Oil companies call for context on regulator’s new website

CALGARY Some oil and gas companies are raising concerns that information in a new reporting program launched by the Alberta Energy Regulator could be misleading.

The regulator launched the pipeline performance report web page Tuesday in an effort to make it easier for the public to see which oil and gas companies are falling behind on pipeline safety, and to push companies to improve.

But in laying out the data in simple charts and rankings, some companies fear the information will be misinterpreted.

“There’s information that can’t just be looked at from a snapshot,” said Walter Vrataric, CEO of Chinook Energy.

Chinook came in as having the worst rating of all operators last year with 52 incidents on a per 1,000-kilometre ratio, the common standard on reporting pipeline performance.

Vrataric said the company had one minor gas leak last year, but because it only had 19 kilometres of pipeline at the end of the year after selling off a long stretch, that incident turned into an alarming statistic when converted to the ratio.

He said Chinook is completely supportive of increased transparency, but that more work needs to be done to make sure the data shows an accurate picture.

Justin Robinson, a spokesman of Osum Production Corp., expressed similar concern.

“I think it is the right thing to do, it’s just that with smaller operators sometimes you need to pay attention to the context as well as the numbers,” Robinson said.

Pipeline incidents are on the decline in Alberta, with a 44-per-cent drop in annual incidents over the past 10 years and a three per cent drop between 2015 and 2016 to a total of 460 incidents last year.