Oil and water don’t mix

In making his case for coastal refineries (Citizen, May 17) David Black was less than honest about the consequences of a spill of dilbit into B.C. coastal waters. Referring to a study done by Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Natural Resources Canada, he states that it would sink to the bottom in three hours.

The study actually says nothing of the sort.

What it does say is that in their tests in a wave tank, when they mixed dilbit with high concentrations of a very fine type of clay called kaolin and virtually all the bitumen either dispersed or formed oil-particle aggregates and sank to the bottom. They also found that conventional crude spilled into dirty water similarly sinks. This was the case in the Kalamazoo spill – the river was very dirty and so the dilbit sank.

B.C.’s coastal waters are not that dirty. The study concluded that in the Douglas Channel approximately 20 per cent of the diluted bitumen would form OPAs which would sink below the sea surface, with little of that material actually sinking to the bottom. A model of an oil spill in the Salish Sea suggests that the majority of the oil would stay on the surface, and accumulate on the shoreline, rather than dispersing into the water column, no different from a similar crude oil spill.

Mr. Black should stick to the facts in presenting his case, not that it’s likely to help him. The same people who oppose the Trans Mountain pipeline also oppose any and all pipelines, and refineries too for that matter.

Art Betke Prince George