The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) plans to lobby the B.C. government on a slew of issues ranging from Indigenous rights and LNG to recovery plans for endangered caribou, according to a lobbyist registration filed April 24.

Rob Beamish, executive director of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association foundation and in-house lobbyist, intends to meet with Premier John Horgan, Energy Minister Michelle Mungall and Scott Fraser, minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, among other elected officials.

In its registration, the association indicates lobbying activities will include the “Southern Mountain Caribou Protection Strategy.”

Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, whose members include Enbridge Pipelines Inc., TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. and Trans Mountain Corporation, operates 119,000 kilometres of pipeline in Canada.

The association further states it intends to arrange meetings with Environment Minister George Heyman and Doug Donaldson, minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, to discuss issues and policies related to pipeline development and the environment, including plans to protect mountain and boreal caribou.

The lobbying registration provides no further details.

The pipeline association, when contacted by The Narwhal, said no one was available to comment.

Two B.C. caribou herds declared extinct in 2019

In March, the B.C. government released two draft agreements aimed at protecting highly endangered southern mountain caribou.

Almost 30 of B.C.’s 52 surviving caribou herds are at risk of local extinction, and a dozen of those herds now have fewer than 25 animals. Two herds in the Kootenay region were declared locally extinct early this year.

The proposed caribou agreements have spawned misinformation and a racist backlash in northern B.C.

The on-going controversy appears to have been a contributing factor to Horgan’s statement last week that legislation to protect the province’s 1,800 species at-risk is no longer on the table for 2020, as the government had promised.

“There’s no significant species at risk legislation on the docket for the foreseeable future here in B.C.,” Horgan told reporters.

Headquartered in Calgary, CEPA members move 97 per cent of Canada’s daily crude oil and natural gas from producing regions to markets throughout North America.

They also operate approximately 14,000 kilometres of pipelines in the U.S., moving about 1.2 billion barrels of liquid petroleum products and 5.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas each year in both countries.

On the subject of Aboriginal affairs, Beamish intends to engage in discussions with Fraser and his deputy minister Doug Caul on a variety of topics, including job skills and training initiatives, Indigenous consultation processes and the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

B.C. has committed to upholding the UN declaration, which states that resource projects must have the “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous peoples.

On the energy file, the pipeline association intends to lobby Horgan and his staff and Mungall and her staff, as well as the Oil and Gas Commission, “to discuss pipeline issues in B.C.”

According to the lobbyist registration, the group will update ministers and their staff on pipeline industry initiatives that include land-based and marine spill responses, methane emissions regulations, revitalization of the provincial Environmental Assessment Act, the LNG value chain, and market access and regulatory reform issues.

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association foundation includes both pipeline operators and various companies in the supply chain, including engineers, contractors, manufacturers, and legal, land and environmental service companies.

According to its website, the foundation aims to improve pipeline safety, environmental protection and industry performance.

The pipeline association has two additional active lobbyist registrations in B.C. — both for lobbyists with the national public relations firm Global Public Affairs.

Global offers “full integrated public affairs campaigns” for organizations “looking to persuade people and governments to create the support they need for a winning outcome.”

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The National Energy Board (NEB) is a “captured regulator” that has “lost touch with what it means to protect the public interest.”

That’s what Marc Eliesen — former head of BC Hydro, Ontario Hydro and Manitoba Hydro, and former deputy minister of energy in Ontario and Manitoba — told the NEB Modernization Expert Panel on Wednesday morning in Vancouver.

“The bottom line is that the board’s behaviour during the Trans Mountain review not only exposed the process as a farce, it exposed the board as a captured regulator,” he said to the five-member panel.

“Regulatory capture exists when a regulator ceases to be independent and objective.”

The Trans Mountain pipeline was reviewed with what many consider a heavily politicized NEB process, one that Trudeau had committed to changing prior to issuing a federal verdict on the project.

That process included what Eliesen describes as gutted environmental legislation, the removal of “essential features of a quasi-judicial inquiry” including the cross-examination of evidence and the limiting of participation of intervenors in such a way it “predetermined the outcome in favour of the pipeline proponent.”

Eugene Kung, staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law, said in an interview with DeSmog Canada that the hearings for the project were the worst he’s seen in almost 10 years of practising regulatory law.

