It’s quickly become what some call a public relations nightmare for the province. There have been three oil spills in the past month, and more than 300 in the last year. Now, the pressure is mounting for a full review of the pipeline system.
230,000 litres of heavy crude leaked out of Enbridge’s Athabasca pipeline near Elk Point this week. A pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada leaked up to 475,000 litres of light sour crude into the Red Deer River on June 7. Before that, there was a spill in May, near Rainbow River up north. There, nearly 800,000 litres of oil leaked out.
Word of the spills is making headlines around the world.
“It’s not just a PR thing,” Brian Mason says. “These are real serious problems in our province.” Alberta’s NDP leader says the issue goes far deeper than just how the province is perceived. “It’s more than the optics… we need to be moving towards a system of monitoring and enforcement on the infrastructure that exists in Alberta, which is extensive.”
Premier Alison Redford isn’t rejecting the idea of a review of Alberta’s pipelines, but she’s not jumping onboard just yet.
“I’m not presupposing the outcome of these investigations,” says Redford, who will wait for the results of the ERCB investigations into the spills.
“Before we see what they are in respect to those three incidents, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions.”
In Alberta, the ERCB is the regulatory body charged with investigating the spills. Critics like Greenpeace say the board is too tied to industry. However, the government maintains the ERCB has its confidence, and the Premier says she’ll wait for the outcome of the board’s investigations on these spills before deciding to do anything more.
Meantime, Canada’s pipeline boss says he expects the recent leaks in Alberta will give ammunition to opponents of the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway projects.
“I think any kind of incident, no matter how small, is going to be picked up by those who are going to oppose any kind of energy development, and they’ll try and use it as a rationale for not doing it,” says Doug Bloom, chairman of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association and president of Spectra Energy, speaking after a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
“Any spill right now is going to be bad timing. There’s such a focus now with Gateway and with Keystone XL and other projects going through regulatory review. Any time there’s any kind of an incident no matter how large or how small, it’s going to be prominent.”
“Over the last year or two, like it or not, we seem to find ourselves prominent in the news and in some cases for the wrong reasons,” Bloom adds.
Redford says it’s the job of Albertans and Canadians to weigh the risks of the oil industry with the benefits.
“These are minimal risks, and we see these incidents happen sometimes,” she says, adding the social outcomes, environmental sustainability, and economic development of these projects need to be considered.
Mason says there’s no time to waste, and that a review should be done immediately.
“There needs to be a complete review of all the pipeline infrastructure in the province … especially aging infrastructure,” he says.
There would be a lot to review. Alberta has nearly 200,000 kilometres of pipeline, and 40% was built before 1990.
Industry figures show at least 3.4 million litres of hydrocarbons have leaked from pipelines in the province every year since 2005.
With files from Vassy Kapelos and The Canadian Press
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