A History of Oil Spills on Long-Distance Pipelines in Canada
Abstract
Abstract
Leaks and spills have been endemic on long-distance oil pipelines in Canada since the mid-twentieth century. Evidence from the National Energy Board (neb) pipeline incident reports reveals a track record of thousands of spills totalling millions of litres of oil across the country. What causes onshore oil spills? Why do they occur? Where have they occurred? What have been the environmental consequences of these incidents? This article explores the history of onshore oil spills on federally regulated long-distance pipelines since the mid-twentieth century. It argues that oil pipeline spills are an endemic characteristic of complex enviro-technical systems built primarily for economic efficiency rather than environmental protection. Based on the analysis of incident reports submitted to the neb, the article finds that, while frequent, onshore oil spills in Canada have been variable in scale and have had a wide range of potential adverse environmental effects, depending on location, product type, and volume. The causes of such spills have also been variable, conforming to no obvious pattern over time. Instead, oil pipeline spills have occurred most often in an unpredictable fashion, posing great challenges for policy development. These spills have also represented a proportionally small fraction of the total oil delivered on Canada’s long-distance pipelines, but, in absolute terms, this has meant the uncontrolled release of many millions of litres of oil into the environment.
Résumé
Les fuites et les déversements sont récurrents sur les oléoducs à grande distance au Canada depuis le milieu du xxe siècle. Les rapports d’incidents impliquant des pipelines de l’Office national de l’énergie (one) révèlent que des milliers de déversements totalisant des millions de litres de pétrole se sont produits partout au pays. Quelles sont les causes des déversements terrestres d’hydrocarbures? Pourquoi se produisent-ils? Où se sont-ils produits? Quelles ont été les conséquences de ces incidents sur l’environnement? Le présent article étudie les déversements terrestres des pipelines à grande distance sous réglementation fédérale depuis le milieu du xxe siècle. Il soutient que les déversements provenant d’oléoducs sont une caractéristique intrinsèque des systèmes enviro-techniques complexes construits surtout à des fins d’efficacité économique plutôt que de protection de l’environnement. L’analyse des rapports d’incidents soumis à l’one révèle en effet que bien que fréquents, les déversements terrestres d’hydrocarbures au Canada ont eu une ampleur variable et des conséquences potentiellement négatives sur l’environnement selon l’emplacement, le type de produit et le volume. Les causes de ces déversements, elles aussi diverses, ne se conforment à aucun modèle qui ressorte au fil du temps. Les déversements d’oléoducs se sont plutôt produits le plus souvent de façon imprévisible, ce qui a beaucoup compliqué l’élaboration des politiques. Si ces déversements représentent également une faible proportion du pétrole total acheminé par les pipelines à grande distance au Canada, il demeure néanmoins qu’ils signifient le rejet incontrôlé de plusieurs millions de litres de pétrole dans l’environnement.
Introduction
In March 1950, four Alberta “pipeline walkers” spoke with a reporter from the Canadian Press about their tireless work. Each worker walked twelve to fifteen miles per day, checking on pipeline facilities in the Edmonton district and looking for leaks, a consistent problem for Alberta’s booming oil industry in the mid-twentieth century. A day’s work was long, exhausting, and often fruitless. The reporter noted that eighteen separate leaks occurred in the district in 1949 with one substantial oil spill near Leduc where “several thousand barrels of oil escaped before the leak was discovered.” Considering the number of leaks to occur in the district despite the walking inspections, the reporter captured the futility of the men’s labour: “Resembling northern trappers walking their trap lines, the men walk miles over their designated routes the year around. It’s a monotonous job – few leaks are found.” After walking more than eight hundred miles on the job, Dick Caws, one of the “pipeline walkers,” confessed: “The funny thing about my job is that I’m supposed to be looking for oil leaks, but since I started last October 1 I haven’t found one.” Sixty-five years later, a contractor discovered one of the largest leaks on an oil pipeline in Canadian history, using the same method of detection.1
On 15 July 2015, Nexen, an oil and gas company headquartered in Calgary, notified the Alberta Energy Regulator (aer) of a massive pipeline spill in northern Alberta near its Long Lake steam-assisted, gravity-driven bitumen extraction facilities southeast of Fort McMurray in the municipality of Wood Buffalo. According to media reports, the company’s early detection warning system had failed, and the spill was eventually spotted by a contractor walking along the pipeline’s route.2 In a settlement with the Crown, a provincial court found that the “mixture of produced emulsion and boiler feed water released from the Pipeline into the environment was a substance that caused or may have caused a significant adverse effect on the environment and is a substance harmful to migratory birds in an area frequented by migratory birds.”3 The spill occurred at an inopportune time for the energy transportation corporations seeking regulatory approval for the construction of new long distance oil pipelines in Canada and the United States. This relatively new feeder pipeline was said to be protected by state-of-the-art leak detection systems. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley told reporters that the spill would undermine public confidence, and she suggested that an investigation would “produce clear, meaningful recommendations to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”4 The history of oil pipeline spills in Canada, however, suggests that the Nexen spill is an endemic characteristic of the transportation of oil via pipelines.
Canada has an enormous system of oil and gas pipelines, most of which originate in the province of Alberta and sprawl across the country over thousands of kilometres of varied terrain. The aer oversees safety and operations on more than 426,000 kilometres of pipeline within the borders of Alberta, while the National Energy Board (neb) is responsible for the approximately seventy-three thousand kilometres of pipeline that cross interprovincial and international borders.5
This article examines the history of onshore oil pipeline spills on Canada’s system of long-distance pipelines operated under the authority of the neb and provides, for the first time, comprehensive statistical analysis of such incidents. Evidence drawn from the neb’s incident reports and other public records shows that onshore oil pipeline spills have been a regular occurrence in Canada since the mid-twentieth century when corporations began to lay long-distance oil pipelines across the country. As the vice president of Pembina Pipelines told the Globe and Mail in August 2000 following a major crude oil pipeline rupture in northeastern British Columbia, “in the pipeline business, you can’t move oil without having spills.”6 Those spills were frequent, variable in scale, and had a wide range of potential adverse environmental effects, depending on location, product type, and volume. The causes of such spills have also conformed to no obvious pattern over time. Instead, oil pipeline spills have occurred most often in an unpredictable fashion, posing great challenges for policy development. These spills have also represented a proportionally small fraction of the total oil delivered via Canada’s long-distance pipelines, but, in absolute terms, this has meant the uncontrolled release of many millions of litres of oil into the environment.
The frequency and proportional volume of oil pipeline spills in Canada are indicative of a system well engineered for economic efficiency but one that continues to pose environmental risks. Hugh Gorman argues that, for most of the twentieth century, technological innovations in the US oil and gas sectors have largely addressed pollution concerns as a side effect of improving economic efficiency. “Unless a pollution control effort resulted in the recovery of valuable material or decreased the amount of money spent on damage and nuisance lawsuits,” Gorman found, “firms generally did not take direct action to reduce their emissions, effluents, leaks, spills, and other discharges.”7 Nevertheless, this ethic of “utilitarian conservation” has overlapped with pollution control by reducing incidents of environmental contamination in an effort to conserve resources.8 In the transportation of oil via pipelines, firms have had an incentive to reduce the number and volume of oil spills to avoid the loss of a valuable product and to satisfy their customers by successfully fulfilling delivery contracts. Oil pipeline corporations also stood to benefit from reducing incidents of spills by avoiding potentially costly damage claims from landowners along rights of way. Spilled oil meant lost profits.
