy and exciting for kids to “buy-in” to their education experience. The success rate is extremely high for all cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. This would be a great program to adopt in South Dakota—public, private, and reservation.

[Representative Patty Miller (R-16/McCook Lake), 2012 Interim Study Survey, Item I, sent to members of the South Dakota Legislature, 2012.03.31]

A representative from Utah-based Imagine Learning assures me that, while they appreciate the good representative’s recommendation, they were unaware of her promotion of their product. “Imagine Learning hasn’t contacted Rep. Miller or any other South Dakota legislator regarding our product,” said the spokesman. Miller’s shilling came entirely on her own initiative.

The Executive Board agreed with my reasoning that the Legislature could better spend its time studying larger issues than the efficacy of one commercial product that local school districts are better qualified to evaluate on their own without state-level interference. Instead, the Executive Board chose these two topics for interim study:

1. (from Senator Mark Johnston) “Study issues and opportunities in South Dakota’s emerging oil and gas boom” or (from Senate Commerce and Energy) “Study the issue surrounding the drilling of oil in northwestern South Dakota, including the opportunities and consequences regarding the current oil boom in North Dakota.”
2. (from House Education, Reps. Thomas Brunner and Tad Perry) “…determine the public purpose of postsecondary institutions in the state… setting policy performance expectations and the means for holding systems and institutions accountable… examine [South Dakota's] approach to funding… review alternative methods….”

We can perhaps credit the Legislature on its interest in the oil and gas boom. Instead of focusing on problems we already have, our elected officials are thinking ahead to consider problems that might arise in the next few years. They are passing on some pressing issues, like county road repair (proposed by Rep. Mark Venner) and drainage laws (proposed by Sen. Larry Rhoden). But the Bakken oil boom has created enormous strains on North Dakota’s rural communities, and its effects are already visible in South Dakota. The potential for impacts on multiple policy areas makes the oil and gas boom a reasonable choice for summer study. Let’s hope the legislators have the foresight to look at not just how much money they think the state can make but how the state will have to spend that money to maintain roads, schools, public safety, and general quality of life if the Bakken tide sloshes south (those would be the “consequences” mentioned in Senate C&E’s wording).

The study of postsecondary education feels like a bit of a dodge. With a referendum on Governor Daugaard’s K-12 education law likely to make the November ballot, the Legislature’s Executive Board could have chosen any combination of four proposals to study our K-12 public schools. Such study would have contributed valuably to the conversation about public education that we will have this fall to inform our votes. Such study also would have provided valuable groundwork for the legislative debate that will take place next when new legislators debate what to do instead of the Daugaard plan that voters will reject this November.

Evidently sitting Legislators want to steer clear of the HB 1234 discussion that their opponents will press… since they know, I suspect, that serious study of K-12 education will only produce more evidence that the Governor’s plan will hurt, not help, our K-12 schools. By my count, 9 of the 15 Executive Board members voted for HB 1234 this winter. Luckily for those legislators, they have the important issue of our public universities and vocational-technical schools to divert their attention.

Hat tip to Nathan Johnson!

Well, that’s depressing: a new report from Environment America ranks the Big Sioux River as having the 13th largest amount of toxic industrial pollution discharges in 2010. The sole discharger into the Big Sioux measured in this report is Smithfield Foods, John Morrell’s processing plant in Sioux Falls, which dumped 2.95 million pounds of yuck into the public waters past the Falls.

(Speaking of toxic discharge, the featured recipe on the John Morrell website this morning is bologna and egg breakfast burritos.)

In all of the surrounding states, only Nebraska has one facility causing more harm to waterways… and that’s the Tyson Fresh Meats processing plant pouring 4.62 million pounds of pollution into the Missouri River. I’m assuming this source is the Dakota City beef facility, for whose toxic discharges Tyson paid the feds a two-million-dollar penalty in 2009.

Surprising to me is the fact that even with all that Bakken-frackin’ oil activity, North Dakota saw much less toxic discharge into its waterways than did South Dakota, under a million pounds. Maybe South Dakota state government is putting us more at risk of polluted waterways with its pressure on local governments to approve giant hog farms than with its push to drill for oil.

For over a year, I’ve maintained with a variety of evidence that building the Keystone XL pipeline will raise the price of oil and gasoline here in the middle of America. At the very least, empirical evidence says Keystone XL won’t decrease gasoline prices.

This morning, let’s look at the inverse: not building Keystone XL lowers the local price of oil:

The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline’s approval and completion is forcing distributors to take larger discounts than usual, according to a report from the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources in Bismarck.

The North Dakota sweet crude price had a 30 percent discount to the New York Mercantile Exchange-West Texas Intermediate price , DMR director Lynn Helms wrote in the report last week….

“What’s occurring right now is there is quite a bit of congestion in the Cushing, Okla. and the Great Lakes area,” said Justin Kringstad, North Dakota Pipeline Authority director….

If the Keystone XL is completed it may help return discounts to normal, Kringstad said….

“The more we can debottleneck midcontinent and open up additional access for midcontinent barrels to get to the Gulf Coast, that’s going to raise the price of a barrel in the Great Lakes area and then in turn affect the North Dakota crude pricing,” he said [April Baumgarten, "Oil Express: Keystone XL Delay Increases Oil Price Discounts in North Dakota," Dickinson Press, 2012.03.31].

