The ability to detect leaks along the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline won't be known until the pipeline is built and pumping oil through the remote wilderness of northern British Columbia, a lawyer for the province noted at a hearing deciding the pipeline's fate.
Chris Jones grilled a panel of company experts on the design of the 1,100-kilometre pipeline that would deliver oil from the Alberta oilsands to a tanker port on the B.C. coast.
"So is what you're telling me that the actual sensitivity of a pipeline - perhaps this pipeline, along with other ones - can only be determined when it's actually been constructed and you're able to test that actual pipeline in operation?" Jones asked on the second day of environmental assessment hearings.
"We have a quite an operating history. ... It's not an issue of trust us, wait till construction," answered Barry Callele, director of pipeline control systems and leak detection for Enbridge Pipelines Inc.
Testing is and has been under way, Callele said, and test results show the estimates provided in the project proposal are conservative.
"But I guess the answer to my question is still: We don't know until it's been built. Isn't that right?" Jones asked.
"I think we know what we know today. We'll know more at every phase along the pipeline construction project and we'll know emphatically or empirically at the time that fluid withdrawal tests are done at different sections of the pipeline."
Callele said there would be five overlapping leak detection systems on the twin pipelines that would carry diluted bitumen to the tanker port in Kitimat, B.C., and condensate from Kitimat back to Bruder-heim, Alta., including aerial surveillance, foot patrols and 132 monitored pressure valves along the route.
"We will have one of the best instrumented pipeline systems not only in North America, but probably the world," Callele said.
Jones said according to U.S. data, there were 31 leaks from Enbridge pipelines in that country since 2002, and six of the 10 largest spills by volume in that time were from Enbridge lines. Of those six, none were detected by Enbridge leak detection systems, Jones said.
Specifically, Jones raised questions about the pipeline's design and about spills along Enbridge pipelines in the Northwest Territories and one in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan - a massive spill that took two years and almost $800 million to clean up.
"Enbridge has admitted procedural violations occurred during the Marshall incident," Callele said, referring to the Michigan spill. He said procedural and "cultural" changes have been implemented since then.
John Carruthers, president of Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, said outside the hearings that people have concerns about whether the pipeline can be built and operated safely, and the questions being raised in the hearing room are "very legitimate."
But Northern Gateway is a state-of-the-art system, he said.
"Whatever industrial activity you have, it has some element of risk," Carruthers told reporters.
"The real key is to try and get that as low as possible. In our case, we're trying to get that to zero. So that's the direction you're going and you try and do the best you can with processes, with people and with technology."
His sentiments were echoed 800 kilometres away at a conference on pipeline safety organized by the B.C. Chamber of Commerce in Vancouver.
Ziad Saad, a vice-president of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said data collected from members shows there's been about three spills annually for the past decade.
"Clearly 2009 and 2011 have not been our best years, but overall the decade is much better (than) the decade prior, so overall pipelines are getting safer," he told attendees. "We know the public has high expectations and we have high expectations as of ourselves, so our goal is zero incidents," he added. "We don't pretend that we are here today at zero incidents and we don't pretend that we're going to be there next year.
"But that remains the goal. Period. We're always going to strive to have zero incidents of releases or leaks."