This approach to pollution control had its limits, however. From the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, improvements in monitoring technologies, anti-corrosion measures, and other engineering solutions helped reduce the percentage of losses from oil spills, but the objective in the industry was to improve economic efficiency, not to eliminate environmental pollution altogether.9 As such, eliminating all oil pipeline spills was not the inevitable result of more efficient operations; an economic efficiency approach to the problem still tolerated a small percentage of spilled oil, which produced environmental risk. And, as the pipeline industry increased its shipments of oil, the absolute volume of oil spills increased accordingly.10
The economic tolerances for onshore oil spills along long-distance pipelines worked hand in hand with the social and political tolerances for such environmental risks during Canada’s transition to a high-energy economy driven by the consumption of fossil fuels in the second half of the twentieth century. The government’s regulation of the environmental hazards associated with oil pipelines was limited and lax for at least the first twenty years of the development of long-distance trunk pipelines. Pipeline companies met little resistance from civil society organizations or mass citizen movements against environmental degradation and harm. Opposition to pipeline development remained small and locally based for much of the twentieth century in Canada. In many ways, some Canadians accepted the exposure (wittingly and unwittingly) to onshore oil spills as a price to be paid for the economic benefits that came with access to plentiful, cheap supplies of energy. That price, however, was not paid equally by all Canadians, just as the benefits of the industrial development that accompanied mass hydrocarbon consumption were inequitably distributed. Rural communities of both settler farmers and Indigenous people were more likely to be exposed to the environmental risks associated with oil spills because they lived along the rights of way that became what Steve Lerner refers to as “sacrifice zones.”11 Urban oil consumers were rarely exposed to onshore oil spills as most spills occurred in rural areas along the main lines or at isolated tank farms and pump station facilities.
This historical analysis of oil pipeline spills highlights the need to integrate environmental analysis with energy history by focusing on one of the environmental consequences of Canada’s twentieth-century transition to a high-energy economy powered by the burning of fossil fuels. As energy historian Vaclav Smil writes, “modern civilization has been created by the massive, and increasing, combustion of fossil fuels, but this practice is clearly limited by their crustal abundance, as well as by the environmental consequences of burning coals and hydrocarbons, and high-energy societies can ensure their survival only by an eventual transition to nonfossil sources.”12 The advent of the mass consumption of fossil fuels, which began in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and accelerated with the exploitation of hydrocarbons in the twentieth century, has been accompanied by innumerable adverse environmental costs. In his long view of human energy consumption patterns, Smil concludes that “higher energy use by itself does not guarantee anything except great environmental burdens.”13 Energy history must, therefore, be attuned to a wide range of the environmental outcomes of energy transitions.
Energy historians have proposed a number of explanatory factors that have shaped energy transitions in the past, but they have recently begun to explore the environmental outcomes and limitations of those transitions.14 John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke describe the period in global history since the mid-twentieth century as the “Great Acceleration,” a time when human effects on Earth’s ecosystems were radically exacerbated by rapid energy consumption, urbanization, population growth, and the development of nuclear technologies. High-energy fossil fuels powered extraordinary economic growth, as well as the substantial ecological transformations associated with the Great Acceleration.15 More recently, environmental historian Christopher Jones has argued that transportation technologies have facilitated and maintained energy transitions by creating “landscapes of intensification.”16 As Jones shows, pipelines have established landscapes characterized by spills, leaks, and explosions as some of the adverse environmental outcomes of the transition to fossil energy in the United States.
Oil and gas pipelines unlocked Canada’s transition to a hydrocarbon energy regime during the Great Acceleration, which saw the country become one of the world’s highest per capita consumers of high-energy fossil fuels.17 In 1979, Canadians consumed approximately 4,028 petajoules of crude oil, a nearly 980 percent increase since 1945.18 As Steve Penfold describes it, the history of oil in Canada can be summarized in a word: more.19 Ruth W. Sandwell further highlights Canada’s unusual path to a high-energy economy noting: “It was not until 1955 that Canada reached the 90 per cent level of modern versus traditional energy use that Britain had attained by 1845, more than a century earlier.”20 Canada, as Sandwell shows, was a latecomer to the widespread and intensified use of fossil fuels. This would not have been possible without the development of a large-scale pipeline infrastructure. This article reveals some of the environmental consequences of Canada’s Great Acceleration.
Finally, this research contributes to scholarship on enviro-technical failure by arguing that failure was not the inverse of success in large-scale oil transportation but, instead, an integrated factor in the development and operation of successful oil pipelines and the result of an economically efficient system of oil delivery with a minimum threshold tolerance for spills that continues to this day. The ability of pipeline corporations to tolerate a small percentage of losses of product was also a function of the inequities in social power of the actors involved in, and affected by, onshore oil spills. Indigenous people and settler farmers in rural Canada lived along the routes of these pipelines in the so-called “landscapes of intensification,” but they held limited power to challenge large, foreign-owned pipeline corporations. Without effective means of resistance, pipeline firms could continue to accept a minimum threshold of failures.
Long-distance trunk pipelines are complicated enviro-technical systems that are integrated into the environments they transect. They are shaped by innumerable environmental factors: topography, geology, gravity, hydrology, mineral decomposition, and even meteorology. Of course, they are also shaped by people prone to accidents, indecision, and errors in judgement. Historical evidence reveals that failure and environmental damage from both non-human environmental factors and human error have been persistent characteristics of pipeline transportation systems that have delivered successfully billions of litres of crude oil and other liquid hydrocarbons. As Jonathan Peyton writes, “failure and success both entangle similar processes.”21 These failures were not essential to the delivery of oil, but the successful delivery of oil produced persistent failure and environmental harm. In short, environmental harm was a known side effect of the modernization of the Canadian economy in the second half of the twentieth century during the country’s substantial energy transition. This work builds upon the ideas of Edward Jones-Imhotep, who argues that “approaching the combined histories of nature and machines in this way means rethinking the place of malfunctions, breakdowns, and machine failures in the history of modern technology,” a history that often privileges success.22 Pipeline failures were a constitutive feature of pipeline successes.
Building and Regulating a Transcontinental Pipeline System
Since the discovery of substantial deposits of conventional crude oil resources at Leduc, Alberta, in 1947, Canadian oil production and transportation has experienced significant expansion. Canada’s first wave of post-war oil production lasted from 1947 until the early 1980s when Alberta reached a peak of conventional oil output in 1980 at 63.2 billion litres.23 Not long after news of the Leduc strike in 1947, pipeline corporations sent a flurry of proposals and requests to the federal government for corporate charters and permission to begin construction of major long-distance oil pipelines. In 1949, the Interprovincial Pipe Line Company (Interprovincial, which is now Enbridge) began construction of what would become one of the largest oil pipeline systems in the world – the Interprovincial pipeline (see Figure 1). Today the system consists of multiple lines in Canada and the United States that span thousands of kilometres from Edmonton in the west to Montreal in the east, passing through the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec and the us states of North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York (see Figure 2).24 The Trans Mountain pipeline, a second major pipeline project, connected Edmonton to Burnaby, British Columbia, in 1953 (with a spur line to refineries in the state of Washington). It crosses the Rocky Mountains at Yellowhead Pass and travels roughly 1,155 kilometres to the Pacific Ocean (see Figure 3).25 These two long-distance pipelines accounted for the largest volume of crude oil shipments across provincial and international borders for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1985, a subsidiary of Interprovincial built a third major long-distance oil pipeline from Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories to Zama, Alberta, where it meets with the Rainbow pipeline, a provincially regulated oil pipeline that carries liquid hydrocarbon products to Edmonton.26
Figure 1 Construction of the Interprovincial pipeline in 1950
Source: IP-2e-1-6, Glenbow Archives.
Figure 2 Map of Interprovincial pipeline and Trans Mountain pipeline
Source:US Environmental Information Administration, “Crude Oil Pipelines,” https://www.eia.gov/maps/map_data/CrudeOil_Pipelines_US_EIA.zip.
