Enbridge project would mean average of 15 spills/year: study
Posted May 2, 2013 10:59 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – There would be an average of 15 spills a year if the Enbridge pipeline project was approved, according to a new study out of SFU.
It found the probability of a disaster is extremely high.
Dr. Thomas Gunton, director of the Resource and Environmental Planning program, found there would be a 95 to 99 per cent chance of spills over the pipeline’s operating life.
He says when they did a risk assessment of Enbridge, they also found major gaps in the company’s analysis. “The estimates that Enbridge uses rely on a database which under-reports the number of incidents and when you rely on that database, you underestimate the number of spills.”
Gunton says the rate of tanker spills has gone down, thanks to improved safety, but there is still a huge risk. “Enbridge itself estimates that for the Northern Gateway; one spill every two years. So, even their estimates show that there will evitably be pipeline spills.”
The study was based on the US Oil Spill Risk Analysis model and it has taken nearly a decade to complete. In that time, Enbridge was contacted numerous times.
Gunton has also submitted information to the joint review panel, which has not made a decision yet.
“Northern Gateway has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to marine and pipeline safety. Our efforts are focused on ensuring safe operations coupled with rigorous emergency response capability in the event of an incident,” says Northern Gateway Pipelines President John Carruthers. “While we have spent enormous effort and resources modeling the possibility of an incident, our number one priority is on safety and preventing an incident from occurring in the first place.
Carruthers says they are very concerned about the report released by Dr. Gunton. “He was also a witness for the Coastal First Nations organization during the Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel process.”
“Mr. Gunton should have made his study available to the JRP process, the most thorough review of a pipeline that has ever taken place in Canada. All of Northern Gateway’s conclusions have been subject to peer review, information requests and questioning by intervenors and the Joint Review Panel,” he adds.
Carruthers says the authors chose not to participate in the JRP process and chose to release the study after the process ended. He believes the study was purposely kept off the evidence record to avoid being tested in the hearing process.
“The spill probability numbers are inflated. The authors use oil throughput volumes that are nearly 40 per cent higher than those applied for in this project which also inflates the number of tanker transits using these inflated volumes,” explains Carruthers. “The pipeline failure frequency methodology adopted by Gunton is flawed, and does not approximate what would be deemed a best practices approach to the scientific risk analysis of a modern pipeline system.”
“Their study results are not borne out by real world tanker spill statistics. Based on Gunton’s estimates we should expect 21 to 77 large spills every year worldwide while in reality after 2000 it has been below 3, and in 2012 was zero,” he adds.
