It’s another day on the Gulf Coast, and locals are fighting yet another fossil fuel infrastructure project. Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren’s company, Energy Transfer, has proposed a pipeline dubbed “Blue Marlin” that would carry crude oil from an export terminal in Nederland to an offshore port in Louisiana waters.
“This thing, given Energy Transfer’s track record, is a disaster waiting to happen,” said John Beard, a former Exxon Mobil employee and an environmental justice leader in Port Arthur, which is part of the same petrochemicals-dominated Golden Triangle area as Nederland. His city of 55,000 is already home to the country’s largest oil refinery, and the overall metropolitan area has a cancer rate 7 percent higher than the Texas average.
Pipelines owned by Energy Transfer, Sunoco, and its other subsidiaries and joint ventures spilled 3.6 million gallons of oil and hazardous fluids in 527 incidents between 2002 and 2017, according to government data, in what amounted to one spill every 11 days and an estimated $115 million in property damage.