Figure 3 Construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline through Jasper National Park, 1952–3
Source: IP-2e-2-8, Glenbow Archives.
Beginning in the late 1940s, the Canadian government, provincial governments, and oil corporations collaborated to develop markets for Alberta’s oil by constructing and regulating long-distance pipelines. On 5 April 1949, the minister of transport, Lionel Chevrier, introduced Bill 190, An Act Respecting Oil or Gas Pipelines, also known as the Pipe Lines Act.27 He believed that the rapid development of the oil and gas sectors along with pipeline infrastructure demanded state intervention. “The new oil fields discovered in Alberta,” Chevrier told Parliament, “will require the construction of trunk pipe lines to carry the crude oil to refineries and the finished products from the refineries to the markets.” Those pipelines, however, would require federal oversight and regulation. As Chevrier explained, “to give private companies power over interprovincial and international pipe lines, without some governing body, would be to create a position of chaos in a new and growing field.”28 The field, he believed, would provide new prosperity for the country, but it would require a regulated pipeline transportation system to create markets for the newly discovered energy resource in Alberta.
The Pipe Lines Act granted the federal Board of Transport Commissioners the authority to regulate all interprovincial and international oil pipelines. In addition to making the board responsible for approving all construction proposals, the act also granted the board a range of powers to inspect pipelines and review the operations of pipeline companies. While the act included no provisions for environmental protection, it did make pipeline companies liable for damages caused to property or individuals during construction and operation. It also allowed the board to intervene in order to guarantee public safety.29
Following the controversy over the construction of the Transcanada gas pipeline, the federal government held two royal commissions to investigate the country’s regulation of the oil and gas industries.30 One of the consequences of these royal commissions was the replacement of the Pipe Lines Act with the National Energy Board Act in July 1959.31 This act created a new quasi-judicial board appointed by the government of Canada with responsibility for the regulation of interprovincial and international pipelines. The act also opened pipeline proposals to the public for comment and intervention.32
Tracking Spills
During the period when the Board of Transport Commissioners held regulatory authority over interprovincial and international pipelines (1949–59), the board appears to have offered minimal oversight. There is no systematic public safety record of the operation of pipelines during the years when the Board of Transport Commissioners was responsible for regulation and oversight. Beginning in 1961, the neb started to keep regular records on pipeline incidents, requiring operators to provide reports.33 In its first couple of years, the neb struggled to acquire the necessary staff to begin to keep regular records on pipeline performance and safety. In 1961, the board reported that “gradual success in recruiting professional staff enabled the Board to progress in establishing records and conducting examinations and studies required by the Act or deemed to be necessary to the discharge of the Board’s responsibilities.”34 By the mid-1960s, the neb had conducted several investigations of incidents on pipelines under its regulations and organized informal meetings with the management of pipeline companies “to review pipe line design features and operating or construction procedures which appear to require scrutiny.”35 In 1967, the board not only accepted updated oil pipeline standards from the Canadian Standards Association (csa) but also began development of its own oil and gas pipeline safety regulations.36
This new attention to oil and gas pipeline safety in the late 1960s appears to have been provoked by the objections of land owners (mainly farmers) in southern Ontario to the operations of Interprovincial. The neb held a special hearing in 1967 to address those concerned land owners who opposed the approval of new pipeline construction and facilities expansion along the Interprovincial pipeline system.37 Peter Lewington, whose farm was bisected by the Interprovincial pipeline on multiple occasions, led a land owner resistance effort in the 1960s and 1970s, challenging the construction practices of Interprovincial and the regulatory oversight of the neb.38
According to its annual reports, the neb spent several years developing its own oil and gas pipeline safety regulations. These new regulations would supplement the existing csa standards established in 1967. The board issued a draft of its oil pipeline safety regulations in 1975 and circulated copies to industry and other relevant parties for comments and feedback. The federal Cabinet did not approve the final version of the neb’s oil pipeline safety regulations until September 1978.39 In 1988, the neb established updated regulations under the title Onshore Pipeline Regulations.40
Although the neb started keeping detailed records of pipeline incidents in 1961, it did not begin to publish any data pertaining to incidents in its annual reports until 1965. Based on the annual reports of the neb between 1965 and 2012, pipeline operators reported 2,690 pipeline incidents, which is an average of fifty-six per year (see Table 1). Unfortunately, these published data on pipeline incidents do not offer detailed information, making it impossible to determine the number of oil pipeline spills. However, the neb’s pipeline incident reports that are available from the board’s library make it possible to construct a historical overview of oil pipeline spills in Canada. With these records, it is possible to determine the number of spills, product type, location, volume, operators, and causes.
Source: neb, Annual Reports.
NEB’s Pipeline Incident Reports
Since 1961, the neb has required federally regulated oil pipeline operators to provide reports on a range of incident types, including oil spills (see Table 2). The neb maintains these reports in a large database, which allows for some limited qualitative and quantitative analysis. Most of the analysis in this article relies upon an incident database that covers a period from 1961 to 1996. It also makes some use of an additional database for the period from 2000 to 2012 acquired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation via an access-to-information request.41
| rem | Removal from service of a segment of main line piping |
| spi | Uncontained spillage |
| esc | Uncontrolled escape of gas or high vapour pressure |
| dis | Discharge of toxic substance to land or water |
| eme | Emergency situation |
| d/i | Death or injury requiring hospitalization |
| int | Interruption of the operation of the pipeline |
| fir | Ignition of gas or high vapour pressure |
| exp | Explosion |
| oth | Other |
These pipeline incident reports are flawed and incomplete records of oil and gas pipeline performance in Canada. Since the neb only started collecting these data in 1961, pipeline incidents that occurred prior to that year along Canada’s major long-distance trunk lines do not appear in these records. Newspaper accounts and public reports from pipeline companies document some of the pre-1961 period, but systematic statistical analysis of oil spills and other incidents for this period may not be possible. It is likely that many smaller spills, fires, and other accidents went unreported.
For the period after 1961, the record of pipeline incidents that operators reported to the neb presents a range of information. The reports include thirty-four fields of information, some of which can be especially useful for historical analysis of pipeline performance. Some of the fields include the date an incident occurred, the company name, the product involved, the kilometre-post location of the incident, the type of incident, the causes, consequences, and textual descriptions of the incident, the quantity of product spilled, the manufacturer information, and the cost of repairs. The reports also include an open text “Other” field for pertinent information related to the incident. This field is a valuable source of historical qualitative data on pipeline incidents.42
Pipeline companies used a series of codes for most fields to indicate details about a pipeline incident (see Table 3). These codes, however, could be ambiguous or limited in the information they conveyed. For instance, the range of codes for the “Consequences” field leave researchers with little information, especially for determining the environmental consequences of a spill. Under this field, environmental damage is simply indicated as “evd.” What exactly constituted environmental damage and the range of that damage is unclear. The description and “Other” fields occasionally offer more information on environmental consequences but only in some instances.43
| ipu | Injury to the public |
| ice | Injury to a company employee |
| iwe | Injury to a contractor employee working for the company |
| inw | Injury to a contractor employee not working for the company |
| dpu | Death to the public |
| dce | Death of a company employee |
| dwe | Death of a contractor employee working for the company |
| dnw | Death of a contractor employee not working for the company |
| fir | Fire |
| exp | Explosion |
| dap | Damage to property |
| evd | Environmental damage |
| oth | Other |
The most significant flaw in the pipeline incident report database is missing information. While the reports include thirty-four fields, operators often left fields blank or incomplete. For example, of the 271 incidents that Interprovincial reported to the neb between 1961 and 1996, seventy reports left the “Consequences” field blank, thirty-eight included no description information, and eighteen included no information on causes. The inclusion of “miscellaneous” and “other” as categories for causes and consequences of pipeline incidents also represent limitations to these data. Interprovincial attributed the cause of 19.93 percent of all reported pipeline incidents as “miscellaneous.” It labelled 17.34 percent of the consequences of its reported pipeline incidents as “other.”44
Despite these limitations to the data, the pipeline incident reports do allow for broad statistical analysis of oil pipeline spills, and they include relevant qualitative evidence of the historical performance of oil pipelines in Canada. The database includes reports from both oil and gas companies, fifteen of which were designated as liquid petroleum carriers. Between 1961 and 1996, these companies reported a total of 560 liquid hydrocarbon spills to the neb (see Table 4). The greatest number of spills in one year occurred in 1973 (twenty-seven spills) and 1993 (twenty-six spills). The largest spill reported to the neb occurred on Line 3 of the Interprovincial pipeline system near Swan Lake, Manitoba, in October 1967. The company reported a 5,247,000-litre oil spill, describing the event as “failure of pipe during test using oil.”45 Further annotations on the report note: “Pipe body failure during test, pipe bulged before fracture.”46 Nearly one month later, a similar incident occurred less than five kilometres away on the same pipeline, resulting in an oil spill of more than 2.5 million litres. In fact, the company suffered four oil spills in 1967 as a result of failed tests using oil.