But that doesn’t seem to be an accident. Eliesen — who withdrew as an intervenor from the NEB review of the Trans Mountain project in 2014 due to the “fraudulent process” — argues the problems go far deeper than just the Trans Mountain review, predominantly linked to the “revolving door” between industry and the board.

“This ‘modernization’ is some spinmaster’s term,” he said. “It’s about public trust and the fact the NEB has lost this trust to the Canadian public.”

Move of NEB Head Office to Calgary Arguably Compromised Independence

In 1991, the NEB’s head office was moved to Calgary, and legislation was changed to require all permanent members to reside in Calgary.

It’s a decision that Eliesen says was completely unexpected and ultimately a political move by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; most other regulatory agencies are located in Ottawa to prevent being influenced by the industry in which they’re supposed to regulate (including finance regulators, even though Toronto is often considered Canada’s finance city).

If it was indeed politically driven, the plan seems to have worked.

More than two-thirds of the staff didn’t move to Calgary, and their positions were subsequently filled by former employees of the oil and gas sector. This has resulted in what some call a “revolving door” between the two; as Eliesen pointed out in his presentation, some former NEB chairpersons have been inducted into the Canadian Petroleum Hall of Fame.

“I’m not suggesting any nefarious activities,” he says. “It’s just that you adopt the headspace and the attitude of the energy industry of Alberta. When you have the legislation changed as well to ensure that all the permanent members reside in Calgary, then you have a major, major bias.”

It’s something he argues got worse under former prime minister Stephen Harper, who took full advantage of it in his final months (appointing many former industry veterans to key positions with the board, including Steven Kelley, who previously worked as a consultant for Kinder Morgan on the Trans Mountain project).

Even one of the five members of the NEB Modernization Expert Panel previously served as president of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association. That same person, Brenda Kenny, signed a 2011 letter to key cabinet ministers petitioning for regulatory overhaul.

“She is in a real conflict of interest,” Eliesen says. “She’s the last person to be on a panel trying to evaluate how to bring back to the public trust to the National Energy Board.”

How to Fix the National Energy Board, Canada's Captured Regulator https://t.co/mHjDbb2iRj #cdnpoli #EnergyEast #TransMountain @james_m_wilt pic.twitter.com/8So7hzWUQ1

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 10, 2017

Many Structural Changes Required to Fully ‘Modernize’ the NEB

Kung, who also presented to the expert panel on Wednesday, expressed concerns about the relationship between the NEB and industry. He says there are many structural ways that such capture can be fixed.

Currently, the NEB receives a majority of its funding from industry, something Kung suggests should be addressed.

Its “very important role” in data collection and forecasting (such as the exhaustive “Canada’s Energy Futures” reports) don’t currently consider climate commitments such as the Paris Agreement, with the latest NEB report imagining a “business-as-usual” world that features an increase of four to six degrees Celsius in average global temperatures. That’s another thing that Kung says needs to change in the modernization.

Patrick DeRochie — climate and energy program manager at Environmental Defence — agrees, arguing that the NEB needs to better align climate and energy policy: “It’s not there right now. With this energy transformation we’re seeing for renewables right now, it’s not adequate. We need to bring that into the 21st century.”

(Conversely, Eliesen disagrees and suggests the NEB be solely a quasi-judicial agency and the energy information and advisory mandate be removed).

A key concern for Kung is also about NEB personnel. He acknowledges the board possesses technical expertise and that it’s tricky to find that kind of knowledge in people who haven’t worked in the industry at some point.

“But the way you can separate it structurally is making their role slightly different so they’re not making a decision, for example, about national or public interest,” he says. “Because that’s an impossible decision to make by a captured regulator.”

Proposed Solutions Include Replacing Board Members, Relocating Head Office

Eliesen proposed two major solutions to the review panel.

First, remove all current board members and replace them with people that reflect a broad range of background and expertise, not just the oil and gas industry. And secondly, relocate the NEB’s head office back to Ottawa.

These two decisions would create a firewall of sorts between industry and the board.

In addition, he suggested that environmental assessments be undertaken outside of the NEB, enforcement of pipeline safety be increased, and proponents be required by the NEB to provide alternative routes for pipelines.

