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Oil pipeline safety: What’s the real story

The recent spill of diluted oil sands bitumen after a pipeline break in northern Alberta has largely fallen off the news radar in most of Canada.

It’s probably not surprising, given the remote location at Nexen Energy’s production site near Fort McMurray. If five million litres (about 30,000 Imperial barrels) of emulsion made up of bitumen, water and sand had created a small lake near, say, Calgary, it would be front-page news.

Nonetheless, those who follow such things have taken note. The double-walled production pipeline was only about a year old and supposedly had the latest leak-detection technology. Both apparently failed; it was a Nexen worker who happened to be in the area who spotted the spill.

The embattled energy industry can ill afford another black mark. It’s already tough enough to sell Canadians on the idea of more pipelines to pump large quantities of bitumen diluted with solvents (known as diluent) through pipelines headed west to the B.C. coast, east through central Canada and south to the U.S.

Environmentalists and climate-change activists lobbying to stop the multi-billion-dollar projects have pointed to recent large-scale spills such as the Nexen incident as a reason to quash them. Proponents, including Alberta’s newly-elected NDP Premier Rachel Notley, say while spills are unwelcome, pipelines are still the safest way to move large volumes of oil, compared with rail tank cars (remember Lac-Megantic?) or even trucks.

If you take the climate-change crowd out of the equation – they oppose any new pipelines because they foster increased carbon emissions – then pipeline safety becomes the main point of contention.

Just how safe are Canada’s pipelines and how prepared are their owners to respond if there’s a serious spill?

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA), which represents the major pipeline transmission companies, refused a request from Yahoo Canada to talk about safety.

But interviews with the two federal agencies charged with regulating interprovincial transmission pipelines and investigating incidents (the provinces regulate internal networks) suggest the threat of spills, large and small, can never be completely eliminated.

A U.S. pipeline expert also said we should not place our faith in warning systems touted in applications for new projects such as the Northern Gateway line from Alberta to the West Coast and the Energy East project that would re-purpose an existing line to move bitumen to the East Coast.

According to statistics posted by the Transportation Safety Board (TSB), there are more than 21,600 kilometres federally-regulated oil pipelines in all, plus almost 56,000 km of natural gas lines. They moved about 1.4 billion barrels of oil and 5.4 trillion cubic feet of gas last year.

The TSB recorded five pipeline accidents under federal jurisdiction last year, down from 11 in 2013 and below the five-year average of 10, despite an increase in pipeline activity. The accident rate based on the volume of product moved dropped substantially. Over the last decade, just over a quarter of the accidents occurred on the transmission lines, while almost half happened at compressor stations and the rest in other locations, such as gathering lines.

Most accidents spilled only a few barrels of oil

Both larger accidents last year involved natural gas lines, not oil. In the last decade there were 14 accidents, the majority involving only a few barrels of oil, the TSB data shows.

“The number of accidents and incidents is pretty much stable over the past 10 years,” Manuel Kotchounian, the TSB’s acting manager of pipelines, said in an interview.

Pipeline incident reports, which capture other problems not necessarily including the release of oil or gas, numbered 133 last year, up from 118 in 2013. The rise was partly attributable to regulation changes that defined the safety zone surrounding the pipeline. When it came to oil spills, 75 per cent were a cubic metre (roughly six barrels) or less.

So far this year, federally regulated lines recorded one accident, resulting in a fire or explosion, and 15 incidents (all now called occurrences) in all, with no uncontained releases. The TSB’s table doesn’t break out oil and gas separately.

The story is a little different in Alberta, which has 415,000 kilometres of pipelines under the Alberta Energy Regulator’s jurisdiction. There have been five pipeline breaks resulting in major spills since 2011, not counting the latest Nexen one.

Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said the province has averaged two spills a day for the last 37 years, “which is definitely atrocious by anybody’s standards even though industry does try to spin that number every once in a while.”

Hudema, based in Edmonton, faults in part an “insanely low” rate of inspections of lines in the province’s aging pipeline infrastructure, saying to inspect every line in Alberta at least once would take a century.

But can we extrapolate Alberta’s alleged problems to federally-regulated interprovincial transmission lines? There’s cause for concern, Hudema argues, because the national carriers use much the same technology.

An American with more than 30 years in the pipeline sector as a designer, operator and consultant also shares in the skepticism about industry safety claims.

The Nexen accident and its delayed discovery were not a surprise, Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts Inc. of Redmond, Wash., said in an interview.

