1,500 barrels of oil spilled in N.W.T. last spring, Enbridge says
Company originally thought only four barrels of crude lost at Willowlake River via ‘pinhole’ leak in pipeline
OTTAWA - Enbridge Inc., the proponent of the Northern Gateway pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to the B.C. northern coast, is planning seven “investigative digs” as part of a new round of measures next month in connection with a 1,500-barrel spill in the Northwest Territories.
Enbridge originally said when the spill was discovered by an aboriginal hunter last May that only four barrels of sweet crude leaked from the pipeline, which takes as much as 39,400 barrels per day 869 kilometres from Norman Wells to Zama, Alta.
But in early June the company notified the National Energy Board that the spill, 150 metres south of the Willowlake River in western N.W.T., involved anywhere from 700 to 1,500 barrels.
Enbridge’s website now pegs the spill, from a “pinhole” leak on the pipeline, at the upper limit of 1,500 barrels.
“We don’t know the cause right now,” Enbridge spokeswoman Jennifer Varey said Thursday.
The company, in its first-ever news release on the spill, announced on Wednesday that it is doing the seven investigative digs in the area to assess the risk of other leaks. An eighth dig will remove and replace the section of pipe where the original leak occurred.
“When we get in there and cut it out and send it to the lab, then we’ll be able to see it and understand” what happened,” said Varey, who noted the company has been extremely active since the spill in communicating with the public and the media in the region of the spill.
The initial low-ball estimate left frustrated citizens in the area in the dark, according to N.W.T. MLA Kevin Menicoche, who worked for Enbridge as a safety officer and senior maintenance technician from 1985 to 2003.
“A mature company like that should have known more than four barrels were spilled,” Menicoche said Thursday.
He also questioned why the company didn’t detect the spill long before 1,500 barrels had escaped.
“Their leak detection software should have triggered an alarm after 50 barrels.” But Varey said some leaks aren’t so easy to detect. “That type of leak allows the oil to very, very slowly stream out of the pipe, but the pressure inside the pipe is maintained,” she said.
“It’s very rare, it can be detected using sophisticated inline inspection equipment, but it can happen over time and it wouldn’t be picked up.”
Enbridge has defended itself against arguments by critics in B.C. that a spill from the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is “inevitable.”
The company has regularly pointed out to the media that there hadn’t been a pipeline rupture resulting in a leak of more than 10 barrels on any Canadian pipeline built in the last 25 years.
“That demonstrates the rigour, the material standards, the quality of the steel, the quality of the coatings, the quality of the inspection practices, the installation practices and how dramatically they’ve improved,” the project’s manager of engineering, Ray Doering, told the Kitimat Northern Sentinel in an interview published in June.
At the time of last May’s spill detection, the Norman Wells pipeline was about 26 years old.
By far Enbridge’s largest spill disaster, the 2010 incident that led to 840,000 gallons of oilsands crude being dumped into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek, involved a pipeline built in 1969.
The NEB, which said in a letter to Enbridge in June that it was “concerned” about the upwardly revised estimate and was therefore launching an investigation, did not comment Thursday on the status of its probe.
The Enbridge news release issued Wednesday said Enbridge will begin work in mid-February to replace the repaired pipe, allowing the company to further analyze the damaged portion in a laboratory to determine what went wrong.
Enbridge will also continue reclamation work on the site, and start hauling remaining contaminated soils now in storage to a licensed disposal facility.
The company began this week moving contaminated materials from a temporary storage site near Fort Simpson, N.W.T., to a licensed disposal facility near Fort Nelson, B.C.
Enbridge’s website said that as of late August more than 730 of the 1,500 barrels had been recovered, while more than 900 cubic metres of “impacted soil” was excavated and more than 630 cubic metres of “impacted water” were recovered.
1,500 barrels of oil spilled in N.W.T. last spring, Enbridge says