Vancouver was only the third stop of 10 for the expert panel. The final “engagement session” in Montreal will conclude on March 29.  The panel is required to submit a report and recommendations to the Minister of Natural Resources around May 15.*

It’s a timeline that DeRochie suggests has made the process “really rushed,” noting that some of the 12 discussion papers weren’t even posted on the NEB Modernization Panel website by the time the first engagement sessions started in Saskatoon. However, DeRochie presented at the engagement session in Toronto on Feb. 1, and said that he went in “kind of cynical” but emerged feeling like they “really did seem like they wanted to engage us and fix this regulator.”

“It’s either get this right or face a bunch of political and legal challenges to every single energy project moving forward,” he says. “I think all stakeholders — industry, government, indigenous communities and ENGOs — want to avoid that.”

* Update: Feb 9, 2017. This article originally stated the panel report was due March 31, as stated on the National Energy Board's website. However, the date has been updated to May 15, as stated in the National Energy Board's terms of reference for the review panel.

Images: Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr. Photo: Canada 2020 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Secrecy surrounding pipeline emergency response plans will soon be the subject of public consultation conducted by the National Energy Board (NEB), according to the board’s CEO Peter Watson.

As the CBC reports, speaking to a group of business leaders in Vancouver on Monday, Watson said, “Canadians deserve to be consulted on the transparency of emergency management information for NEB-regulated pipelines.”

Pipeline operator Kinder Morgan recently made headlines for refusing to disclose emergency response plans for its TransMountain pipeline expansion project, which would nearly triple the capacity of the existing line. Kinder Morgan refused to release an unredacted version of the emergency plan despite repeated requests from the province of B.C.

As DeSmog Canada first reported, the same emergency response plans were released in full to the public in the U.S. for portions of the pipeline that extend down into Washington State.

Redacted from the B.C. plans were contact details for company officials and first responders, information regarding spill response measures and cleanup equipment as well as spill response timelines for each unique segment of the pipeline.

Kinder Morgan argued disclosing the documents in B.C. triggered "security concerns." The NEB ruled the company was within its right to keep the information secret, leading some to question the legitimacy of the federal pipeline review process.

Now, Watson said the NEB wants to rethink the disclosure issue.

"There may indeed be some specific information that should be kept confidential,” he said, “but I believe that we have been too conservative in our approach to this issue to date."

"And to tell you the truth," he added, "I haven't been happy with the amount of emergency response information that pipeline companies or the NEB has been sharing with the public."

Watson said the recent bunker fuel spill in Vancouver’s English Bay put a spotlight on spill response capacities.

"I do not believe we have a choice on this matter," he said. "We need to help ensure that everybody involved in an emergency response for a leak in an existing pipeline knows what their role is — and how to deliver on that role, when something serious happens."

The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) recently announced its would form a new task force to address public concern over disclosure rules.

“A number of our members have faced significant public pressure to disclose all information contained in emergency response plans,” Jim Donihee, chief operating officer with CEPA, said.

“The CEPA task force will work to support that by establishing clear principles and guidelines that seek to find the right balance between the public’s right to know, the privacy of personal information and the security considerations also required for public safety.”

Image Credit: NEB

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The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) is working hard to undo damage caused by pipeline company Kinder Morgan’s refusal to release oil spill response plans in British Columbia. The company’s lack of disclosure angered the province of B.C., especially when it was revealed that Kinder Morgan released detailed spill response plans in Washington State for portions of the pipeline that extend across the border.

The pipeline association recently announced it would form a task force to address the issue, hoping to waylay growing public concerns by developing “guiding principles” for disclosure.

“A number of our members have faced significant public pressure to disclose all information contained in emergency response plans. The CEPA task force will work to support that by establishing clear principles and guidelines that seek to find the right balance between the public’s right to know, the privacy of personal information and the security considerations also required for public safety,” Jim Donihee, chief operating officer with CEPA, said.

In the case of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, the company argues it shouldn’t disclose spill response plans — even to the province of British Columbia, which has requested the plans during the National Energy Board Review of the Trans Mountain pipeline — because of “safety concerns.”

DeSmog Canada first published the documents Kinder Morgan publicly released in the U.S., comparing them to similar documents severely redacted or completely withheld in B.C.

Since then, the story has been covered in the Globe and Mail, the CBC and the Canadian Press, forcing Kinder Morgan and the National Energy Board (NEB) to defend the company’s actions.

