More oil, more risk?
Dakota Access pipeline owners press to pump more oil through Illinois. Critics worry expansion will increase risk of leak or devastating spill in state.
Oil has been flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline across Illinois since the summer of 2017, traveling underground from the Mississippi River to a hub in a tiny central Illinois town.
Every day, an average of 560,000 barrels of oil flows through the pipeline.
Now the company that owns the pipeline, which begins in North Dakota, wants to nearly double the volume, pumping up to 1.1 million barrels from the oil-rich Bakken region through South Dakota and Iowa into Illinois.
To increase the flow, the company wants to build a series of new pump stations along the 1,172-mile route, including in western Illinois, and upgrade its facilities where Dakota Access links up with other Midwestern pipelines.
In Illinois, the oil companies filed a petition for the upgrades with the Illinois Commerce Commission, seeking authorization to build a new pump station in Hancock County, north of Quincy, and replace and add pumps at the oil tank complex in Patoka, about 80 miles east of St. Louis. The petition also requests authorization to build a new pump station on another pipeline at the southern edge of Illinois, near the town of Joppa on the Ohio River.
But the June filing drew objections from two environmental groups and a landowner with property near the pipeline. Save Our Illinois Land and the
Sierra Club filed objections to block the expansion, arguing that pumping more oil through the pipeline will increase the risk of spills and leaks along the rural route.
“I don’t trust these people to operate in a safe and rational manner,” said Bill Klingele, who owns farmland adjacent to the pipeline in Brown County in western Illinois.
The Dakota Access pipeline and the Energy Transfer Crude Oil pipeline, which delivers oil to the Gulf Coast, are collectively referred to as the Bakken pipeline, a joint venture between Energy Transfer, MarEn Bakken Co. and Phillips 66.
Since summer, the pipeline company and the environmental groups have been locked in legal wrangling with no immediate end in sight. The environmental groups are pushing for more information on why the increased oil flow is needed and objecting to the risks involved. The oil companies have highlighted the economic benefits of the project.
“The optimization of the pipeline will help allow for further development in the Bakken, economic growth in North Dakota and the stabilization of costs for the industry and consumers,” Lisa Coleman, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer, said in an emailed response to questions. “Constructing pump stations is a safe and standard industry practice. The maximum operation pressure (MOP) for which the pipeline was designed, tested and permitted will not change. … We constructed the Dakota Access Pipeline using all of the latest pipeline technology, and exceeded many regulatory requirements with additional safeguards.”
The fate of proposals to build additional pump stations and increase the pipeline flow in two of the three other states through which Dakota Access travels also are up in the air.
In Iowa, public utility commissioners required the pipeline company to file detailed answers to questions about how the upgrades will affect operations before they vote on the project. In North Dakota, where indigenous people and environmentalists clashed with authorities during 2016 protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation over pipeline construction, a mid-November public meeting drew dozens to the microphone.
A decision on the fate of the new pump stations in Illinois will not be made until after the new year. The next evidentiary hearings are scheduled for Feb. 10 and 11 in Chicago.
“My primary goal is for them to leave it (the oil) in the ground,” Klingele said “But they’re not going to do that. These people are greedy.”
Pressing for more volume
Dakota Access, in a June filing with the commerce commission, detailed its desire to increase pipeline volume and upgrade pumping infrastructure along the route. The simple reason for the changes, they say, is increased production and demand for crude oil.
In order to handle the increased flow, the company wants to build a $35 million to $40 million pump station near Carthage in western Illinois and add two pumps and replace two others at the pump and tank hub near the towns of Patoka and Vernon along U.S. Highway 51.
Those upgrades, the company says, will allow it to increase the daily flow through the pipeline to as much as 1.1 million barrels per day. The Williston Basin in North Dakota, which includes the Bakken region, is producing about 1.4 million barrels per day, up 29% from when the Dakota Access pipeline began operating in June 2017, according to a recent company filing for the commerce commission. The company forecasts that production will continue to increase over the next five years because of advances in “recovery and drilling technology.”
Energy Transfer is the Dallas-Forth Worth area’s fourth-largest publicly traded company, according to The Dallas Morning News.
The increased flow, the company says, will not increase the risk of spills or leaks or increase the danger to workers or those who live near the pipeline.
“Our plan to optimize the pipeline’s capacity is well within the design parameters of the current system,” Coleman wrote. “The additional pumps and the enhanced safety controls along the route, i.e., surge tanks, will not change the risk profile of the pipeline or the maximum operating pressure. The Dakota Access pipeline will continue to operate safely at the optimized capacity.”
The company also noted that the pipeline’s Operations Control Center in Houston monitors the pressure, temperature, density and flow of oil throughout the pipeline around the clock. The staff at the control center can remotely shut emergency valves or deploy field personnel to manually shut down the pipeline, Coleman said.
The Illinois Commerce Commission staffer assigned to the case has recommended the commission approve the plans for new pumping stations and facilities for additional capacity.
