Saturday, March 20, 2010
The Gitga'at said she looked like a prizefighter with a broken nose.
The Petersfield, a Bahama-registered 187-metre bulk freighter had headed out from Kitimat along the Douglas Channel on Sept. 25, 2009. Two hours south of Kitimat, the ship lost control and struck a rocky outcrop across from Grant Point.
Despite extensive damage to its bow, the ship was able to make it back to Kitimat, and later was cleared for travel with a tug escort to Vancouver to make repairs.
Although no fuel was spilled in the mishap - unlike in the sinking of the Queen of the North ferry in nearby northwest coast waters in 2007 - the Gitga'at said it was an ugly reminder of the threat posed by tanker traffic from Enbridge's proposed $4.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline project.
"The Gitga'at are of the sea and we have always known that oil and gas tankers in these waters were a horrible and frightening idea," said Gitga'at spokesman Cameron Hill. "Hopefully, the Petersfield will help Canada and the world understand that too."
Enbridge is proposing to build an 1,170-kilometre pipeline - with a capacity of 525,000 barrels of oil a day - to carry bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to Kitimat, where it would be loaded on huge tankers.
Those tankers will be destined for Asia, and perhaps the U.S. West Coast.
Condensate, used as an oil thinner, will be shipped in smaller tankers to Kitimat from places like Russia, the Middle East and Asia.
The condensate will be transported on a smaller pipeline -- with a capacity of 193,000 barrels a day -- back to the Alberta oil sands.
If Enbridge gets the go-ahead for its project, approximately 225 tankers will traverse the 100-kilometre Douglas Channel to Kitimat each year.
While the Gitga'at, other First Nations like the Haida and Haisla, and environmental groups, are increasingly voicing their opposition to tanker traffic on inside waters of the B.C. northwest coast, Enbridge says its marine plan will ensure the safe passage of tankers.
The Calgary-based company's plan includes the use powerful tugs to ensure safe passage. It also calls for a radar monitoring station at Kitimat to be staffed around the clock. Enbridge also says it will set up equipment and personnel to respond to spills along the route.
More details are expected to be laid out in the company's application to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, perhaps as early as this month.
The terms of reference for the federal panel review -- expected to take as much as two years -- were expanded to include tanker traffic not only in Douglas Channel, but into Hecate Strait, between the Queen Charlotte Islands and the coastal mainland.
The review also includes an examination of proposed shipping routes that are within Canada's territorial sea which extends to the western side of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Enbridge has stated that, if it did not believe the movement of petroleum goods could be done safely, either in a pipeline or by tanker, it would not have proposed the Northern Gateway project.
"It's fair to say we accept and understand there's a social responsibility to address any issues that come as a result of our pipeline operations, and we have also stepped up to talk openly about marine aspects," said Enbridge spokesman Steve Greenaway. "The commitment starts with adopting what we believe are the best practices found at any modern port in the world."
Critics dismiss the company's safety claims.
B.C.-based environmental groups in particular point to the history of opposition to tanker traffic in the province's coastal waters. That history goes back four decades. After the U.S. made a proposal in 1969 to ship Alaskan oil south by tanker through B.C.'s coastal waters, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the B.C. Legislature passed a resolution in 1971 opposing tanker traffic off the coast.
According to documents obtained by the environmental group Dogwood Initiative, under Canada's Access to Information Act, the federal government adopted a moratorium on tanker traffic in 1972 that included shipping oil through the Dixon entrance at the northern end of the Hecate Strait, and south through the inside passage. The federal government's move -- considered a policy statement -- was also a response to Alaska's plan to ship oil south.
However, the current Conservative government disputes there is a blanket moratorium on tanker traffic on B.C.'s inside coastal waters. Instead, they say, there is only a voluntary exclusion zone for Alaskan tankers that deals with north-south traffic. It would mean there is nothing stopping tankers from entering B.C. ports.
Ships carrying condensate have already travelled into Kitimat, where the oil thinner is loaded onto rail cars for delivery to Alberta.
"People have a very emotional reaction to tankers on the coast," notes Dogwood Initiative official Eric Swanson, pointing to the fact that B.C. is largely a coastal community. "There are not oil tankers up there now, and we want to keep it that way," he stresses.
Even for the Prince George-based Sea to Sands Conservation Alliance, 400 kilometres from the coast, the threat of a tanker spill is an issue. It's why the name Sea to Sands was chosen, says Mary MacDonald, one of the group's founders. "I think all British Columbians should be concerned for the welfare of the coast, particularly for northern B.C.," she said, noting that many people from the Prince George region go there to fish and enjoy the outdoors.
"And if we are concerned about local food production, it's also an issue, because it's a major fisheries area," adds MacDonald.
Any mention of the risk of tanker spills, immediately evokes the memory of the Exxon Valdez.
The tanker ran aground on March 24, 1989 in Prince William Sound, spilling an estimated 42 million litres of crude oil (about 262,000 barrels) across 2,000 kilometres of coast line.
