Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp., both based in Canada’s greatest city, as Stephen Harper recently labelled his adopted Calgary hometown, have been doing giant work giving this country a black eye.
And they may have driven a stake through their plans for two pipeline megaprojects – combined cost, $13-billion-plus. One of them is to span the length of the U.S. to deliver Athabasca crude to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast (TransCanada’s Keystone XL). The other is to navigate the mountain ranges of B.C. and Alberta to convey Athabasca crude to Asian markets (Enbridge’s Northern Gateway) as an alternative to a U.S. market that now takes practically all of Canada’s oil exports.
Even before this week’s report by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) excoriating Enbridge over its reckless disregard and ineptitude with its massive leak in Michigan in 2010, controversy had dogged these two planned projects since their inception.
Then came Tuesday’s widely reported NTSB findings on the rupture of an Enbridge pipeline that spilled about three million litres of oil in one of the most heavily populated U.S. states, in the Kalamazoo River some 70 km. west of Detroit.
The NTSB found that Enbridge knew about the roughly 15,000 defects in Line 6B some five years before the spill and excavated to inspect just 900 of them, obviously not including the corrosion and cracking that was under way on 6B near the Kalamazoo River.
When 6B ruptured, Enbridge control-room personnel in Alberta, Chernobyl-style, mistook repeated alarms of a pipe break for a drop in pressure. Accordingly, they twice pumped massive additional crude through the pipeline when shutting it down was called for. Seventeen hours passed before Enbridge realized it had a calamitous pipe break on its hands. The extra pumping accounted for 81 per cent of the Canadian crude spilled into Michigan waterways, causing an estimated $765 million in damages in what the U.S. government calls the biggest inland oil spill in Midwest history.
Deborah Hersman, NTSB chair, said “When we were examining Enbridge’s poor handling to their response to this rupture, you can’t help but think about the Keystone Kops.” The NTSB didn’t spare complaisant U.S. regulators from its wrath. They’d grown too cozy with Enbridge, taking its reassurances as gospel. That’s an economy-wide phenomenon known as “regulatory capture.” We have that curse to thank for the regulator-abetted Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010 (conveniently, for Enbridge, obscuring its own disaster that year in Michigan), and the Wall Street explosion that tipped the world into the Great Recession.
Post-NTSB report, a consortium of 50 Alberta groups already has sprung up this week to petition Alison Redford, the Tory Alberta premier, to launch an independent inquiry into pipeline safety in Alberta. These farmers, landowners, First Nations and environmentalists have a sense of urgency the province lacks. Redford is open to such an inquiry with recommendations to go into effect next summer. But her constituents want answers now.
B.C.’s Liberal premier, Christy Clark, says if the proposed Northern Gateway is to be run by Enbridge’s standards in Michigan, Enbridge can “forget it” in seeking approval of a pipeline from Alberta to a Pacific Coast shipping terminal at Kitimat. Adrian Dix, B.C.’s NDP leader, whose party leads Clark’s by high double digits ahead of next year’s B.C. general election, vows that as premier she would try to stop Northern Gateway “with everything we had.”
Thomas Mulcair, who leads Harper in the polls, said the “conclusive report by the Americans, I think, should be the final nail in that coffin,” meaning Northern Gateway. “The danger for that kind of raw bitumen flowing along the coast is just beyond belief.” Mulcair didn’t mention the Exxon Valdez, or need to.
Bitumen crude is indeed different from the conventional variety. The goo has to be diluted with toxic chemicals to make it viscous enough to flow through a pipeline. Those toxins have caused reported health problems among scores of Michiganders. It’s also studded with quartz sand and other corrosive materials that effectively sandblast the inner lining of steel pipelines.
As far as I can tell, the dwindling support for Keystone XL and Northern Gateway includes that of Harper. The PM has attacked some pipeline opponents as a “terrorist threat.”
Mitt Romney’s aboard. Approving Keystone XL is point one in the G.O.P. presidential nominee’s five-point plan for restoring lost jobs. (In fact, Keystone XL would create enough work to slash America’s jobless rate by less than 0.0005 per cent.)
And there’s the credulous Cal Davis, Alberta’s minister of international and intergovernmental relations. The day after the devastating NTSB report, Davis allowed that there might be some “learnings that we can garner from what’s transpired” in Michigan, but no reason to scrap Northern Gateway.
You have to wonder how many “learnings” this industry needs.
In 2006, BP PLC had to replace huge portions of its sprawling, long-neglected network of Prudhoe Bay pipelines that had spilled millions of gallons of crude. Which taught BP nothing, apparently, about its unfounded self-confidence in matters of safety as it reassured the U.S. Congress in 2008 that a doomed-to-fail blow-out preventer untested at the unprecedented depth of 1,524 metres below its Deepwater Horizon was infallible.
The first phase of TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline has leaked 14 times in just two years in operation. The firm also suffered an explosion this month at its Bison natural gas pipeline in Wyoming, a new line open for all of six months. When your newest, presumably state-of-the-art assets are deficient, that’s hardly a public-confidence builder.
Enbridge’s records show 804 pipeline spills on its network in the 11 years beginning in 1999.
CEO Pat Daniel says Enbridge’s lessons from Michigan are considerable. Let’s hope some day they actually kick in. Last month, a broken pumping station on an Enbridge Athabasca pipeline in Northern Alberta spilled about 230,000 litres of heavy crude. Two other firms also had major spills in Wildrose Country this summer, prompting that safety petition by concerned Albertans.
Canada’s two huge pipeline operators, with a combined 124 years’ experience, should be Canadian champions of best practices worldwide. Then again, on the facts, it’s tough to dispute NTSB Managing Director David Mayer’s assessment of “pervasive organizational failures at Enbridge.”
Realistically, how can one make a case for Enbridge operating a safe, 1,777-km pipeline across B.C. and Alberta mountain ranges – an engineering challenge for the ages – when it can’t manage to keep its oil to itself in the gently rolling hills of southwest Michigan?
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: David Olive
No comments:
Post a Comment