Line 9’s Approval Puts Millions at Risk In issuing their approval, the NEB was seemingly unperturbed by Line 9’s thousands of cracks, the expert testimony of Rick Kuprewicz which pegged its risk of rupture at “over 90 percent,” the thirty-five times and more than 3,000,000 litres of the oil pipe has already spilled, Enbridge’s history of not following regulations, their average operating record of about 73 spills per year, and Line 9’s striking similarities to Enbridge’s Line 6B, the pipeline which ruptured millions of litres of bitumen into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River because Enbridge ignored a known defect. Almost four years after the Michigan rupture, as Line 9 is being granted a green light, it remains to be seen whether or not the Kalamazoo River will ever be cleaned up. Rick Kuprewicz, an engineer with four decades of experience in pipeline integrity management, is the source of the most widely quoted warnings about Line 9. His report to the NEB argued that there is “a high risk that Line 9 will rupture” due to cracks and corrosion “in the early years following Project implementation.” He believes that Enbridge relies too heavily on experimental pipeline monitoring technology and that their tools often miss cracks or misinterpret them. While Enbridge has called his report “entirely unfounded and grossly unfair,” Kuprewicz’s record speaks for itself. “I’ve been here before, working on pipelines where if they were to rupture would kill a lot of people,” he said. “When I’ve done a high risk call I’ve never been wrong. I’ve got to live with that. I have checks and balances to make sure that I’m using the science and I’m not letting emotion get into it…I don’t make these calls often, in my forty years, but when I’ve made them they’ve come true.” As I have reported previously, there are hundreds of waterways along Line 9’s route where spilled bitumen could settle at the bottom of Lake Ontario or the St. Lawrence River, effectively poisoning the drinking water of millions of people. Vapours evaporating off of a spill could cause serious health problems for those nearby, as both diluted bitumen and Bakken crude contain compounds like hydrogen sulphide which “may cause irritation, breathing failure, coma and death, without necessarily any warning odour being sensed.” When I spoke to Kuprewicz, I asked him if this was an accurate assessment of Line 9’s risk. He told me that “the worst case scenario would be a very large rupture. It would release many thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons. Maybe it will be moving dilbit, or the worst case scenario from an impact perspective would be a Bakken crude spill or something that’s really light. And you already know what a Bakken type crude could do. Lac Mégantic? That’s nowhere near what a pipeline of this diameter could release.” The risks of this project, industry argues, are mitigated by the pipeline’s economic benefits. These have been evaluated by Enbridge to be about $1 billion annually over a 30-year period, including upwards of 200 jobs per year and a steady supply of fuel for Quebec refineries. Kuprewicz told me that, given the pipeline’s current disuse, it makes sense from a supply perspective to reverse its flow. But a cost-benefit analysis submitted to the NEB warned that Enbridge’s numbers are likely overstated and found that “these benefits are insignificant in the relevant context of the overall Quebec, Ontario, and Canadian economies, and even more insignificant when weighed against the cost of a major accident/spill.” You may now be asking, “How is this even happening?” or “Isn’t Canada a democracy?” Well, in the sense that we still get to vote in increasingly fraudulent elections, yes, it totally is. But it’s important to note that hundreds of laws in Canada have changed in the last few years and that Line 9 is among the first major energy projects to be assessed in this new legal landscape.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 03:58:44 +0000
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