Now you have to read the Bakken-beholden local press carefully: “increasing price discounts” means lowering the price of oil. “Returning discounts to normal” means raising the price of oil.

Baumgarten does point out one significant problem with delaying the Keystone XL pipeline: with or without the pipeline, oil producers are still going to frack all the oil they can out of the Bakken and seek access to the market. Absent Keystone XL, oil producers compete with agribusiness for boxcars, making it harder to get crops and critters to market when the price is right. Of course, if farmers and ranchers focused on diversified local agriculture instead of industrial scale monoculture, they wouldn’t have that problem, would they?

Prairie atheists, take heart! South Dakota is not the most religious state in the nation. Gallup finds that we rank just 13th:

Maybe being only 13th is why South Dakota hasn’t struck oil yet: 55% of us just aren’t praying hard enough. Texas may be getting a petro-piety boost, but we out-Jesus North Dakota, Wyoming, and Palin-Land, and they’re reaping/ripping all sorts of wealth from the Earth. Hmmm….

The above map doesn’t capture all of the granularity, but it reminds us that, at 13th, South Dakota is the most religious state outside of the Bible Belt and the great Mormon Promised Land. And not that I want to impose a religious test on any candidate, but some of my Republican friends might find it interesting to note that Mitt Romney got his university education at Brigham Young in Utah, one of the most religious states, and at Harvard in Massachusetts, one of the least religious states. He chose to live in Massachusetts. Maybe he saw Massachusetts as an opportunity for more missonary work?

Gallup defines its categories thus:

1. very religious: ”religion is an important part of their daily life and… they attend religious services every week or almost every week”;
2. nonreligious: ”religion is not an important part of their daily life and… they seldom or never attend religious services”;
3. moderately religious: the squishy middle, either calling religion important but not going to church regularly or occupying a pew while not considering religion important (why? why?).

Other Gallup data suggest that South Dakota’s not-very-religious majority should get more religion if they know what’s good for them. The most frequent churchgoers experience 18% fewer negative emotions and 9% more positive vibes each day than non-pew-fillers. The very religious tend to beat us non-believers on every aspect of the Gallup Well-Being Index except for physical health (Trying to catch me on your bike? You really don’t have a prayer!).

Interestingly, the “moderately religious” fall below both the very religious and non-religious on the Well-Being Index. Riding the fence must give saddlesores….

All of these well-being stats are generalizations, not guarantees. You can find joyful secularists and depressed pew-sitters. Contrary to the belief of some nameless colleagues across the aisle, I find great pleasure and satisfaction in my teaching, my writing, my outdoor adventures, and my family. And if you’re looking purely for practical effects, I suspect a good breakfast can do as much for your well-being as that weekly trip to church… and you can do breakfast in your PJs.

A “pig in a poke” is a lovely idiom for “an offering or deal that is foolishly accepted without being examined first.” That’s not quite an accurate description of the Keystone 1 pipeline. But TransCanada needs to get a bigger poker to get a pig out of its pipe:

TransCanada Corp. will shut down its Keystone oil pipeline in April for up to several days to find and remove an errant “pig,” from the 500,000-barrel-per-day oil system, the company said Monday.

The piece of equipment, a pipeline inspection gauge (pig), was being used during a routine cleaning operation of the Hardisty to Cushing, Okla., line when it became disconnected, TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha said.

“I can’t speculate on how long it will take to remove the pig but it should be completed within a few days,” Cunha said in an email [Dina O'Meara, "TransCanada to Shut Keystone Pipeline in April to Remove 'Pig'," Calgary Herald, 2012.03.20].

The pig broke away on March 15 somewhere upstream of the Steele City, Nebraska, pumping station but has not hindered a normal flow of oil through Keystone 1 at 500,000 gallons a day. With oil flowing at that enormous pressure, you fellows at the refinery in Cushing might want to check your oil for pig parts.

We can hope that waiting a couple weeks before shutting down the flow and cleaning out the pipes signals that there’s no need to be concerned about nuts and bolts zooming through the pipe and damaging or plugging a valve. But maybe TransCanada figures that tar sands oil is so acidic and abrasive that it will simply wear that pig down to nothing before they have to open the hatch and fish it out.

I had the very unpleasant experience during my petitioneering last weekend of trying to pierce the illogic of a rancher from Nebraska who avers that President Obama is a Muslim. Again, the proper response to that myth is (1) what’s wrong with a public official being a Muslim? and (2) Barack Obama is a Christian. The rancher responds that I he can tell I’m a teacher, which he considers a bad thing.

While I’m in the mood, here’s some more teaching against some other common anti-Obama myths:

1. The Obama Administration has issued fewer new federal rules in its first three years than did the Bush Administration.
2. Despite fighting the worst recession since the 1930s, the Obama Administration has overseen less per capita growth in per capita government spending than any recent president but one, President Clinton.
3. AP confirms that more U.S. oil drilling hasn’t reduced gasoline prices… just as new tar sands pipelines don’t.

I don’t expect to convince my Nebraska interlocutor or other underinformed Tea Party shouters to be swayed by facts. But I’ll keep trying.