Building pipelines is an invitation for more oil spills
All technologies fail sooner or later. If the Northern Gateway pipeline and supertanker port or the Keystone pipeline are built, there will be spills, including disastrous spills. Just as the decision to use nuclear power means accidents, including major ones like Chornobyl or Fukushima, a decision to build big diluted bitumen pipelines is a decision to accept oil spills that will damage forest, river and marine ecosystems.
There will be spills because everything breaks down over time. Pumps blow out, corrosion sets in, landslides and tidal waves and earthquakes happen, wackos blow things up. Operations personnel get lazy or fall asleep, they get drunk on the job, they don’t know how to react when the unprecedented happens — or sometimes they just don’t care.
A case in point is the continent’s largest- ever freshwater bitumen spill, from the Enbridge pipeline in Michigan in July 2010, a pipeline that also runs through Saskatchewan. The spill dumped more than 20,000 barrels of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River.
According to the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board, which is responsible for investigating the spill, safety measures that could have reduced the impact of the spill were not followed. Here is what they say:
“The initial and subsequent alarms associated with the rupture were not recognized as a line break … over multiple control centre shifts. Residents near the rupture site began calling the … 911 dispatch centre to report odours at 9:25 p.m. on Sunday; however, no calls were placed to the Enbridge control centre until 11:17 a.m. the following day. Once the Enbridge control centre was notified, nearly 17-hours after the initial rupture, remote controlled valves were closed, bracketing the ruptured segment within a three-mile section.”
It seemed the staff in Enbridge’s Edmonton control room did not know or could not agree what to do when their instruments indicated there had been a major pipeline failure.
Verbatim accounts of the conversation in the control room show that the staff disagreed on what was happening.
One was quoted as say- ing, “Whatever. We’re going home and will be off for a few days.”
Meanwhile, thousands of barrels of diluted bitumen were gushing into the ecologically sensitive watershed.
So far, the spill has cost Enbridge $725 million and U.S. taxpayers another $37 million to clean up. All because somebody didn’t push a button.
Diluted bitumen is worse than crude oil. Volatile components of the diluent containing benzene and toluene evaporated, causing local inhabitants to suffer nausea, dizziness, headaches, coughing and fatigue.
The bitumen sank to the riverbed and became mixed with sediments. Conventional cleanup equipment such as skimmers and oil booms proved useless in recovering the submerged oil.
This spill is hardly an isolated incident. Enbridge has reported hundreds of spills over the last decade, totalling 132,715 barrels of oil, equivalent to more than half the Exxon Valdez spill. Thousands of these barrels of oil were spilled in Saskatchewan.
The latest Enbridge spill, near Elk Point, Alta., on June 18, saw an estimated 230,000 litres of heavy crude oil leak into the environment. The cause has been attributed to the failure of a gasket.
Pipeline failures are not exclusive to Enbridge, of course. Earlier in June a larger spill dumped 475,000 barrels of crude oil from a Plains Mid-Stream Canadaowned pipeline into the Red Deer River, part of the South Saskatchewan River system.
Federal officials flagged safety concerns about Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project nearly two years ago, while warning that the company had an “insufficient” oil spill response plan.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials saw fit to halt the proposed Keystone pipeline — that would run through Saskatchewan — due to environmental concerns.
Part of the problem is hubris: The belief people can engineer something that won’t fail.
And as the federal government’s gutting of environmental oversight demonstrates, it operates under the illusion that it is reasonable to reduce public scrutiny — in the face of a record of pipeline failures — and to still expect pipelines to be fail-safe.
This shows a shocking disregard for the environment and human health by our federal government.
Contrast this with renewable energy: When there is a huge solar energy spill, it’s just called a sunny day.