Uhhh, About Those Pipeline Safety Claims: Bad week for Canadian Oilies

It has been a very bad couple of weeks for the Canadian oil and pipeline industries.

This weekend, the Keystone pipeline popped, spilling more than 20,000 gallons of tar sands oil and sending a 60’ spout into the air from a pumping station in the Dakotas. The line remains closed. It is the 10th spill on the line, which has not been in operation for a full year yet despite being advertised as a safe, modern pipeline that would “only” have 1.4 spills per decade. Ooops. This spill comes on the heels of a much bigger pipeline failure in Alberta where 1.2 million gallons of oil were spewed in the Peace River region last week. It is the worst spill in Canada since 1975 and it illustrates a lot of the oil infrastructure issues that we have been hammering on for some time.

Regarding last week’s spill, the Globe and Mail noted, “The spill raises new questions about the health of Alberta’s aging pipeline system.” Us too. Though Alberta’s regulators panned our report Tar Sands Pipeline Safety Risks when it came out earlier this year (only to later admit they hadn’t read it before responding), the event eerily echoed many of the concerns we raised. While we do not know what was spilled near Peace River (initial indications are that it was not tar sands oil), we do know a bit about the pipeline that failed. Again, from the Globe and Mail:

“It’s the second major spill from the Rainbow line, whose owner is a subsidiary of publicly traded Plains All American Pipeline, L.P. (PAA-N61.98-1.00-1.59%) In late 2006, 7,500 barrels leaked from the pipe, which travels 770 km from Zama, Alta. to Edmonton. At the time, an investigation determined that “stress corrosion cracking, fatigue cracking and external coating failure caused the release.” These issues are often related to age; the Rainbow line was built in 1966. It is designed to carry 220,000 barrels per day; last year, it averaged 187,000 barrels per day.”

We also know that the line carried an array of oil products: from the light sweet crude that most of us picture when we think of oil, to the heavy DilBit that is the subject of the report.

And that is interesting.

The “stress corrosion cracking” noted in the previous Rainbow spill is a hallmark of lines moving high sulphur fuels like DilBit, according to NRDC pipeline expert Anthony Swift. We will be watching to see if that comes into play when the CSI work is done to figure out the source of this failure, but our report makes clear that the unique chemical composition of DilBit makes corrosion-related breakdowns in pipelines carrying the nasty stuff much more likely.

What is clear from this event and last summer's Kalamazoo River spill is that the Canadian oil industry doesn’t do itself a lot of favors. The Keystone and Rainbow pipeline incidents are likely to give a lot of people pause---many of whom have been assured repeatedly of the safe status of North America’s oil pipelines to quell concerns over some projects that the industry desperately wants: Keystone XL (a pipeline from Alberta to Houston) and the Enbridge Gateway pipeline (from Alberta to the British Columbia coast). Both are designed to open up foreign markets for the tar sands oil that currently can only go to Canadian and US markets. In both cases, there is fierce pushback along the pipeline routes from folks reasonably concerned about spills and especially impact on water resources.

The Keystone spill is particularly damning in that it makes clear rosy safety predictions made by TransCanada (who would also build the Keystone XL line) simply cannot be substantiated. The spill really was the perfect opportunity for the pipeline company to prove its claim that a spill on their system could be stopped in 12 minutes. Instead, despite the fact that this occurred at one of their pumping stations instead of a far-flung field where detection or access would be harder, it reportedly took 30 minutes to turn off the flow, 2.5 times the company’s claims. It would not surprise me if landowners along the proposed pipeline path were wondering if other safety claims were off by a factor of 250%.

And anyone watching the Alberta or Michigan spill has also been given real reasons for pause.  The lack of transparency and slow response have been surprising (heck, even Alberta’s Premiere Ed Stelmach, oil industry apologist in-chief, has been criticizing the Rainbow pipeline response) where no public announcement about what kind of oil had been spilled was made for over a week. The initial size of the spill and proximity to wetlands were discounted. This followed the spill in Michigan, where the mere fact that tar sands oil was even involved was vehemently denied until OnEarth magazine and Michigan Messenger exposed the truth. Come on guys---fess up. Instead of investigation, there is denial and defensiveness pretty consistently which doesn’t do anyone any good. It hinders a quality cleanup, endangers public and first responder health, as well as undercutting the public trust.

Blaming the victims doesn’t help much either. The brusque, uncivil response to legitimate concern from folks near the Peace River spill is also counterproductive. Check this out from Greenwire (subscription required):

"Just because there is an odor doesn't necessarily imply there are health-related issues," said Environment Minister Rob Renner, who sent a mobile air monitoring unit to the area.

...

"Whoever is saying that really doesn't care what is going on," [Brian] Alexander [principal of Little Buffalo School on Lubicon Cree First Nation, which is at the spill site] said. "They don't care about people's well-being."

Tsk, tsk.

Pipeline industry spokespeople like to say, “Oil is oil.” They repeat it constantly. But that is simply not true. These spills make clear that the industry needs to do more work to figure out how to move DilBit safely. We cannot afford to add nearly 2,000 more miles of liability for oil that a study commissioned by DOE shows we don’t need. With a decision looming from the Obama administration on Keystone XL, it seems pretty clear with the events of the last couple weeks that the new pipeline should wait.