Tar sands and coast focus of forums

Kitimat Sentinel
June 03, 2009

Oil sands and the risk to BC’s coastline was the topic for two-authors at the end of a five-day tour of BC’s northwest.

In a series called “A story with two ends”, Ian McAllister, author of The Great Bear Rainforest and most recently The Last Wild Wolves of the Great Bear Rainforest, together with business journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, who authored Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, presented a packed room at the Rod and Gun Club with what pipeline development will mean not only for the local ecosystems but also for the nation-at-large.

Approximately 100 people attended the forum on Friday evening.

“I’m not here to tell people whether to be for or against the Enbridge pipeline,” Nikiforuk told the Sentinel. “But this is no ordinary pipeline. It’s connected to the world’s largest energy project.”

Enbridge is proposing to construct a twin-pipeline from Alberta, just north of Edmonton, to Kitimat. A 36-inch pipeline will export bitumen to a marine terminal proposed to be built in Kitimat while a 20-inch pipeline will send condensate east.

Condensate is a diluent which makes piping the petroleum easier.

Nikiforuk said his involvement in the tour was to provide the “big picture” of tar sands.

Through previous forums he said he found that some people are shocked at the scale of tar sands development and most people don’t realize that Canada is the number one supplier of oil to the United States.

Opening up markets for the bitumen overseas presents some problems for job creation, he explained. He estimated that for every 400,000 barrels of oil a day that Canada exports, the country is also exporting 18,000 jobs.

“Rather than upgrading and refining the bitumen in Alberta we would be putting it in a pipeline and shipping it off for upgrading and refining either in Asia or southern California,” he said.

No public policy currently exists for adding value to bitumen here in Canada.

“We’ve got this new export staple and we’re repeating the same mistakes we made in the lumber industry,” he continued. “We’ll just export all these raw logs, we won’t bother adding any value.”

He said that tar sands shouldn’t even be developed until a Plan B is in place for investing in renewable energy.

“We should have had a plan b in place long before people started pointing fingers.” “You don’t invest $200 billion into the development of bitumen without having at least a $100 billion investment in renewable, climate change action and fossil fuel reduction in the country.”

According to Nikiforuk, if Canada is still on the tar sands resource in 30 years time “we’re going to fail as a civilization.”

National policy and sands development aside, the coastline of BC has much to lose from the arrival of a pipeline and the increase in tanker traffic, says McAllister.

He said he has seen the area where the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled its oil and said there was far more room there than there is on the outskirts of the Douglas Channel.

He also said that models have shown that if a tanker spilled that within 30 days, depending on the season, oil will spread up to Prince Rupert, over to Haida Gwaii and down to Bella Bella.

It isn’t the Douglas Channel that poses the risk, however, it’s the network of islands outside it.

“The Douglas Channel is not a problem,” said McAllister. “If you’re awake you’re probably going to be okay in the Douglas Channel.”

It’s outlying islands like Gil Island where trouble can begin.

And if it was only a few tankers a year and you could choose your schedule it wouldn’t be so bad but sending a tanker through the area in the winter, with hurricane force winds, could be disastrous.

But oil isn’t the only thing to be concerned about, he said.

The acoustic environment in the Douglas Channel is one of the quietest in BC and an increase in traffic would put that in jeopardy.

“When you’re looking at endangered species or threatened species, or recovering species (such as blue whales, etcetera), this would be considered one of the best habitats because it’s still quiet,” he said.

In Prince Rupert and Puget Sound there have been disturbances on whale’s ability to communicate, which has been attributed to shipping traffic.

“I think that the way this process has been going that Enbridge in particular has not really considered the true cost of introducing oil tankers for the first time to the inshore waters of the inside passage,” he said.

He also said that sending the bitumen to be refined in Asia, the pollution that is created is entering the food web and coming back to BC.

Nikiforuk said there is certainly a risk of spill from the pipeline itself and pointed some incidents over the past ten years at Enbridge pipelines, including spills in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

He said pipeline breaches could happen for a number of reasons including corrosion or poor welding.

He also said there is a tendency to put multiple pipelines where one goes.

“If [a community had] known that one pipeline would lead to six or seven they would never have said yes to the first one.”

Nikiforuk also worried against government level changes to Canada due to the influx of money from oil.

“When you have a lot of oil money, it starts to bend any government out of shape,” he said.

He said when there’s easy money taxes get cut, but then government’s begin spending too much and that, in turn, leads to secrecy.

As it is he said there is no fiscal responsibility for tar sands and Canada has been criticized for not having a sovereign fund to have money available for future generations.

Kitimat was the pair’s final stop after meetings in Prince George, Burns Lake, Smithers and Terrace. It was presented by Forest Ethics, Friends of Wild Salmon and the Pembina Institute.

Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 03 Jun 2009