NEB spokesman Darin Barter said the board was considering making public pipeline emergency plans mandatory for energy companies.

“Our chairman is not very happy that there’s a lack of transparency around these emergency response plans,” Barter said. “Canadians deserve to have that information. There’s a public will for that information. Industry needs to find a way to make that information public.”

In a recent letter to Enbridge, the NEB expressed concern over the company’s requirement that municipalities sign non-disclosure agreements before emergency plans are released.

“I am concerned that Enbridge’s practice of requesting NDAs is not consistent with the principle of regulatory transparency that guides the board’s regulatory approach,” NEB chairman Peter Watson said in a letter, available on the NEB website.

Watson said he would like to know how Enbridge would proceed with a municipality unwilling to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Despite the NEB’s recent push for increased transparency, the board ruled Kinder Morgan was within its right to deny the province of British Columbia detailed spill response and emergency plans for the Trans Mountain pipeline.

When B.C. asked the NEB to compel Kinder Morgan to release the plans, the board refused.

As DeSmog Canada reported, the plans withheld in B.C. included contact information for first responders and company officials and outlined access to oil booms, pumps, hoses and storage tanks and other supplies needed in the event of an oil spill.

Canadian Energy Pipeline Association vice-president Pay Smyth said the group is seeking disclosure standards that will satisfy the public demand for disclosure while protecting personal information of company employees and first responders.

“This is by no means a PR exercise,” Smyth told the Calgary Herald. “We are treading new ground here. Industry recognizes that Canadians have the right and the need to know and we’re going to make sure they have access to information.”

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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.

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The Harper government knew in early 2012 that proposed regulatory reforms tabled in the contentious Omnibus Budget Bill C-38 would be "very controversial." As a result a parliamentary secretary to the minister of Environment Canada was directed to seek the cooperation of a major tar sands developer, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL), regarding the proposed changes, saying "the reforms, when introduced, may be very controversial. I hope we can count on your support."

The comments, revealed in secret briefing notes released to Postmedia News through Access to Information requests, were prepared for Environment Minister Peter Kent's parliamentary secretary, Michelle Rempel. The secret documents show behind-the-scenes coordination between industry and Environment Canada occurred well before the federal government overhauled environmental laws last summer or even proposed the changes in Parliament.

Similar communication did not occur with First Nations or environmental groups.

The briefing notes provided Rempel with specific talking points intended to highlight the role industry interests played in the overhaul of environmental protections.

"Resource development is certainly among the major industrial sectors that are top-of-mind as we consider the modernization of our regulatory system," the notes read.

Rempel, who met with Bill Clapperton, CNRL vice-president of stakeholder and environmental affairs on February 2, 2012, suggested the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers – Canada's most powerful oil and gas industry lobby group – had also "pointed to potential areas for reform."

The documents are part of a larger body of internal documents that highlight the federal government's close liaison with the oil and gas industry.

In September 2012, Postmedia's Mike De Souza reported on internal briefing notes prepared for Minister Kent before a meeting with the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association. They showed the federal government's promise that new legislation would lighten regulation of industrial projects.

"Pipeline development is certainly among the major industrial sectors that are top-of-mind as we consider the modernization of our regulatory system," the documents stated.

An additional internal document from late 2011 and only released earlier this month, showed numerous oil and gas industry groups requested changes to existing environmental laws that they deemed not beneficial to industrial activities. The Harper government granted these requests only months later with the radical overhaul of environmental protections through Bill C-38.

The federal government appears to have pushed through these massive environmental reforms – eliminating some 3000 environmental reviews in tandem – despite the caution of Environment Canada officials who told Kent such reforms could "weaken public trust and credibility in the environmental assessment process…especially when applied to major projects such as oil sands developments or large mines."

Those comments, originating from Environment Canada, came from internal briefing notes, prepared for Minister Kent, and released through Access to Information legislation to researcher Ken Rubin.

The notes continued, "it is in the interest of all parties that the federal and provincial governments fully meet their respective mandates for the protection of the environment in relation to oil sands development," adding anything less could "undermine the government of Canada's ability to fulfill its responsibilities," reported De Souza.

These internal documents, now released, demonstrate the extent to which Harper's budget legislation appears to be designed with industry interests in mind, or rather, "top-of-mind."

Image Credit: Emissions from tar sands refineries by Kris Krug. Used with permission.

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