An oil spill south of Elk Point last week, with about 230,000 litres of heavy crude oil released from a pumping station, couldn’t have come at a worse time, at least in terms of publicity for pipelines. Crews are still working to clean up two other large leaks in Alberta, nearly 800,000 litres of oil from a Pace Oil & Gas Ltd. well, about 200 kilometres from the Northwest Territories border, and 160,000 to 480,000 litres from a Plains Midstream Canada pipeline that ruptured beneath the Red Deer River.
Energy Minister Ken Hughes has been quoted as saying that oil spills will happen from time to time, “and they simply cannot be avoided” in a province like Alberta, which has the most pipelines, at more than 320,000 kilometres, than any other place in Canada.
Alberta experiences 300 spills a year, which some critics charge is partly due to the aging pipeline infrastructure. According to the Globe and Mail, in 2010, the province averaged nearly two pipeline failures a day, spilling 9,350 litres, but that amount is actually dwarfed by the amount of oil spilled in these past three months, a number that is dwarfed even more by the amount of oil safely flowing through the province around the clock.
News of oil spills hits hard; luckily, the Elk Point-area spill did not affect waterways or any wildlife, and as such, will not have a strong negative environmental impact – there’s much more cause for concern when pipeline ruptures may affect waterways, as with the Red Deer spill.
However, Hughes is right when he notes we all fill up our cars using gasoline. We all use oil and gas products on a day-to-day basis, from the clothes we wear, to the warmth in our homes, to all the plastic products we consume and use on an hourly basis. Oil is our society’s very lifeblood right now, and as such, there needs to be a way to transport it – that comes down to pipelines.
But when it comes to spills, one spill a month is unfortunate, twice is starting to look bad, but three times is not only terrible publicity, but starts to raise questions if maybe those naysayers in British Columbia or down south in the States have a reason to be skeptical of pipeline projects.
Alberta absolutely needs to ship its products to more than one supplier, and new pipelines such as Gateway or Keystone will apparently use the latest technology and upgrades. But still in order to move ahead with these projects, there will have to be a huge effort to convince First Nations, environmentalists, landowners and other members of the public that every effort will be made not only to create the infrastructure, but maintain and monitor it in the future to prevent, as much as possible, any leaks.
That said, we had better be very sure that Alberta’s existing infrastructure is in good shape before companies begin embarking on building new pipelines. As such, a broader review of the integrity of Alberta’s pipeline systems is likely a good idea; after all, future accidents and negative publicity around pipeline ruptures means greater opposition to new projects.
