jriddle@thealpenanews.com
News Photo by Julie Riddle
Alpena County resident Clifford Malenfant last week describes the damage he fears an oil spill could do to his Partridge Point Road home.
ALPENA In six days, oil escaping from under the Straits of Mackinac could reach Rogers City.
There, it could hurt wildlife, sicken residents, and coat beaches with slime, according to experts studying the possible effect of an oil spill from Line 5, Enbridge Inc.’s 68-year-old pipeline carrying crude oil across the bottom of the Straits.
Such a spill presents relatively low risk of devastating environmental impact in Alpena and Thunder Bay, according to studies. Neighbors to the northwest, in Presque Isle County, face a more realistic possibility of long-term hurt if oil escaped the pipeline.
4:32
Michigan Radio s Lester Graham and Bridge Michigan s Kelly House explain the economics behind Enbridge Energy s Line 5 tunnel proposal.
In the decade since Line 5 emerged as an issue of statewide concern, a debate about the pipeline s future that began with concerns about an oil spill in the Straits of Mackinac has morphed to include broad questions about how oil pipelines fit into the global energy transition.
Credit Lester Graham / Michigan Radio
As Canadian officials lobbied a Michigan Senate committee in March to keep the Line 5 pipeline open, Sen. Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) grew frustrated with a conversation that, up to that point, had focused mainly on the immediate economic and safety implications of a possible shutdown.
The natural gas storage report from the EIA for the week ending December 11th indicated that the quantity of natural gas held in underground storage in the US had decreased by 122 billion cubic feet to 3,726 billion cubic feet by the end of the week, which left our gas supplies 284 billion cubic feet, or still 8.3% higher than the 3,442 billion cubic feet that were in storage on December 11th of last year, and 243 billion cubic feet, or 7.0% above the five-year average of 3,483 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have been in storage as of the 11th of December in recent years..the 122 billion cubic feet that were drawn out of US natural gas storage this week was less than the average forecast from an S&P Global Platts survey of analysts who had expected a 127 billion cubic foot withdrawal, but was higher than the average withdrawal of 105 billion cubic feet of natural gas that have typically been pulled out of natural gas storage during the same week over the past 5 years, and the