Nobody seems eager to address the questions of pipelines properly. Is it not possible that some pipelines can do good and some can commit unspeakable evil? Are we to be treated as idiot children incapable of sorting out the good from the bad?
We should start with natural gas pipelines. These are everywhere. The odd time that one of these baby’s bursts or is entangled in an accident, it is easy to cut off the feed, squelch any possible flames and fix the problems. If nobody is hurt, the environmental damage can be quantified and ameliorated.
And that is why I see few problems with the liquified natural gas (LNG) operation in B.C. that takes the provincially sourced gas from a pipeline. It makes business sense and is hardly a serious polluter. And did you know that modern LNG tankers use some of the natural gas to power the ship?
And then there are the pipelines designed to ship everything from crude oil through to refined fuels throughout North America. While more volatile and heavily regulated, these lines are essential today to keeping our North American economy moving. They are certainly an excellent reason to always check before you dig.
The third type of line that pipeline people have been less reluctant to tell us about is the type of line that can handle transmission of tar sands bitumen. It was only in talking to knowledgeable experts that I could find out what Enbridge, TransCanada and Kinder Morgan people were talking about when proposing lines such as Energy East and the line to Kitimat, B.C. These lines were specific to push large quantities of diluted, heated bitumen from our tar sands at high pressure.
Of some 40 significant spills (each of more than 50 barrels) of Enbridge lines over the years, the spill of diluted bitumen up-river from Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2012 was the most expensive, at a cost of over US$700 million. It never could be completely cleaned up.
I remember how shocked I was when Enbridge applied to change its Line 9 through Toronto and on to Montreal to enable it to also to heat and push bitumen at higher pressure. I was there when that line was installed down a hydro right-of-way and across the top of Toronto’s Yonge Street subway. I sent a scenario to the National Energy Board of the tens of thousands of casualties from a leak and a flood of flaming bitumen running down the subway.
Some scoffed at my concern as though it was like a thousand-year flood. The only problem is that, even in Canada, we are now getting thousand-year floods every couple years.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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