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
In the aggregate, the neb’s pipeline incident reports provide a broad overview of the historical record of spills on Canada’s federally regulated system of interprovincial and international oil pipelines. However, examining some of the largest pipeline systems individually can reveal clearer insights. The fifteen operators that reported incidents to the neb between 1961 and 1996 managed distinct and variable pipeline systems. Some were large, complex networks with multiple lines carrying a variety of liquid hydrocarbon products. Others were relatively small lines that carried limited quantities of oil. These pipeline systems are not all equivalent, and, therefore, they are challenging to analyze in aggregate. A detailed examination of the spill histories of the two largest and oldest oil pipeline systems – Trans Mountain and Interprovincial – can provide better opportunities to understand historical pipeline performance over time.
Oil Spills and the Trans Mountain Pipeline
As with the operation of nearly all long-distance oil pipelines in Canada, Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company (Trans Mountain) has a long history of oil spills and other incidents. The causes of such spills range from operator error, to corrosion, to landslides. Overall, there is no identifiable pattern of oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline in its more than sixty-year history. Instead, oil spills along this pipeline have occurred in a sporadic fashion, often the result of accidents, material failures, or other unforeseen causes.
Pipeline testing and monitoring has been part of Trans Mountain’s corporate operations from the outset. Prior to the opening of the pipeline in October 1953, the company ran hydrostatic pressure tests of the entire system under the supervision of the Board of Transport Commissioners to ensure that all welds on the pipeline were properly sealed.47 In spite of vigorous efforts to ensure that each weld was complete, those first hydrostatic tests ran water through the system and resulted in five leaks. Four of the leaks were minor in nature, but they were difficult to locate. The company resorted to the use of “sonic leak detectors” in order to locate the faulty welds. One leak north of Blue River, British Columbia, in an isolated and road-less segment of the route resulted in a complete rupture of the line. The company had great difficulty locating the leak, as its sonic leak detector was useless under rainy conditions. For three weeks, engineers failed to locate the leak as it gushed the equivalent of twelve to fifteen barrels of oil per hour. Eventually, they resorted to filling that section of the line with a fluorescent dye and removing each segment piece by piece until the leak could be located.48
Following the hydrostatic tests, the company believed the pipeline was ready for operation. On 15 October 1953, Trans Mountain held a ceremony at its Burnaby Mountain tank farm to dedicate the new pipeline. To celebrate the completion of the project, Burnaby Reeve W.R. Beamish unveiled a commemorative plaque at the ceremony that featured a carved map of the pipeline curving through the Rocky Mountains on its way to the Lower Mainland. The company held a reception and banquet later that same night at the Hotel Vancouver where Justice John D. Kearny, a member of the Board of Transport Commissioners, was invited to be a guest speaker. In his speech, he likened the completion of the pipeline to the accomplishments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur traders Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser.49 Members of the BC government joined Trans Mountain executives for dinner, drinks, and speeches. In a large advertisement placed in the Edmonton Journal that same morning, the company wrote: “Looking to the future, we hope that Trans Mountain will warrant the continued confidence of the Canadian public.”50 Unfortunately, the day’s events were marred by the failure of the pipeline to deliver any crude oil. “Alberta to BC Pipeline Unveiled But Still No Oil” read the headline in the Globe and Mail. The pipeline had incurred its first oil spill somewhere near Mount Robson on the BC-Alberta border. The spill delayed the opening of the pipeline for another two days.51
Oil spills remained a challenge for engineers and maintenance crews on the Trans Mountain pipeline long after deliveries commenced in 1953. Consistent detailed records for all reported incidents on the Trans Mountain pipeline are available for the years 1961–96 and 2000–12. Further records relating only to pipeline spills are available from the neb’s and Trans Mountain’s own public disclosure of records for the remaining years 1997–9 and 2013.52 These sources provide a broad overview of the history of oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline system (see Table 5).
Sources: neb, Incident Reports; Trans Mountain, Spill History Table, http://www.transmountain.com/spill-history.
Between 1961 and 1996, Trans Mountain reported a total of ninety-one incidents to the neb, thirty-four percent of which were reported to have caused some kind of environmental damage. This included a range of incident types, which are indicated in Table 6. Over this period, sixty-two percent of all reported incidents were categorized as “uncontained spillage,” and nearly all of those involved low vapour pressure products, usually crude oil. Of those incidents, about seventy-nine percent occurred at Trans Mountain facilities, including tank farms and pump stations, and twenty-one percent occurred on the main line. More than half of all reported incidents between 1961 and 1996 occurred in British Columbia. Combining all known spill data from 1961 to 2013 reveals a total of eighty-one liquid hydrocarbon spill events on the Trans Mountain pipeline, averaging 1.53 spills per year. The volume of reported liquid hydrocarbons spilled in the same period totals 5,799,700 litres.
Source: neb, Incident Database.
The aggregate data of the total number of oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline system, however, does not necessarily provide a clear picture of the scale of these events. To better understand the history of oil spills on the system, one must also look at the volume of oil spilled over time (see Table 7). Nearly fifty-seven percent of the total oil spill volume between 1961 and 2013 occurred in just three years: 1966, 1977, and 1985.53 All three of these incidents involved uncontained spillage of crude oil totalling more than one million litres apiece. These spills all occurred in Alberta, the first two on the main line and the third at the Edmonton tank farm. Oil spills on the main line tended to spill greater volumes than those that occurred at Trans Mountain tank farms and pump stations. Although twenty-one percent of all oil spill incidents on the system between 1961 and 1996 occurred on the main line, this accounted for more than sixty percent of the total volume spilled.
Sources: neb, Incident Reports; Trans Mountain, Spill History Table, http://www.transmountain.com/spill-history.
Oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline cannot be attributed to any single predominant cause. In fact, the historical data reveal that there were a wide variety of causes and occasionally unpredictable events (see Table 8). The largest category type for causes of reported oil spills between 1961 and 1996 was “miscellaneous” (28.1 percent), followed by “hardware failure” (20.2 percent). While hardware failure caused the second greatest number of spills on the system, these incidents tended to be relatively small in volume. The largest oil spill caused by hardware failure occurred in June 1978 when a coupling gasket on a tank line at the Blackpool pump station failed and released 6,400 litres of crude oil.54 While the largest category type was “miscellaneous,” most of the spill incidents categorized as “miscellaneous” could more appropriately have been categorized as various types of hardware failures and operator or third-party errors. For example, on 3 December 1991, one of the tanks at the Edmonton terminal leaked an estimated 2,800 litres of oil due to a crack in a frozen roof drain. On another occasion on 13 August 1994, about 757 litres of fuel spilled from a contractor’s truck at the Sumas pump station when the driver struck a rock. In total, 12.3 percent of all spills on the Trans Mountain system were caused by internal and external corrosion, and these events typically occurred at the tank farms.55 One of the worst such incidents occurred on 20 August 1981 when internal corrosion on a tank caused 165,000 litres of crude oil to spill from a redundant pipe at the Edmonton tank farm.56
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
The most environmentally disastrous oil spills in the history of the Trans Mountain pipeline (in terms of volume and location) tended to be caused by faulty welds and other construction defects, human error, and forces of nature. On 29 April 1966, the main line at mile 239 west of Edmonton ruptured when a large rock struck an exposed portion of the pipeline as a result of highway construction blasting operations. The rupture caused a crude oil spill of approximately 1,110,000 litres.57 This was one of the three biggest oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline by volume. Smaller spills could cause more public risk and concern depending on the location. For instance, Trans Mountain had long expressed anxieties about the vulnerability of the pipeline to heavy rain and landslides near river crossings. In 1954, the company reported one such event:
Winter snows combined with spring runoffs and summer rains are a source of concern as they cause landslides and washouts which can endanger the line itself. During the past year a landslide caused a line break which, in addition to washouts at or near several river crossings, resulted in some major repairs and replacements.58
A similar line break occurred in April 1971, when the community of Merritt, British Columbia, found itself exposed to a nearby 475,000-litre crude oil spill on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Days of heavy rains caused landslides that uncovered up to two hundred feet of a buried portion of the pipeline, “which eventually buckled and cracked,” according to the company’s report to the neb.59 After spotting the breach by helicopter patrol, the company hastily built an earthen dike to try to contain the spill to prevent oil from pouring into the Coldwater River, a tributary of the Nicola River and an important salmon-spawning run. Landslides continued to threaten rivers along the main line as the company experienced a close call near the Coquihalla River on 27 December 1980 when a washout caused by heavy rains exposed the main line at four separate locations in the valley. While the line did not break and no oil leaked, several falling boulders struck and dented the pipeline.60 The North Thompson River, however, was directly exposed to traces of crude oil five years later in October 1985 when a hydrostatic test failed and broke the pipeline, spilling 520,000 litres of water and residual crude oil that left a sheen on the surface of the river.61
On another occasion, early in the morning on 25 June 1973, a Canadian National Railway worker spotted an oil spill on the Trans Mountain pipeline just inside the borders of Jasper National Park about 150 yards from the Athabasca River. For twelve hours, the pipeline leaked crude oil undetected, ultimately releasing approximately 125,000 litres over an estimated two hundred-square-foot area of the park. According to newspaper accounts, the seepage was too slow to be registered by the company’s electronic monitoring equipment. The company attributed the spill to a gouge that was “most likely made during initial construction in 1952.”62 Bruce Wilson, park superintendent for Jasper, described the situation as “pretty lucky.” He was thankful that the spill did not reach the river, but he told a Calgary Herald reporter: “We can’t help but feel that where it can happen once, it can happen again.”63 Four years later in 1977, the main line ruptured and suffered another spill roughly 267 kilometres to the east because of a faulty longitudinal weld. A two-metre-long rupture spilled approximately 1,033,000 litres of crude oil into the surrounding environment.64 Finally, at the Edmonton tank farm in 1985, the system experienced its largest oil spill by volume. Stress and corrosion caused the floor plates of Tank no. 5 to fail and release approximately 1,155,000 litres of crude oil. The spill was contained within the dikes surrounding the tanks.65
Despite the relatively regular frequency of oil spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline system, the volume of released liquid hydrocarbons has always been proportionally small relative to the total throughput of the system. For example, in 1985, the year Trans Mountain experienced its largest oil spill by volume, the 1,158,300-litre crude oil spill at the Edmonton tank farm constituted just 0.00125 percent of the approximately 92 billion litres of petroleum product delivered that year.66 The successful delivery rate of the pipeline is high. Over the course of the period from 1961 to 1992, just 0.001 percent of liquid hydrocarbons spilled from the pipeline and its facilities. However, this constituted a total spill volume of 4,745,500 litres of liquid hydrocarbons released into the environment.
Oil Spills and the Interprovincial Pipeline
The Interprovincial pipeline is the largest liquid hydrocarbon pipeline system in Canada, and it carries the largest volumes of crude oil and other liquid hydrocarbon products across the country. It also supplies oil to several Midwest American states. Its safety performance record is similar to that of the Trans Mountain pipeline: a regular frequency of spill incidents punctuated by a handful of high-volume leaks; variable causes; a high rate of throughput success; and environmental damage that is affected by location, product type, and volume of spill. However, the Interprovincial pipeline system lost a higher percentage of oil to pipeline spills than Trans Mountain.
The Interprovincial Pipe Line Company first incorporated in 1949 following the Leduc oil discoveries. Later that year, the federal Board of Transport Commissioners granted the company approval to construct the first segment of its expansive transcontinental pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin. In 1950, Tommy Douglas, premier of Saskatchewan, declared it “an historic occasion” when he opened the valve at the Regina pump station on 23 October 1950, inaugurating the first deliveries on the pipeline between Alberta and his province. He celebrated the moment as a great benefit for Saskatchewan to have access to low-cost, affordable oil to fuel the province’s post-war economic growth.67
Just three years later, the federal government approved the extension of the Interprovincial pipeline to link Superior, Wisconsin, with Sarnia, Ontario, in order to avoid the need to ship oil across the Great Lakes on tankers to reach refineries in Central Canada. This extension ran south of the Great Lakes through the United States, including the states of Wisconsin and Michigan.68 The company maintained a continuous program of gradual expansion of the pipeline system into the mid-1970s, adding new pump stations, loops, and parallel lines to expand capacity. In 1957, Interprovincial completed an extension to Port Credit, Ontario, to make direct deliveries to refineries in the Toronto area. It made further extensions into New York to service Buffalo in 1963 and a loop to service Chicago by the end of the 1960s. Then, in 1976, the company completed an extension from Sarnia to Montreal to satisfy a Canadian government policy objective to ensure access to domestic sources of crude oil for refineries in the Montreal area.
Much like the Trans Mountain pipeline, Interprovincial encountered oil spills as a regular problem from the outset of operations in 1950. Even cartoons in the employee newsletter noted the problem (see Figure 4).69 In addition to hiring pipeline walkers to search for spills, the company published ads in local newspapers offering bounties for spotting oil spills, such as one in the Brandon Daily Sun from late 1950:
Figure 4 Cartoon depicting a leaking oil pipeline from Interprovincial employee newsletter
Source: The Piper 2, no. 1 (March 1952): 9, Glenbow Archives.
During construction every precaution was taken to prevent any leakage of oil from the line. But accidents do occur. Anyone noting signs of a leak along the pipe line route is asked to contact the company immediately at its nearest station by telephone or telegraph.70
Interprovincial later established other measures to monitor for leaks, including aerial patrols and electronic monitoring of pipeline pressure.
