Pipeline problems

Kudos to our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making the right decision to shelve the Northern Gateway pipeline as proposed. Raw Bitumen diluted with an acidic condensate to enable pipeline transportation is a recipe for disaster as what happened to the Kalamazoo River in the U.S .

Moving to the south, the Kinder Morgan Transmountain pipeline will triple tanker traffic out of Burrard inlet. This transportation of heavy crude is to be moved in a old existing pipeline coupled with a new pipeline that will increase the amount of crude oil being transported to the Lower Mainland by threefold as well.

Taking the old existing pipe out when the new larger pipeline is completed makes total sense because of its age, loss of metallurgical integrity and the thinning of the shell thickness due to the movement of the acidic slurry of bitumen. Replacing the old pipe with the new larger diameter pipe would also make sense so as the refineries become completed you have the bitumen supply available.

Looking at the big picture, our new NDP government should be calling on investors ( like David Black’s $25 billion refinery plan that he proposed to build at Onion Lake near Kitimat) to begin constructing multiple refineries and upgraders using carbon capture technology in the Lower Mainland and further up the valley to Princeton. We could have all tankers leaving with finished products. As we all know their are also many byproducts created when refining bitumen.

Everybody knows that if you throw a rock out into a body of water it sinks to great depths instantly before you can react. Do you believe that you can recover that rock before it sinks? The mass weight of bitumen is several times heavier than the same mass of water. So bitumen like a rock will sink too fast to be recoverable. Our former Premier Christy Clark knew this and still tried to deceive the public that a world-class oil recovery response was possible. The truth of the matter is that a world-class oil recovery is only possible with finished products.

On a related matter, residents of the Lower Mainland have been paying higher gas prices of late but within the next few years Burrard Thermal will be shutting down due to its old age requiring too much in maintenance costs. Burrard Thermal supplies the bulk of fuel needed for Lower Mainlanders but when it’s closed in the near future they will have to transport their fuel from Alberta or the U.S. Don’t see them getting any deals and their fuel costs will go through the roof at that point. Refineries with upgrades take considerable time to build so there’s no better time like the present to get moving on this.

Now we have a government that puts British Columbians first and not the lowest bidders as the Liberal government has shown with the mega Site C hydroelectric project. This project is already billions of dollars over budget because of the Liberal government’s irresponsible business dealings. We can now expect project labour agreements to be the norm on government projects, protecting fair wages for all, employment for First Nation’s peoples and training opportunities for apprentices numbering one apprentice for every four journeyman tradesmen, (not the present ratio at Site C of one apprentice for 40 journeymen.

These companies have no regard for training the younger generation. The most recent calculation of trades people at Site C had only 49 apprentices of the 2,000 workers on site. That’s less than five per cent of their overall work force, where as with union building trades their target is 25 per cent apprentices on any work site past and present.

Miles Thomas, Prince George