Oil Pipelines

Divers sealed a broken oil pipeline after about 44,500 gallons leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said. The spill about 30 miles south of Galveston, which started Dec. 24, was expected to have minimal effect on the environment. The oil continued to move away from land and was quickly dispersing, the Coast Guard said.

WASHINGTON - President Obama said Friday he wanted to put more Americans to work by slashing the amount of time it takes to grant federal approval for big job-creating projects. But Obama's choice of venue for his remarks - a Baltimore company that makes mining and pumping equipment - provided fodder for Republicans. They noted that the company president had, just the day before, testified on Capitol Hill in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration has delayed for years over environmental concerns.

Chicago-based GATX Corp., which operates a network of oil pipelines in the Los Angeles harbor area, was ordered to spend $750,000 to upgrade its system as part of a court settlement of felony and misdemeanor charges stemming from an oil leak last year in Wilmington. Compton Superior Court Judge Rose Hom also ordered the company to pay $90,000 in punitive damages resulting from a pin-hole-size leak in a pipeline that trickled hundreds of gallons of oil into Compton Creek late last summer.

This year President Obama will decide whether to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Few environmental issues in recent years have engendered so much passion and debate. The pipeline would facilitate the transportation of a particularly thick type of oil, oil sands crude, from Canada to U.S. ports. What is oil sands crude? It is a tar-like substance containing bitumen, extracted from the boreal forests of western Canada by strip mining.

Russia, Greece and Bulgaria signed a deal to build a 175-mile pipeline to transport Russian oil to a port in northern Greece, a pact that the three governments hailed as helping to secure Western oil supplies. The pipeline from Bulgaria's Black Sea port of Burgas will transport crude to the port of Alexandroupolis. The project will improve networks in southeastern Europe that transport oil and gas from the Caspian Sea region to the European Union.

Operators of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline hope a scraping device will push out a piece of metal 20 inches in diameter that's been missing in the pipeline since December. A pipeline cleaning device known as a scraper or paraffin pig broke apart inside the pipeline in December between pump stations just north of Fairbanks and near Delta Junction, about 100 miles to the south. Most of the pieces have been recovered, but a stainless steel ring that holds other pieces in place has not been found.

A public hearing will be held at 10 a.m. today to accept testimony on the proposed Pacific Pipeline, a 171-mile line that would transport crude oil from north of Santa Barbara through Ventura County and south to Wilmington in Los Angeles County. The Ventura hearing is the fourth in a series of five presented by the California Public Utilities Commission, which is expected to make a decision on the project later this year.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has decided to oppose as environmentally too risky a planned $225-million crude oil pipeline that would run beneath 13 cities, including parts of Glendale, Burbank and several miles of Los Angeles, The Times has learned. Bradley, who has remained noncommittal over the controversial Angeles Pipeline, will announce his opposition at a City Hall news conference scheduled for this morning after deciding sometime last week to speak out against the project, sources said.

William Theo Eskew, 74, the former president and chief executive officer of Santa Fe Pacific Pipelines. A native of Anderson, S.C., Eskew attended Clemson University, served as a Navy officer during World War II and completed a mechanical engineering degree at Duke University. He was president of Santa Fe Pacific's predecessor company, Southern Pipe Lines, and helped engineer its 1983 merger with Santa Fe Industries, which created the current company. Eskew was active in the Assn.

Although the Mobil Oil Corp. pipeline that ruptured twice last month in the San Fernando Valley meets all safety regulations, members of a state Senate committee expressed doubt Thursday that future accidents can be avoided. Two members of the Senate Committee on Toxics and Public Safety Management held a public hearing in Van Nuys on the Sept. 10 and Sept. 27 pipeline ruptures and called for more frequent and thorough safety testing of oil pipelines in California.

WASHINGTON - A long-awaited State Department review of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline released Friday concludes that he project would have minimal impact on the environment, increasing the chances it could be approved in the coming months. The State Department underscored that the study, a supplemental environmental impact statement, is a draft and that it does not offer recommendations for action on the $7-billion project, which would bring petroleum from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - A major rival to the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline project is vastly boosting its U.S. pipeline system, but it's avoiding the same scrutiny that federal regulators, environmentalists and landowners are giving Keystone owner TransCanada Corp. Enbridge Inc. is proceeding largely unencumbered with plans to spend $8.8 billion in the U.S. to transport greater volumes of petroleum to the Gulf Coast and other markets than TransCanada would with its Keystone XL pipeline project from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast.

The on-again, off-again Keystone XL pipeline gained new traction in Nebraska on Wednesday. State legislators authorized the state Department of Environmental Quality to begin evaluating options for a new route outside the sensitive Nebraska Sandhills , the marshy hills and grasslands that lie atop the nation's most important agricultural aquifer. Critics of the pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, say the legislation amounts to a rubber stamp for TransCanada.

With gas prices becoming a high-octane campaign issue, the Democratic-led Senate defeated a Republican effort Thursday to advance the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. The vote to attach the project to a must-pass transportation bill required 60 votes to advance. It received 56, with 11 Democrats joining Republicans in support; 42 senators voted no. President Obama had called senators to urge a no vote. "We hope that the Congress will ... not waste its time with ineffectual, sham legislation," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

The prime minister is talking about being "held hostage" by U.S. interests. Radio ads blare, "Stand up to this foreign bully. " A Twitter account tells of a "secret plan to target Canada: exposed!" Could this be Canada? The cheerful northern neighbor: supplier of troops to unpleasant U.S.-led foreign conflicts, reliable trade partner, ally in holding terrorism back from North America's shores, not to mention the No. 1 supplier of America's oil? Canada's recent push for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the nation's West Coast, where it would be sent to China, has been marked by uncharacteristic defiance.

President Obama may have nixed a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, but that hasn't stopped the Canadian company that wants to build the 1,660-mile structure from going to court to force the cooperation of landowners who don't want it crossing their land. The issue erupted into a noisy protest Friday in Paris, Texas, where farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford has sought a temporary restraining order to prevent the company, TransCanada, from beginning any construction or digging on her property until issues of legal jurisdiction are decided.

The rupture of an oil pipeline during the Northridge earthquake has prompted some residents and public officials to call for extra safeguards on the lines that cross underneath the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. When the Jan. 17 quake fractured an Arco pipeline on Wolfskill Street in San Fernando, the crude caught fire, seriously burned a man and charred 17 cars and a house.

The abandonment of a proposed Iraqi pipeline project that has involved U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III in controversy has not prevented Iraq from dramatically increasing its network of pipelines to export the crude oil that finances its war against Iran. The recent growth of the pipeline network in Iraq and the region is viewed as a plus for the energy security of the United States and other oil-importing nations, because it diminishes the chance of supply interruptions.

An internal audit cleared the State Department of major missteps and conflicts of interest in its environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline, but faulted the agency for its lack of scientific expertise and for not adequately considering alternative routes. The report by the State Department's Office of Inspector General "determined that the department did not violate its role as an unbiased oversight agency. " But it found that the State Department was hampered by its lack of expertise in handling an environmental review on the scale of Keystone XL, a $7-billion, multiyear oil transport project that would wind 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

The Obama administration has decided that it will not issue a permit before Feb. 21 for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, according to people with knowledge of the decision. The announcement, which could come as early as Wednesday, comes in response to a 60-day deadline Congress imposed in late December on the decision-making process for the permit as part of a deal to extend a payroll-tax break and unemployment benefits for two months.   Today's decision, expected from the State Department, would make official what the administration has said from the outset: that under current law, it cannot accelerate the permitting process, especially in light of the need for additional environmental reviews of a new path for the pipeline through Nebraska.