The pipeline initially opened in 1950 without hydrostatic pressure testing. Instead, the company received approval from the Board of Transport Commissioners to skip this test and test the line with oil. These early tests of the line between Edmonton and Superior resulted in at least two oil spills. After the line opened, farmers along the right of way discovered further failures and spills. According to a Globe and Mail report, in November 1950, the newly opened Interprovincial pipeline spilled about 31,797 litres of crude oil across a farmer’s field in Minnesota. Another major leak occurred a couple of months later in early 1951 when a contractor working in North Dakota accidentally struck the line with his equipment. Because of the cold winter weather, crews took four days to repair the leak. When the company extended the line from Superior to Sarnia in 1953, it tested the line with water. The opening of the line, however, was delayed as this hydrostatic test resulted in a leak.71
The neb’s incident reporting data provide a similar statistical overview of the performance of the Interprovincial system to that of the Trans Mountain pipeline (excluding incidents that occurred along Interprovincial’s us sections). Between 1962 and 1996, Interprovincial reported 271 incidents to the neb, 190 of which were oil spills (73 percent) (see Table 9). Interprovincial’s annual spill rate during this period was 5.43 spills per year (see Table 10). By volume, Interprovincial spilled a total of 51,194,840 litres between 1962 and 1996 (see Table 11). The spill record by volume shows a record of punctuated large spill events: 1967 (two spills that exceeded two million litres and one that exceeded 5.5 million litres); 1974 (two spills that exceeded one million litres and one that exceeded 4.4 million litres); 1994 (one spill that was approximately four million litres). There is no single predominant cause of oil spills on the Interprovincial pipeline system (see Table 12). Hardware failure caused twenty- seven percent of all spills, weld failures caused twenty-two percent, operator or third-party error caused eleven percent, and corrosion caused eight percent. The company attributed eighteen percent of all spills to miscellaneous causes, again, many of which could have been categorized as hardware failure or human error. Most spills occurred at pump stations and other facilities (sixty-seven percent), but spills on the main line tended to release more liquid hydrocarbons, with seventy-seven percent of the total spill volume from 1962 to 1996 leaked from incidents on the main line of the Interprovincial.
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
Source: neb, Incident Reports.
The problem of oil spills became especially acute in the 1970s at the height of Interprovincial’s expansion. Between 1973 and 1975, the company experienced what one newspaper report described as “an unusually high spill rate.”72 According to the neb’s incident data, the company reported twenty-four oil spills, totalling nearly eleven million litres spilled into the environment between 1973 and 1975. The high rate of oil spills and the catastrophic volumes caught the attention of both federal and provincial authorities. Alberta’s environment minister, Bill Yurko, was especially disturbed by a couple of major spills near Strome, Alberta, in January 1974, which resulted in more than five million litres of crude oil being spilled. David Flemming, operations manager for Interprovincial in the 1970s, described the experience of discovering oil spills as follows:
It’s always about three in the morning when you get a call that you have a leak. The computers in the control room pick up a loss in pressure someplace, and they know it’s between here and there that there’s a leak. They can’t say it’s right at milepost so-and-so plus so many feet. And they immediately shut down the line. Then they notify the manager of operations, the district supervisor or the western division manager.73
While computer monitoring systems could locate drops in pressure to particular segments of the line, finding the specific location still required workers to head into the field, often relying on smell or reports from nearby residents to detect spilled oil. The attention drawn to these spills compelled Interprovincial to address the problem in new ways. In 1975, Interprovincial established a partnership with Fred D. Cook from the Department of Soil Science at the University of Alberta to conduct research into the effects of oil spills on soil quality and potential ways to minimize damage to agricultural lands. It is not clear, however, if this research resulted in any practical applications or outcomes as oil spills continued to be a problem into the 1980s.74
The most environmentally disastrous oil spills in the history of the Interprovincial system tended to be influenced by volume, location, and product type, and they tended to be caused by faulty welds, other construction defects, and human error. For instance, the 1974 spill, near Strome, Alberta, was caused by a five-foot-long split along a faulty longitudinal weld that released 4,452,000 litres of crude oil, flooding an estimated 30,000-square-foot area.75 Even more dangerous conditions were evident just a couple of years later in 1976 outside of Killam, Alberta, where a faulty weld leaked 2,385,000 litres of oil across 5.6 acres of land. During the clean-up operations, the oil ignited, injuring seven employees and killing two.76 Again, fire continued to be a hazard on the Interprovincial pipeline when, in February 1985, approximately 2,800,000 litres of liquid natural gas escaped from a crack in a repair sleeve weld on an original portion of the line near Camrose, Alberta. A nearby vehicle engine ignited vapours from the spill, killing two men, injuring three others, and burning more than a hectare of land.77
Like the incident record of the Trans Mountain pipeline, the volume of liquid hydrocarbons released on the Interprovincial pipeline system has always been proportionally small relative to the total throughput. However, Interprovincial’s spill volumes have tended to be higher per incident, with an overall proportional spill volume that is three times as high as Trans Mountain. For example, in 1967, Interprovincial suffered its worst year in terms of oil spills in the period from 1962 to 1996. In that year, the company delivered approximately thirty-seven billion litres of liquid hydrocarbons and spilled 0.03 percent. Its successful delivery rate for 1967 was 99.97 percent. But when dealing with the scale of deliveries on a pipeline system like Interprovincial’s, a small percentage of failure could result in substantial environmental harm as the pipeline spilled 11,081,500 litres of crude oil into the environment. Over the course of its history from 1962 to 1987, Interprovincial has lost 0.003 percent of the total volume of liquid hydrocarbon deliveries, which is still more than ninety-nine percent successful. That fraction of a percent failure rate, however, has led to more than forty-one million litres of liquid hydrocarbon spills. The scale of the Interprovincial system may account for the higher spill percentage when compared to Trans Mountain. Interprovincial has multiple parallel lines with larger diameters spanning nearly three times the distance. Spills on the Trans Mountain have never exceeded 1.2 million litres, whereas Interprovincial has suffered multiple single spill events of over two million litres.
Conclusion
Spills have always been a risk associated with oil pipelines in Canada. Data from the neb’s incident reports reveal that oil spills have been endemic to Canada’s long-distance pipeline systems from the 1960s to the 1990s, and further evidence suggests that the problem existed even earlier than that. Despite high rates of successful deliveries (often exceeding ninety-nine percent), major trunk pipelines, including Trans Mountain and Interprovincial, have released millions of litres of crude oil and other liquid hydrocarbons into the environment across Canada. These pipelines have excellent records of economic efficiency, but they also have more problematic records of environmental risk.
Broad statistical analysis of the neb’s incident reports for oil pipelines do not show obvious, recognizable patterns over time. The rate and volume of spill incidents do not conform to periods of high or low activity. The causes of spills have been variable with no single predominant cause. Physical degradation through corrosion does not seem to have worsened or improved over time. Instead, oil spills are often the result of unforeseen failures in hardware, operator error, and third-party accidents. These historical case studies of the Trans Mountain and Interprovincial pipelines demonstrate that the environmental and safety risks associated with onshore oil spills can be variable depending on location, volume, and product type. Small oil spills in rivers and lakes can cause significant environmental harm as can large spills on open fields. Spills outside of pump stations and other pipeline facilities have been considerably larger in volume and can endanger wildlife, private property, and the public at large. And the ignition of liquid hydrocarbons can be fatal.
The failure of Canadian oil pipelines has been a consequence of the successful delivery of billions of litres of oil since the mid-twentieth century. From pipeline walkers, to helicopter patrols, to computer monitoring, pipeline companies have applied a variety of different technologies to reduce leaks and spills on their expanding systems. While these technologies have achieved a high degree of economic efficiency, Canadian pipeline systems have tolerated releases of small fractions of their total throughput. Because long-distance pipelines ship billions of litres of oil each year, a small percentage loss to spills can constitute significant environmental risk. These risks include water contamination, wildlife habitat disruption, soil quality degradation, and, in cases of accidental ignition, the loss of human life.
