‘A lot more oil escaped than they’re letting on,’ says scientist
Husky Energy Inc.’s claim that it has recovered 88 per cent of the crude oil released when one of its pipelines failed two months ago in Saskatchewan is “surprising ” given the circumstances, according to a hydrogeologist familiar with the spill.
“I think a lot more oil escaped than they’re letting on, and I think a lot of it is going to end up at the bottom, in the sediments, and that’s going to be a long-term problem,” said Ricardo Segovia of the Santa Fe, New Mexico non-profit E-Tech International.
Interested groups, including Idle No More, contracted E-Tech International to test sediment samples pulled from the North Saskatchewan River after the July 20 spill, which Husky said released up to 250,000 litres of oil and condensate.
Segovia said his conclusion is based on his experience, as well as Husky’s refusal to say exactly how big the spill was and a 14-hour delay between when a pipeline problem was detected and the leak isolated — a timeline Husky disputes.
That delay allowed some oil to travel far downstream and sink into the river bed, suggesting that a “rather high” recovery rate of 88 per cent is unlikely, Segovia said, adding that in most cases a recovery rate of 50 per cent is a success.
“Usually a lot of the oil is lost. Now they’re saying 88 per cent. How credible is that?”
Two months after the spill, it remains unclear what caused the 16-inch pipeline east of Maidstone to fail, precipitating a massive response from downstream communities that relied on the river for drinking water.
Government and Husky officials have repeatedly declined to comment on an ongoing investigation into the incident. That report is expected to be made public when it is complete.
It is also unclear how much oil escaped. A report published by the province and based on Husky data stated the total spill volume was 225,000 litres, plus or minus 10 per cent, of which about 12 per cent was fast-evaporating condensate.
As of Sept. 10, crews contracted by the Calgary-based energy company had recovered 181,000 litres of spilled material — of which 66,900 had soaked into the ground near the spill site — leaving 44,000 litres unaccounted for, the report stated.
Husky spokesman Mel Duvall said in an email this week that crews have recovered 88 per cent of the crude oil that spilled from the pipeline. That figure does not include the roughly 27,000 litres of condensate that also escaped, he said in the email.
The provincial Ministry of Environment, which has been involved in the cleanup since the beginning, is “comfortable” with Husky’s figures, according to Wes Kotyk, executive director of the ministry’s environmental protection branch.
Staff have verified how much oil has been recovered, and found that the company’s estimate of how much oil escaped the pipeline is “a reasonable calculation and a reasonable amount of error that would be acceptable in this type of situation,” he said.
Asked about E-Tech International’s claim that the 14-hour delay exacerbated the effects of the spill, Kotyk said the government is investigating the spill and won’t draw any conclusions about what happened until that work is completed.
Experts have compared the Husky spill to a much larger release that took place in 2010, when an Enbridge Inc., pipeline spilled about 3.2 million litres of bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.
Steve Hamilton, a professor of ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry at Michigan State University who advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency following the spill, said estimates of how much oil was recovered vary six years later.
While it’s possible that Husky crews have recovered 88 per cent of the spilled oil in Saskatchewan, the fact that most of the condensate would have evaporated means the company’s numbers “sound pretty optimistic,” Hamilton said.
His experience working on the Kalamazoo spill underscored another “big problem” facing those responding to environmental disasters: the lack of information available from pipeline companies, which tend to treat their data as proprietary, he said.
In a report published last year, Hamilton and his co-authors said comprehensive annual reports by pipeline operators “will fill a fundamental gap in publicly available information” and help responders know what effects a spill could have.
“This will facilitate better planning at the area, regional, and national levels and encourage more informed public engagement,” the report stated. the largest single category of wholesale trade in Saskatchewan, slightly ahead of machinery and equipment.
For example, the $10.6 billion in sales of agricultural supplies represented 40 per cent of total wholesale trade in 2015. Saskatchewan posted $26.5 billion in wholesale trade in 2015, up from $24.9 billion in 2014 and $23.8 billion in 2013. What it means: With the four per cent increase in sales in July, wholesale trade is rebounding from a slow start in the first half of 2016, which saw a 14 per cent decrease in sales, compared with the first half of 2015. And agricultural supplies led the way, suggesting that farmers were gearing up for an expected bumper crop, estimated to be 33.6 million tonnes — the second-largest in Saskatchewan history behind the record crop of 39.1 million tonnes in 2013.