Fuel crisis inquiry begins digging
Probe will investigate if pipeline weakness could have been found earlier. Tom Pullar-Strecker reports.
Refining NZ will face grilling from a government inquiry over whether it could have averted the rupture of its Auckland fuel pipeline 18 months ago and prevented the crisis that led to the cancellation of more than 100 flights at Auckland airport.
The pipeline provides the main supply of petrol, diesel and jet fuel for Auckland and its catastrophic failure on September 14, 2017, raised questions about whether a second pipeline costing hundreds of millions of dollars might be justified.
But a body representing airlines has signalled they may now be close to an agreement with oil companies that would instead see extra fuel storage tanks installed either at Auckland airport or at a nearby facility at Wiri at a likely cost of $100 million to $150m.
That would be sufficient to see airlines through any similar 10-day outage with only a small amount of fuel rationing, Board of Airlines Representatives executive director Justin Tighe-Umbers said.
One way or another, airlines and their passengers would ultimately pick up the tab for that investment, but the impact on individual airline tickets should be ‘‘minimal’’, he said.
‘‘If you were to build an additional pipe it might be a different story.’’
Refining NZ, which also operates the Marsden Point Oil Refinery, blamed the pipeline failure on an unidentified digger driver who it believes damaged the pipeline some time after July 2014, perhaps while searching for swamp kauri.
A Northland Regional Council report concluded there was ‘‘no suggestion Refining NZ could or should have known the incident was going to occur’’.
But a newly-convened government inquiry will shortly begin hearing evidence on whether an increase in pressure in the pipeline may have contributed to the failure and also on whether Refining NZ should have detected the digger damage before the pipeline broke.
It emerged last year that a sequence of events had preceded the pipeline rupture.
In particular, a WorleyParsons engineering report released under the Official Information Act revealed the pipeline experienced an ‘‘emergency shutdown’’ just two hours before it ruptured, after a maintenance worker accidentally triggered a fire alarm at a pumping station part-way along the 170 kilometre pipeline.
Two of three pumps then failed to restart when the refinery began pumping fuel back through the pipeline about 20 minutes later, causing pressure in the pipeline to spike to nearer to its maximum allowed level.
The normal maximum operating pressure of the pipeline had also been increased the previous month to allow more fuel to be pumped down it.
The two members of the governmentappointed inquiry team – Elena Trout, president of the Institution of Professional Engineers, and civil engineer and Wellington regional councillor Roger Blakeley – said they intended to see if anyone was at fault and would adopt an ‘‘inquisitorial procedure’’ to gather information.
They said in a ‘‘list of issues’’ that they intended to look at the frequency of Refining NZ’s tests on the condition of the pipeline.
The company ran a scanning device through the pipe in 2006, 2009 and July 2014 to check for problems and had next scheduled a test for this year.
It did not conduct a new test before increasing the operating pressure of the pipeline in 2017.
After the rupture, former Refining NZ chief executive Sjoerd Post – who has since resigned – defended that decision, saying it was only required to do such tests every 10 years.
Refining NZ would not comment last year on whether it thought the pump failures that followed the emergency outage and the August pressure rise might have been the ‘‘final straws’’ that triggered the pipeline rupture.
Neither would it speculate whether the pipeline might otherwise have held out until the next scheduled scan this year.
But spokesman Greg McNeill noted an engineering report by Quest Integrity concluded the pipeline could have been expected to withstand a higher pressure than it was ever subjected to, had it not been for the digger damage.
That report also suggested the digger damage was likely to have caused the pipeline to fail at some point in time regardless of any pressures rises, as normal pressure cycles in the pipeline caused the cracks it created to gradually worsen.
Aside from potentially attributing blame for the fuel crisis, Trout and Blakeley will also consider whether it showed additional measures might be warranted to increase the resilience of Auckland’s fuel supply.
Tighe-Umbers said the proposed additional jet fuel storage at Auckland airport or Wiri, and a ‘‘road bridge’’ costing less than $10m that would allow tankers to refuel directly from the Marsden Point Oil Refinery, should in combination be sufficient to see the airlines through any repeat event.
That would be a far more cost-effective way to deal with what was potentially a ‘‘one in 30 year event’’ than a second pipeline, he said.