Onshore oil pipeline spills were also socially and politically tolerated in Canada throughout much of the period covered in this study. While small groups of settler farmers and Indigenous people raised local concerns about construction practices and the effects of oil spills, their resistance to oil pipeline development did not fundamentally challenge or disrupt the establishment of the large-scale infrastructure that underpinned Canada’s remarkable energy transition in the latter half of the twentieth century. For most Canadians, onshore oil spills were a cost associated with the modernization of the economy – a form of collateral damage. That cost, however, was paid not by the primarily urban consumers of oil but, rather, by the rural inhabitants who lived along pipeline rights of way or near tank and pump station facilities. Mass mobilization of environmental activists and others against the development of long-distance oil pipelines in Canada did not arise until the early twenty-first century, when carbon pollution and global warming emerged as the predominant international environmental costs of a high-energy fossil fuel economy.
What accounts for this social and political tolerance for the environmental risks associated with oil pipelines? Why have Canadians seemingly accepted these conditions? How did governments, regulators, and private corporations respond to these environmental hazards? What does this reveal about the economic and political systems that governed (and continue to govern) Canada’s fossil fuel economy? This single study, of course, cannot directly answer all of these questions, but it does point to several directions for further research to address such urgent concerns.
The data about onshore oil pipeline spills suggest geographic disparities of exposure to risk may account for the social and political tolerances that tacitly and explicitly accepted the environmental harms experienced from the 1960s to the 1990s. How those geographic disparities of risk map to social and economic inequities in Canada is crucial for understanding allowances for risk, especially within the context of a settler-colonial society with a politically and economically marginalized Indigenous population. The modernization of Canada’s economy and the transition to high-energy fossil fuels came with few immediate environmental risks for the majority urban consumers who benefited from that transition. These risks came in exchange for cheap, plentiful supplies of energy that reshaped Canadian economies and the lives of those who could partake in the energy transition. The emergence of anthropogenic global warming by the late twentieth century, however, altered that geography, vastly expanding the zone of risk. As such, the politics of opposition to pipeline development in Canada have broadened from what was once highly localized activism to an international environmental movement.
The scholarship on histories of high modernism, environment, and technology do not suggest that the political structures of a liberal democracy or economic structures of capitalism necessarily explain the emergence of large and environmentally destructive infrastructure. Historians have examined similar twentieth-century large-scale infrastructure developments and adverse environmental consequences under a variety of economic and political systems from authoritarian communist dictatorships to liberal democracies.78 As Paul R. Josephson argues, the application of ecologically destructive “brute force technologies” for resource management occurred throughout the twentieth-century world under a variety of governments and social structures.79 Still, this case study should entice further scholarship on how, under the conditions of a capitalist liberal democracy and settler-colonial society, these social and political tolerances for the environmental harms caused by large-scale energy infrastructure emerged and operated.
Finally, this analysis of the neb’s pipeline incident reports and the history of onshore oil spills in Canada answers critical questions relevant to contemporary energy and environmental policy. In 2011, following a 4.4 million-litre oil spill near Little Buffalo, Alberta, the province’s environment minister, Rob Renner, defended oil pipeline transportation by telling reporters: “Sure there are incidents from time to time, but I would put our record up against any other.”80 The evidence analyzed in this article lays bare that record and shows that there is no leak-proof system of oil transportation via pipelines in Canada. It shows what has caused onshore spills in the past, why they happened, where they occurred, and how they might have affected communities exposed to oil spills. This historical knowledge can help Canadians make future decisions about energy infrastructure with a better understanding of the context and a clear view of the risks involved.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Petro Canada Young Innovator Award. The author is grateful for the thoughtful feedback from the editors and the anonymous peer reviewers. This article benefited from comments and suggestions on earlier drafts from R.W. Sandwell, Andrew Watson, Christopher Jones, Andrea Gill, and Steve Penfold.
References
1.
“These ‘Oil Men’ Hope They Never Strike a Gusher,” Winnipeg Free Press, 6 March 1950.
2.
“Dead Duck Found at Site of Nexen Pipeline Spill,” CBC News, 20 July 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/dead-duck-found-at-site-of- nexen-pipeline-spill-1.3161115.
3.
Her Majesty the Queen and Nexen Energy ULC and Nexen INC, Provincial Court of Alberta, Criminal Division, “Agreed Statement of Facts,” Docket no. 170756811P1, 3.
4.
Quoted in Rebecca Penty and Robert Tuttle, “Oilsands Pipeline Projects Look Doomed after Nexen Oil Spill Leaves ‘Two Big Football Fields of Black Goo,’” Financial Post, 28 July 2015.
5.
“Pipelines,” Alberta Energy Regulator, https://www.aer.ca/providing-information/by-topic/pipelines; “Pipeline Regulation in Canada,” National Energy Board (neb), https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/bts/whwr/pplnrgltncnd-eng.html.
6.
“Oil Spill Threatens River, Town in B.C.,” Globe and Mail, 2 August 2000.
7.
Hugh Gorman, Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2001), 2.
8.
Ibid., 359.
9.
Ibid., 211.
10.
Ibid., 230.
11.
Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2010), 2.
12.
Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2017), 18.
13.
Ibid., 439.
14.
Edward A. Wrigley’s early work on the English industrial revolution suggests that material limitations of what he calls “organic” energy sources (human bodies, animals, biomass fuels, wind) precipitated England’s transition to a fossil fuel economy based on burning coal. This interpretation highlighted England’s great leap in energy consumption that resulted from the transition to so-called “mineral” energy resources, including coal, oil, and natural gas. Andreas Malm has challenged Wrigley’s analysis of this energy transition, arguing that material limitations did not play a pivotal role in the shift to steam power in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead, he argues that social power and the relations of labour and capital provide better explanations for the adoption of steam power over water power alternatives. Vaclav Smil points to technological innovations as critical factors that influenced energy transitions in the past. In the case of industrialization and the transition to fossil fuels, he sees the steam engine, electric turbines, and the internal combustion engine as fulcrums of the transition to high-energy economies. Coal had long been used by ancient civilizations, particularly in China, but the transition to high-energy economies did not occur until people could harness the stocks of solar energy in fossil fuels to power new prime mover technologies, especially for locomotion and electricity generation. E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1988); E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York: Verso, 2016); Smil, Energy and Civilization.
15.
J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
16.
Christopher Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2014), 4–5.
17.
Richard W. Unger and John Thistle, Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2013), 13.
18.
Ibid., 125.
19.
Steve Penfold, “Petroleum Liquids” in Powering Up Canada: The History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600, ed. R.W. Sandwell (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 277.
20.
Sandwell, Powering Up Canada, 4.
21.
Jonathan Peyton, Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2017), 15.
22.
Edward Jones-Imhotep, Unreliable Nations: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2017), 10.
23.
Alan J. MacFadyen and G. Campbell Watkins, Petropolitics: Petroleum Markets and Regulations, Alberta as an Illustrative History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 20.
24.
“Pipeline Profiles: Enbridge Mainline,” neb, https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/pplnprtl/pplnprfls/crdl/nbrdgmnln-eng.html.
25.
“Pipeline Profiles: Trans Mountain,” neb, https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/pplnprtl/pplnprfls/crdl/trnsmntn-eng.html.
26.
“Pipeline Profiles: Enbridge Norman Wells,” neb, https://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/pplnprtl/pplnprfls/crdl/nbrdnrmwlls-eng.html.
27.
An Act Respecting Oil or Gas Pipe Lines, SC 1949, c. 20 (Pipe Lines Act).
28.
Canada, Parliament, House of Commons Debates, 20th Parl, 5th Sess, Vol 3 (8 April 1949, Hon. Lionel Chevrier, MP), 2509.
29.
Pipe Lines Act.
30.
For more on the controversy over the TransCanada gas pipeline, see William Kilbourn, Pipeline: TransCanada and the Great Debate: A History of Business and Politics (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1970).
31.
An Act to Provide for the Establishment of a National Energy Board, SC 1959, c. 46.
32.