The immediate environmental impact was devastating. Thousands of animals and sea mammals were killed. The best estimate includes 250,000 sea birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and 22 orcas, and billions of salmon and herring eggs, according to the Alaskan government's Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council.
While the vast majority of the spill area now appears to have recovered, pockets of crude oil remain in some locations, and there is evidence that some damage is continuing, according to U.S.'s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The northwest B.C. coastal area that tankers carrying Enbridge oil will traverse is considered a rich and diverse natural region.
The Queen Charlotte Basin -- which includes the Douglas Channel and Hecate Strait -- has an abundance of salmon rivers and herring spawn areas, according to a report by UNBC's Northern Coastal Information and Research Program. The basin also contains important spawning and nursery habitat for other fish species, including halibut. It is also an important migratory route for whales and dolphins, and home to the only sea otter colony on the north and central coasts. More than a million sea birds breed there.
It's the potential impact of an oil spill on this resource that has coastal First Nations most concerned. Tankers would pass in front of the Gitga'at village of Hartley Bay, which is located off the southerly end of the Douglas Channel.
The community still relies on traditional foods like salmon, halibut, seaweed and shellfish. The Gitga'at depends on commercial and sports fishing for income.
When the Queen of the North sank in 2007 it spilled 200,000 litres of fuel in Wright Sound. The spill contaminated a clam bed the Gitga'at First Nation used. And while Health Canada cleared the clams as safe to eat within months, there was a lingering perception it was not safe. It took two years for the villagers to return to the clam bed.While Enbridge has touted the economic benefits of the Northern Gateway pipeline project -- promising 200 permanent jobs, 4,000 construction jobs, legacy funding and the possibility of an ownership stake for First Nations along the pipeline -- the Gitga'at see little benefit and much risk for their people in the project.
"We're not willing to risk our resources, our culture, our people," says Kyle Clifton, a marine planning co-ordinator for the Gitga'at, who recently spoke in Prince George.
--
Like the risk for pipeline spills, it appears that there has been improvement in the rate of oil tanker spills since the 1970s.
That improvement was shown in research cited by Tim Van Hinte in his 2005 Simon Fraser University 177-page masters thesis, Managing Impacts of Major Projects: An Analysis of the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline Project.
However, Van Hinte extrapolated the research data -- based on international, U.S. and Alaska North Slope crude oil tanker spill rates to 1999 -- to show that the risk of an oil tanker spill from the Enbridge project was "significant."
His analysis shows that the risk of a tanker spill of less than 1,000 barrels would take place once every 6.56 years. The risk of a tanker spill of more than 10,000 barrels was calculated at once every 15.96 years. However, Van Hinte did caution that the spill rate data he used was historical and may not be applicable to the Northern Gateway project.
Other data, shows a continuous, and significant improvement, in tankers spill rates.
Spill data from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation shows that there was an average of 25.5 spills of more than 5,000 barrels per year in the 1970s compared to 3.3 spills a year in the past decade. The federation's data also shows the quantity of spills is decreasing. Most notably, says the federation, the number of major oil spills involving tankers reached zero in 2009 for the first time since it began collecting tanker spill statistics. Enbridge argues that tanker safety -- like pipeline safety -- has improved in the past 20 years.
The pipeline company points to the use of double-hulled tankers, which will be an international requirement by 2015. The Exxon Valdez was a single-hulled tanker.
Enbridge has also stressed that the tankers calling at Kitimat will be boarded by experienced pilots to provide navigational guidance through coastal waters.
Enbridge is completing its own risk assessment of tanker spills as part of a Transport Canada technical marine and shipment review.
The company has hired Norwegian-based Det Norske Veritas -- which has experience in the area of risk assessment -- to provide a risk assessment of tanker spills. Enbridge expects that assessment, likely to run thousands of pages, to become part of its application for the Northern Gateway project to the federal review panel.
While communities like Kitimat -- as the terminal for the tankers and an end-point of the pipeline -- could benefit economically from the project, its mayor is not passing judgment on the project just yet.
Kitimat could use an economic injection. The community of 9,000 -- which had the dubious distinction of leading the country in declining population in the last federal census -- took another employment hit recently when West Fraser shut down its Eurocan liner board and kraft paper mill and put 535 people out of work.
But mayor Joanne Monaghan, in a recent interview with The Citizen, said she will refrain from commenting on the Northern Gateway project, and tanker traffic, until the environmental review is complete and she's had a chance to read all the information. "I don't think you can make a decision until you have all the information," she said.
AS BIG AS THIS ...
The tankers that would carry the oil from Enbridge's pipeline will be of various sizes, the largest the VLCC class, literally very large crude carriers.
These VLCCs, with a length nearly twice as long as the Petersfield freighter, are capable of carrying 2.3 million barrels of oil.
The plan, first outlined in Enbridge's preliminary project filing to the National Energy Board in 2005, also calls for the use of Suezmax-size tankers, capable of carrying 1.1 billion barrels of oil.
The plan also calls for two berths -- an oil berth designed to handle VLCCs and a condensate berth designed to handle the Suezmax.
- Gordon Hoekstra
