This is Part 2 in a series. For Part 1, click here. 

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association isn’t the only company trying to salvage diluted bitumen's – aka dilbit's – public image.

Amidst the controversy surrounding the Joint Review Panel hearings on the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, Enbridge reached out directly to some of its most vocal opponents on Twitter, including Vancouver-based author John Vaillant, activist Bill Hiller and UBC mathematician Mark Maclean.

The company claimed it had a report that would give the final word on whether dilbit sinks or floats in seawater: "crude oils, including diluted bitumen are less dense than water and therefore float."

This claim was a direct contradiction to observations described in the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) report on the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill, which observed, “Once the crude oil mixture (oil and diluents) enters the environment, weather factors, volatility, and physical agitation affect the composition, thus allowing some of the oil to sink into river sediments and collect on the river bottom.”

In response to one commenter on the website, Enbridge wrote “when oil combines with sediments, it can sink. This is what happened in Kalamazoo. However, it should be noted that only a small amount of the oil that was released from Line 6B ended up submerged.”

This again contradicted the findings in the NTSB report, which described a significant amount of oil – moderate-to-heavy contamination – was still present in the river bed one year after the spill.

“Enbridge began collecting sediment samples on July 27 to determine the impact of the spill on the river system,” the report recounts. “By August 2010, field personnel noticed the presence of submerged oil. Starting in September 2010 and continuing throughout the winter, Enbridge removed the submerged oil by dredging, excavating, and aeration. In spring 2011, an EPA-directed reassessment found a moderate-to-heavy contamination covering over 200 acres of the river bottom. In August 2011, the EPA directed Enbridge to remove the remaining submerged oil.”

The NTSB report went on to say, “The large volume of oil that escaped the source area also contributed greatly to the estimated $767 million cleanup for this accident. Nearly 2 years after the accident, crews are still removing submerged oil and contaminated soils miles from the release site.”

Given the overwhelming evidence of the NTSB report, even TransCanada was forced to acknowledge that, “Crude oil does sink if it is allowed to weather and mix with dirt over time, making a swift response to a spill in water critical. In turbulent water, it is typically driven to the bottom of the river where it tends to stick to rocks, which can make clean-up more difficult.”

So what could account for the difference between Enbridge’s lab tests and the NTSB’s observations?

Anthony Swift of the National Resource Defense Council says it might come down to a case of mistaken identity. He points out that crude oils often go by one name for technical purposes and another name for marketing purposes. He contends that the Cold Lake crude that Enbridge tested in their lab was not the same as the crude that ended up in the Kalamazoo River. Chances are, it wasn’t even dilbit.

“Enbridge in its study said it evaluated Cold Lake crude,” says Swift. “The problem with Cold Lake crude is it’s a name under which several blends of diluted heavy crudes are marketed. Some of them are diluted bitumen and some of them are diluted heavy crudes. Cold Lake is also a technical name for a blend of crude which is a conventional heavy crude.”

He explains that diluted bitumen under pressure in a pipeline is lighter than water, but when that mixture is exposed to air, as it was in the Kalamazoo River spill, the diluent—often a natural gas condensate—evaporates, leaving behind the much heavier bitumen to sink to the bottom.

Although there are few independent studies into the characteristics of bitumen, a chapter in the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems by Wyoming researcher Dr. James G. Speight puts the average density of tar sands bitumen at 8 API, which is heavier than water’s 10 API and therefore sinkable.

Swift says that the “issue with the Enbridge study was, given the importance of knowing the heaviness of the bitumen they were working with, they didn't mention that, which is a bit of a tell. The omission of the key fact that they should be testing for is a problem.”

“If one were inclined to be disingenuous, one could do so fairly easily,” he says.

He believes that the key to ending the spin on dilbit is transparency, including independent studies into its characteristics that are not spearheaded by industry.

“Ideally we would have had studies evaluating the behaviour of diluted bitumen before it was being moved in pipelines,” says Swift. “What's really shocking is we still don't have an independent study evaluating the behaviour of diluted bitumen nearly three years after the worst onshore pipeline accident in US history revealed the problem.”