“The public thinks it’s like a balloon: If it breaks or leaks, it bursts, so everybody ought to see that,” he said. “In fairness to the industry, it’s much more difficult problem to identify releases.”

Oil discharges are caused by anything from pinhole leaks to large stress-related pipe fractures, all of which are though to pinpoint.

“Even the ruptures can be very challenging to identify,” said Kuprewicz.

No country has perfect pipeline regulation, says expert

Kuprewicz has made submissions at National Energy Board pipeline applications, including TransCanada PipeLines Ltd.’s Energy East project, which uses a combination of new and re-purposed pipe to move bitumen diluent east.

No country has a perfect regulatory system, he said. Each has strengths and weaknesses. For Kuprewicz, Canada’s weakness is its “overuse” of risk-management approaches to make decisions on pipeline design, siting and operation. The engineering risk assessment technique used in this country to validate the integrity of a line and predict the time it will take before it fails is flawed, he believes. They often miss time to failure by many years, he said.

“My opinion would be too many companies are misapplying the engineering assessments and going well beyond what the technology can do,” he said.

Iain Colquhoun, the NEB’s chief engineer, rejects Kuprewicz’s view.

“We are accountable to the people of Canada for the safety of pipelines, so we tend to be risk-averse,” he told Yahoo Canada.

“We tend to look very skeptically at risk assessments given to us and make sure the assumptions that are made are conservative assumptions, reasonable and conservative assumptions.”

Canada’s regulatory philosophy is little different from other places where Colquhoun has worked, including Britain, Texas and Southeast Asia, he said.

“The basic methodologies that are used with all of these jurisdictions is very similar,” he said. “I would say there’s no shortcomings in our approach. We’re at least as good as any of the rest.

“We have not seen anything in the failure rates that lead us to believe that we’re in any way worse than any other jurisdiction.”

Leak detection has been fingered as another villain in pipeline breaks, notoriously in the 4.5-million-litre spill near Little Buffalo, Alta., in 2011 and three-million-litre spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River that gave Calgary-based Enbridge Energy a a black eye.

“It went seventeen and a half hours before somebody isolated the damn thing and initiated an oil spill response,” Kuprewicz pointed out.

The core technology used to warn pipeline control rooms about leaks dates back decades Hudema noted. It relies on regular inspections via so-called “smart pigs” that are run through the pipeline and on mass balancing, where controllers monitor how much product leaves the line compared with how much was put in.

Leak-sensing equipment not that reliable

Analysis of 10 years of U.S. spill data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration between 2002 and 2012 showed remote sensors detected leaks only five per cent of the time, according to a Bloomberg Business news report.

Kuprewicz said the conclusion is a little harsh: The figure is more like 80 per cent detection failure.

“It’s a very high percentage, that’s the point,” he said. “Whether it’s 95 or 80, it’s a big number.”

He and Hudema agree the applicants for new lines such as Energy East and Northern Gateway (Enbridge) oversell leak-detection as a safety net.

“I don’t necessarily think they’re lying to people or deceiving people, but they’re overstating their capabilities in order to sell the project,” Kuprewicz said.

The TSB’s Kotchounian can’t recall the agency identifying leak detection as a specific problem in any recent investigations.

Colquhoun of the NEB does not believe remote leak sensing has been oversold, though it’s puzzling the Nexen leak was missed.

“That should have been picked up very easily with what we call mass balancing, in other words, the amount that comes out should be the amount that goes in,” he said.

Pipeline operators augment remote leak detection with air patrols and workers literally walking the line.

It’s unrealistic to expect 100 per cent pipeline reliability or perfect leak detection, Kuprewicz said. The technology continues to evolve, including recent developments in external leak detection, including the use of sonar and aerial surveillance that don’t rely on knowing what’s going on inside the pipe.

“In hyper-sensitive areas, where oil would be a very terrible thing because you’ll never be able to clean it up, they’ve tried those in field applications, actually in operating lines,” he said.

Colquhoun said detecting major pipeline ruptures are not the biggest problem.

“It’s the small leaks that can occur over a period of time. That’s where the bigger challenge is,” he said. “The methodologies for finding those is developing but there’s still a bit of work to be done.

“On a new pipeline you would not expect that to happen. But an old line, where you’re dealing with ongoing maintenance, there is a possibility you might get these very small leaks.”

If you can’t rely on leak detection, it makes companies’ spill response even more important, said Kuprewicz.

“But understand that spill response is after the fact; the genie’s out of the bottle,” he said.