Earle Gray, Forty Years in the Public Interest: A History of the National Energy Board (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2000), 17.
33.
The record-keeping practices of pipeline operators and federal regulators limit the construction of a quantitative history of onshore oil pipeline spills in Canada. Chiara Belvederesi, Megan Thompson, and Petr Komers find that “in Canada, inconsistency in reporting criteria among provincial agencies, the difficulty in obtaining mileage information, and the incompleteness in data records of environmental impacts allow for only limited quantitative analyses that are based on specific case studies.” This finding, however, is based upon the perceived utility of historical pipeline incident data for particular forms of risk assessment. Belvederesi, Thompson, and Komers too easily dismiss the relevance and efficacy of qualitative historical analytical methods for assessing environmental change. These data can still be valuable for historical analysis. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of pipeline incident data and historical records can yield insights into the environmental consequences of oil pipeline development, operation, and maintenance in Canada since the mid-twentieth century. Chiara Belvederesi, Megan S. Thompson, and Petr E. Komers, “Canada’s Federal Database Is Inadequate for the Assessment of Environmental Consequences of Oil and Gas Pipeline Failures,” Environmental Reviews 25, no. 4 (2017): 415–22.
34.
neb, Annual Report (Ottawa: neb, 1961), 1.
35.
neb, Annual Report (Ottawa: neb, 1967), 18–19.
36.
Canadian Standards Association CSA Z183–1967, which was the set of industry standards and guidelines for the construction and operation of oil pipelines.
37.
neb, Annual Report 1967, 19.
38.
Peter Lewington later wrote about his experiences in No Right-of-Way: How Democracy Came to the Oil Patch (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991).
39.
neb, Annual Report (Ottawa: neb, 1978), 23.
40.
neb, Annual Report (Calgary: neb, 1988), 43–47; “Regulations Respecting the Design, Construction, and Operation and Abandonment of Onshore Pipelines,” PC 1988-1719, 25 August 1988; the board issued further amendments to these regulations in 1999. Onshore Pipeline Regulations, SOR/99–294.
41.
The author acquired a pipeline incident database from the neb’s library in Calgary, Alberta, with data for the period from 1961 to 1996. With the support of Adrian Gamble, a research assistant at York University, the database was compiled into digital spread sheets for quantitative analysis. This research data can be downloaded and viewed at http://niche-canada.org/silentrivers. In 2013, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation acquired a second database via an access- to-information request covering a period from 2000 to 2012, which is available online at http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/community/editorsblog/2013/10/digging-for-data-on-pipelines.html.
42.
neb, “Pipeline Related Incidents under N.E.B. Jurisdiction: Appendix I,” tn 879.5/C16, neb Library.
43.
neb, “Pipeline Related Incidents under N.E.B. Jurisdiction: Appendix II,” tn 879.5/C16, neb Library.
44.
Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, “Pipeline Related Incidents under N.E.B. Jurisdiction,” tn 879.5/C16-J1, s. 11, neb Library.
45.
Ibid., 1.
46.
Ibid., 2.
47.
Forty-Ninth Report of the Board of Transport Commissioners for Canada (Ottawa: Board of Transport Commissioners, 1954), 8.
48.
Neill C. Wilson and Frank J. Taylor, The Building of Trans Mountain: Canada’s First Oil Pipeline across the Rockies (Vancouver: Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, 1954), 67–69.
49.
Ibid., 76; Forty-Ninth Report, 9.
50.
Advertisement, Edmonton Journal, 15 October 1953.
51.
“$93 Million Oil Line Dedicated,” Vancouver Sun, 16 October 1953; “Alberta to BC Pipeline Unveiled But Still No Oil,” Globe and Mail, 16 October 1953; “Pipeline Leak Delays Oil Flow,” Edmonton Journal, 16 October 1953; “Pipeline Flow Reaching B.C. Coast,” Edmonton Journal, 18 October 1953.
52.
Kinder Morgan, the company that now operates the Trans Mountain pipeline, published the spill history of the pipeline online at https://www.transmountain.com/spill-history.
53.
The three largest spills by volume all resulted in the uncontrolled release of more than one million litres of crude oil each in 1966 (1,110,000 litres), 1977 (1,033,000 litres), and 1985 (1,155,000 litres). A few of the oil spill incident reports in the neb’s records do not include a total spill volume, even when the description of the event suggests that the spill volume was likely very high. For example, a spill recorded on 19 February 1963 included no total spill volume data, but the report described the event as resulting in a spill rate of 3,200 litres per hour. Another two reported spills in April 1989 at the Edmonton tank farm include no total spill volume but merely explain that the spill was contained on company property by the dike surrounding the tank.
54.
Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, “Pipeline Related Incidents under N.E.B. Jurisdiction,” tn 879.5/C16-T4, s. 24, 3, neb Library.
55.
Ibid., 11–13.
56.
Ibid., 3.
57.
Ibid., 1.
58.
Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, Annual Report (Vancouver: Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, 1954), 3.
59.
Trans Mountain, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 1; “Dike Holds Back B.C. Oil Spill,” Edmonton Journal, 29 April 1971.
60.
Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, Annual Report (Vancouver: Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, 1980), 2.
61.
A hydrostatic test is a test of a pipeline with water. In a hydrostatic test, there is residual oil in the line. When there is a spill during a hydrostatic test, the residual oil spills along with the water. Trans Mountain, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 5.
62.
Ibid., 2.
63.
“Oil Spill in National Park Causes Serious Concern,” Calgary Herald, 28 June 1973.
64.
Trans Mountain, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 1.
65.
Ibid., 5–6.
66.
Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, Annual Report (Vancouver: Trans Mountain Oil Pipe Line Company, 1985).
67.
“First Delivery of Alberta Oil,” Leader-Post, 24 October 1950.
68.
“Gas Pipeline to Sarnia,” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 12 June 1953.
69.
Cartoon, The Piper 2, no. 1 (1952): 9.
70.
Advertisement, Brandon Daily Sun, December 1950.
71.
“Long Oil Pipeline Has First Leak,” Globe and Mail, 28 November 1950; Bob Bott, Mileposts: The Story of the World’s Longest Petroleum Pipeline (Edmonton: Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, 1989), 31; “Leak Will Delay Arrival of Oil,” Globe and Mail, 14 December 1953.
72.
“Pipeline Report Sought,” Regina Leader-Post, 31 January 1975.
73.
Bott, Mileposts, 88.
74.
Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, Annual Report 1975 (Calgary: Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, 1975), 10.
75.
Interprovincial, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 3; “Oil Export Tax May End, Macdonald Tells Americans,” Windsor Star, 31 January 1974; Bott, Mileposts, 88.
76.
Interprovincial, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 5; Bott, Mileposts, 94.
77.
Interprovincial, “Pipeline Related Incidents,” 9; Bott, Mileposts, 117.
78.
See, for instance, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1998); Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (2009): 517–44; Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, “An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 399–427; Daniel Macfarlane, Negotiating a River: Canada, the us, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014); Tina Loo, “High Modernism, Conflict, and the Nature of Change in Canada: A Look at Seeing Like a State,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2016): 34–58; Jacob Blanc, “Itaipu’s Forgotten History: The 1965 Brazil-Paraguay Border Crisis and the New Geopolitics of the Southern Cone,” Journal of Latin American Studies 50, no. 2 (2018): 383–409.
79.
Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, dc: Island Press, 2002).
80.
Quoted in Emily Mertz, “Alberta Government Addresses Massive Oil Spill,” Global News, 4 May 2011.
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Published In
Canadian Historical Review
Volume 101 • Number 2 • June 2020
Pages: 161 - 191
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© University of Toronto Press.
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Published online: 2 December 2019
Published in print: June 2020
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Canadian Historical Review 2020 101:2, 161-191
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