Pipeline foe says Delco study proves project’s risk
One group opposed to the Mariner East 2 project said a county-funded risk assessment forms the basis for the reason Delaware County Council should intercede.
Delaware County Council approved $115,000 to have Houston, Texas-based G2 Integrated Services to conduct an evaluation of the risks associated with the Mariner East 2 and Adelphia pipelines. It concluded that people are more likely to die from fatal traffic accidents, house fires or stair falls than from an incident associated with pipelines of this nature.
Mariner East 2 is the almost completed 306-mile pipeline that will transport 275,000 barrels of natural gas liquids, mostly propane and butane, from the Marcellus Shale region to Marcus Hook for domestic and international distribution. About 11.4 miles of the 20-inch line is in Delaware County.
The Adelphia line is an existing 84-mile, 18-inch line making a transition to natural gas from oil. The northern 34 miles has already been converted and the remaining 50 miles, of which 12 are in Delaware County, is in the process of being adapted to transport natural gas.
One group that has advocated on behalf of community members is Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety. They have also spearheaded funding efforts for other safety studies on the lines and representatives from the group provided their own analysis of G2’s findings.
“With a modeled blast radius of 1.3 miles, the results of the G2 risk assessment are frightening,” Eric Friedman, speaking on behalf of Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety, said. “It is now abundantly clear that the rupture of a hazardous, highly volatile liquids transmission pipeline in Delaware County is going to be a mass casualty event. And the odds of this happening are disturbingly high. Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety calls on Delaware County Council to take action now based on the alarming public safety implications in this report.”
One thing, Friedman said, was that G2 figured out accident consequences for the Mariner East 2 pipeline using a program called Phast that he said was developed by DNV, a Sunoco contractor.
“Using Phast, G2 developed a model that shows a vulnerability zones three times larger than calculated by Quest Consultants in the Citizens Risk Assessment,” he said, referring to the study Del-Chesco commissioned solely from private funds.
Friedman pointed out that G2 showed that a delayed ignition flammable vapor cloud could extend downwind 2,075 meters, or about 6,800 feet, the equivalent of 1.3 miles. He also noted that Quest’s calculation was 2,115 feet.
In addition, he said a key factor had been omitted.
“G2 ignored the fact that Sunoco proposes to operate multiple hazardous, highly volatile liquids transmission pipelines in the same right-of-way,” Friedman said. “This omission is important because, everything else being equal, two pipelines doubles the probability of a release over a single pipeline. Doubling probability also doubles risk. Three pipelines triples the risk and so on.”
He said G2’s focus on one pipeline only doesn’t fully portray the potential scenarios.
“Adding a second pipeline doubles the risk at zero meters,” he said of the study’s outdoor risk calculation. “”This is off the top of their chart and greater than the other risks they present (with the exception of being in a motor vehicle accident...)”
The G2 study said a person is 20 times more likely to die from a traffic accident or stair fall and 35 times more likely to die from a house fire than an incident involving the Mariner East
2 pipeline.
In addition, Friedman said the assessment only considers individual risk of fatality.
“It ignores the fact (as Quest did also) that most locations in Delco like Glenwood Elementary School, for example, contain dozens or hundreds of people within what Sunoco calls the ‘blast radius,’” he said.
County officials are working to schedule a public presentation of the findings with a representative from
G-2 Integrated Services.