US exporting dirty fuel |
US oil refineries that are unable to sell a dirty fuel waste product at home are exporting vast quantities of it to India instead.Petroleum coke, the bottom-of-the-barrel leftover from refining Canadian tar sands crude and other heavy oils, is cheaper and burns hotter than coal. But it also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart and lung-damaging sulphur - a key reason few American companies use it. Refineries instead are sending it around the world, especially to energy-hungry India, which last year got almost a fourth of all the fuel-grade `petcoke` the US shipped out, an Associated Press investigation found. In 2016, the US sent more than 8 million metric tons of petcoke to India. That`s about 20 times more than in 2010, and enough to fill the Empire State Building eight times. The petcoke being burned in countless factories and plants is contributing to dangerously filthy air in India, which already has many of the world`s most polluted cities. Laboratory tests on imported petcoke used near New Delhi found it contained 17 times more sulfur than the limit set for coal, and a staggering 1,380 times more than for diesel, according to India`s court-appointed Environmental Pollution Control Authority.
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