A pipeline at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake oilsands facility southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, spilled about five million liters (32,000 barrels or some 1.32 million gallons) of emulsion, a mixture of bitumen, sand and water, Wednesday afternoon — marking one of the largest spills in Alberta history.

According to reports, the spill covered as much as 16,000 square meters (almost 4 acres). The emulsion leaked from a “feeder” pipe that connects a wellhead to a processing plant.

At a press conference Thursday, Ron Bailey, Nexen vice president of Canadian operations, said the company "sincerely apologize[d] for the impact this has caused." He confirmed the double-layered pipeline is a part of Nexen's new system and that the line's emergency detection system failed to alert officials to the breach, which was discovered during a visual inspection. 

At this time, the company claims to have the leak under control, according to CBC News.  

Nexen's "failsafe" system didn't detect massive pipeline spill: http://t.co/ULEnxlmQEN pic.twitter.com/DmChECTUX7

— Anna Mehler Paperny (@amp6) July 17, 2015

The spill comes at a particularly bad time for Canada’s premiers, who are poised to sign an agreement three years in the making to fast-track the approval process for new oil sands pipelines while weakening commitments to fight climate change, according to Mike Hudema, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace.

“As provincial premiers talk about ways to streamline the approval process for new tar sands pipelines, we have a stark reminder of how dangerous they can be,” Hudema said in a statement. “This leak is also a good reminder that Alberta has a long way to go to address its pipeline problems and that communities have good reasons to fear having more built.”

New pipelines would lead to more development of the tar sands, Canada’s fastest growing source of carbon emissions, Hudema said. “We need to stop new pipeline projects before they’re built and focus on building renewable sources of energy that are sustainable and won’t threaten communities, our environment, and the planet.”

Raw footage of the emulsion spill from CBC News.

Canada’s premiers aren’t alone in seeking to remove barriers to new pipeline construction in order to get more tar sands flowing out of Alberta. It recently came to light that Wisconsin officials worked with an attorney and lobbyist for Canadian pipeline company Enbridge to draft a controversial provision placed into the 2015 Wisconsin Budget that would fast-track expansion of the company's Line 61 pipeline, what’s been called a “Keystone XL clone.”

Nexen and Alberta regulators say it’s too soon to determine what caused the pipeline failure Wednesday, or how long it was leaking before it was shut off. The emulsion has so far not reached any bodies of water, according to reports, but did flow into muskeg or bog.

This is the biggest spill at least in recent Alberta history. Last March, 2.7 million liters of condensate (about 17,000 barrels, or 700,000 gallons), used to dilute heavy oil so it flows through pipelines, were spilled at Murphy Oil’s Seal oilfield in northwestern Alberta.

In 2011, 4.5 million litres of oil (over 28,000 barrels, or 1.2 million gallons) leaked from a Plains Midstream pipeline into marshlands near the northern Alberta community of Little Buffalo. A year later, about half a million litres of oil spilled from another Plains pipeline into the Red Deer River in central Alberta.

Plains Midstream is a subsidiary of Houston-based Plains All-American Pipeline, the company that owns the pipeline that spilled 105,000 gallons (2,500 barrels) of oil near Santa Barbara, California earlier this year.

Image Credit: CBC via Youtube.

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Last week, after a frenzy of press coverage of the ongoing underground bitumen seepage* at the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range, CNRL, the company responsible for the spill, released a press statement suggesting the incident was contained.

“Each location has been secured and clean-up, recovery and reclamation activities are well underway,” the press release reads.

Cara Tobin from the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) says the spill is still ongoing and has yet to be brought under control.

“It’s ongoing. The spill is still ongoing. There is still bitumen coming up from the ground. With my language I would say it is not under control [because] bitumen is still coming up from the ground.”

The AER website has the incident officially listed as “ongoing” on its website.

“However,” says Tobin, “from a containment point of view CNRL has put up a perimeter around the extent of the impact on the surface and that surface impact is not getting any bigger. They have contained the extent of the spill.”

But beyond cordoning off the spill site, Tobin says, “it’s a release that is still ongoing. It is a very slow release but it is still ongoing.”

AER updated the total volume released on Friday to 1060 cubic metres – just over 6600 barrels of oil or more than 1 million litres. The volume of the Kalamazoo tar sands disaster, the largest and most expensive on shore oil spill in US history, was around 3 million litres.

The original incident report claimed only 28 cubic metres of oil were released.

Cold Lake bitumen release on CNRL's Primrose site. Courtesy of Emma Pullman.

“That volume grows every day, so it changes every day,” said Tobin.

A recent Alberta Primetime exclusive shows a large body of water affected by subsurface seepage of bitumen. CNRL incident commander Kirk Skocylas says one area of the spill is emerging from "a subsurface source" and "because it is within the water body we physically can't see where it is coming up." 

“Clean up is ongoing,” she added. “CNRL is working diligently to clean up the release.”

This spill, says Tobin, “is in the same operational area” as a similar release CNRL experienced in 2009. “These are releases coming up from basically cracks in the ground, not from the well pad.” CNRL told DeSmog Canada there is "absolutely no connection" between the 2009 incident and the ongoing release.

The Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board, now the AER, released a report in 2011, which found numerous investigations into the 2009 spill inconclusive, although several causes, such as underground fractures, were cited as possible explanations for the release.

As for the cause of CNRL’s current ongoing bitumen release, Tobin says it is too early to say what may be the cause.

Last week CNRL stated “mechanical failures of wellbores" were to blame for the spill although Tobin says “we do not have the technical data or evidence to verify what that cause might be – what that cause or causes might be. We will determine that through our investigation process.”

Image Credit: Emma Pullman

* An earlier version of this post described the underground bitumen release as a "geyser." Thanks to comments from our readers and members of the scientific community we've changed the wording to more accurately reflect the nature of the spill. We originally used the term geyser to denote the underground surfacing of liquid from a subsurface source, but now realise the term is technically inaccurate. 

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.

Authorities in the tar sands region in Alberta are responding to the release of bitumen emulsion at the Primrose project in the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range, operated by Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL).

According to a press release from the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) “the affect area is off lease and has impacted a nearby slough. The company has begun clean-up operations. There were no injuries as a result of the release. The volume of emulsion released has not been confirmed at this time." Media relations contacts were unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Bitumen emulsion is a mixture of heavy tar sands crude know as bitumen and water from in-situ (in ground) oil production.

According to the CNRL website, the company uses a “huff and puff” technology also known as Cyclic Steam Stiumulation or CSS to develop bitumen at the Primrose project.

During in-situ bitumen recovery, steam is injected into deep underground deposits of heavy crude oil. The resulting mixture of oil and water is called an 'emulsion.' 

CSS is unlike other in-situ recovery processes because it uses only one injection and extraction well. 

The Cold Lake area lies to the south east of Fort McMurray.

CNRL projects in the immediate area include Wolf Lake, Marie Lake and Hilda Lake, which together comprise the Clearwater reservoir that contains an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil.

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) is presently on site and working with CNRL, Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development to "ensure that the incident is controlled, contained, and all appropriate clean up and mitigation measures take place. The AER is conducting an investigation into the cause of the incident. All information is preliminary and may be changed as updates are available," according to the press release.

It is unclear at this time where on the Primrose site the release occurred. There are three distinct Primrose locations, as seen in the CNRL map below.

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