“I continue to recommend that the commission find that the planned additional pumping stations are necessary and will provide the security and convenience of the public in Illinois,” he testified.
Two labor groups, Laborers’ International Union of North America and its regional councils and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local No. 702, have filed as intervening parties in the Illinois Commerce Commission case, urging the commissioners to approve the projects. The labor groups argue the new pump station construction would result in work for their members.
Transporting oil by safest method
Khalid Aziz, an energy resources engineering professor emeritus at Stanford University, said he does not see any peril in the company’s push to deliver more oil through the pipeline. The company should know the maximum pressure the pipeline can handle, he said, based on the pipeline’s steel and thickness, and “is not going to increase the pressure beyond the safety standards that are established.”
“I don’t see why there is a controversy,” Aziz said. In Aziz’s opinion, if the pipeline company wants to increase flow because of increased demand for oil, “I don’t see that making the pipeline any less safe.”
Aziz stressed that pipelines “are the safest ways to transport oil” — much safer, he said, than by rail cars.
“I get really upset when people object to pipelines when oil is still being transported by rail,” Aziz said.
The pipeline companies have resisted providing specific information to the environmental groups regarding steps or equipment that will be used to prevent pressure surges or that will ensure operating pressure will be within acceptable limits, saying such information is not within the scope of the commerce commission proceedings.
But Klingele, a retired engineer who lives in Joliet and owns 385 acres of Brown County farmland along with his two sisters, said he’s not convinced by the company’s arguments that increased flow will be safe or by the argument that pipelines are better than other forms of transport. He provided written testimony to the commerce commission in October outlining his objections.
“Statistics are great until oil is coming up in your land, your soil,” Klingele said in an interview with the Tribune. “Then statistics don’t mean anything.”
The SOIL group and Sierra Club also oppose expansion. SOIL, a group of Illinois residents, was formed in 2017 in opposition to the expansion of the Enbridge Line 61 project, which runs from Superior, Wisconsin to Flanagan, Illinois, 45 miles northeast of Peoria. SOIL members are opposed to the extraction of oil from the ground, and thus its transportation across the land. Group members said they want to push back against the development of more fossil-fuel-based industries, which they argue exacerbates climate change and does not benefit Illinois or the Midwest.
“This is our chance to say, ‘No, we’re not going to do this stuff here,’ ” said SOIL’s treasurer, Richard Stuckey.
SOIL’s board chair Deni Mathews said the group is concerned about all of the effects of pumping more oil through the pipeline.
“I just can’t imagine how you can almost double the capacity without increasing the risk,” Mathews said.
Multistate debate
The debate over the pipeline upgrades has been taking place for several months across several states.
In North Dakota last month, a public hearing stretched on for more than 15 hours. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe is intervening, objecting to the plans. After commissioners heard from the company and the tribe, about two dozen members of the public commented on the proposal. The public service commission plans to hold a series of meetings before deciding on the project.
In between the start of the pipeline in North Dakota and its end in Illinois, the pipeline proposal faces different bars for approval. In South Dakota, the company does not need state approval because wording in the 2014 petition to construct the pipeline does not cap the amount of oil. There, the inclusion of the words “or more” means the company only needs to receive approval at the county level for plans to build one new pump station along the route, according to Leah Mohr, deputy executive director of the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission.
But in Iowa, the utilities board has pumped the brakes on the pipeline’s upgrades. In September, the board issued an order requiring Dakota Access to file a petition for an amendment to their original permit. The Iowa board, in its 13-page ruling, is requiring the company to provide a bevy of new information before it will consider whether to approve proposed upgrades to a pump station and increase the flow through the state. The Iowa Utilities Board specifically asks the company to address whether increased flow will increase the amount of oil that would be released in a spill and how an additive used to help with more flow will affect the longevity of the pipes.
In the ruling, the Iowa board noted that it initially approved a pipeline that could handle a capacity of 570,000 barrels per day.
“New facilities in (Illinois and North Dakota) would not be necessary if the Dakota Access pipeline was proposed and originally constructed as a pipeline that could transport up to 1,100,000 barrels of crude oil per day,” the Iowa board members wrote.
They concluded: “Since Dakota Access must build additional facilities in other states and modify the pumping station in Cambridge, Iowa, to transport the increased flow of oil, it is evident the existing pipeline was not designed, constructed, or approved to carry 1,100,000 barrels per day.”
Stuckey, the SOIL member, wonders how anyone in the Midwest, other than the company itself, would be helped by the plans, especially if the oil is headed for export to other countries.
“It begs the question, what is the benefit to Illinois, the Midwest, or the U.S., for that matter?” Stuckey said. “Who’s getting any benefit out of this at all? … We get the risks, and the damage of the climate change.”
“Our plan to optimize the pipeline’s capacity is well within the design parameters of the current system.”
— Lisa Coleman, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer
“I just can’t imagine how you can almost double the capacity without increasing the risk.”
— Deni Mathews, board chair of Save Our Illinois Land