Image Credit: Environmental Protection Agency

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This post is part of a series. For Part 2, click here. 

What do we know about dilbit? Since coming on the scene, the mixture of tar sands crude and a lighter substance such as natural gas condensate has been a matter of much speculation. How does it behave in pipelines? Does it float in water or sink?

Now, Canadian oil producers are saying that diluted bitumen (dilbit) has gotten a bad name. They are seeking clean up its image with an industry-funded report claiming that the tar sand mixture is no more dangerous to pipelines than some conventional crude oil.

The report, entitled “Dilbit Corrosivity,” was prepared by UK’s Penspen Group for the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA). It seeks to debunk arguments like those made at the hearings on the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, that dilbit’s high viscosity, acidity, and level of sediments could cause corrosion that would leave the areas around pipelines more vulnerable to spills. It argues that, because dilbit is no more corrosive than other forms of heavy crude, no special plans need to be made to prevent spills.

“Some of the literature is ill-informed and wrong: both Dilbit and Synbit in a crude oil transmission pipeline environment is no more corrosive than comparable heavy sour crudes and in many cases may be less corrosive,” it reads.

“Consequently, there are no significant additional implications for corrosion control in a pipeline carrying Dilbit and Synbit as part of pipeline integrity management over and above what is already standard practice.”

Anthony Swift, an attorney with the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) disagrees with this characterization. He argues that Penspen’s findings are not new and describes the CEPA report as a “rehash of a number of flawed government and industry studies intended to promote tar sands.”

He points to a 2011 NRDC report that states, “There are many indications that DilBit is significantly more corrosive to pipeline systems than conventional crude. For example, the Alberta pipeline system has had approximately sixteen times as many spills due to internal corrosion as the U.S. system. Yet, the safety and spill response standards used by the United States to regulate pipeline transport of bitumen are designed for conventional oil.”

Speaking over the phone from DC, Swift says the CEPA report’s first mistake is to compare dilbit to heavy crude. He believes it would be far more beneficial to compare dilbit to West Texas Intermediate, a lighter crude that is considered the benchmark for crudes in North America and “represents the types of crudes that have historically moved on the North American pipeline system.”

Swift also takes issue with CEPA’s claim that the typical temperature of a pipeline carrying dilbit is 17 to 40 °C and that the Keystone XL pipeline will operate at 26 to 48 °C. He says that public documents on TransCanada’s application for the Keystone 1 had a top range of 70 °C and those for the Keystone XL pipeline had an average operating temperature of 60 °C.

This is a crucial issue because dilbit tends to be more viscous than conventional crude oil and that viscosity can lead to higher pipeline temperatures. Those higher operating temperatures have been linked to rises in both internal and external pipeline corrosion of the kind the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found after 2010 the Kalamazoo River spill.

It should be noted that CEPA is the group responsible for a 2011 letter to the Harper government outlining some of its preferred changes to environmental regulation, which Greenpeace obtained to last year via an Access to Information request.

Sandra Burns, CEPA’s manager of communications, later authored a blog post in the Huffington Post arguing that their lobbying strategies were well within reason and that bills C38 and C45, which included many of their suggested changes, would reduce the number of studies on “activities that were benign or whose effects were well understood and mitigated through standard practices.”

The new report seems to argue that CEPA considers transportation of dilbit through pipelines one of those benign practices.  It concludes that “corrosion mechanisms in pipelines are well understood and are the subject of continuous investigation both in the field and laboratory to fine tune that understanding.”

Should regulators take their word for it? Swift says absolutely not. He says that the NTSB, “have attributed several major pipeline accidents in the States to federal safety regulators delegating too much of their oversight to the pipeline operators they're supposed to be regulating.”

He believes that too often the trend is to seek an explanation for a spill after it has happened rather than preventing it through careful research.

“It's sort of the difference between a safety net and a coroner,” he explains. “More often than not we're seeing regulators diagnose the cause of death in a pipeline spill rather than engaging to ensure one doesn't happen to begin with.”

Image Credit: Dilbit spill in Kalamazoo River from Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.