Canada sits on the third-largest oil reserve in the world. Most of it is in the Alberta oilsands, where companies extract bitumen, a crude oil with the consistency of peanut butter.

To get the oil to pass through pipelines, petroleum engineers mix the oil with lighter components — usually byproducts of natural gas production — to dilute and liquefy the bitumen. This mixture is called “diluted bitumen” or dilbit for short.

Alberta is landlocked. To reach refineries and the international market, dilbit is transported through a network of pipelines and railways over vast stretches of land, riddled with lakes, rivers and wetlands.

But oil pipelines can leak or rupture, and spill their contents into the environment. In July 2010, for example, an Enbridge pipeline in Marshall, Michigan, spilled at least three million litres of dilbit into the Kalamazoo River, of which an estimated 680,000 litres sank.

The issues of inland spills aren’t new. They are more common than marine spills but often overlooked or unreported. Generally, we know much less about how oil spills affect freshwater ecosystems than the ocean and, when it comes to dilbit spills, we know even less.

To find out, our research team carefully spilled dilbit into mini-lakes to uncover the real-world responses of the oil and its impact on aquatic life.

Recreating a freshwater oil spill

We created mini-lakes with 1,400-litre tanks, filled with lake sediment, water and the natural community of microscopic plankton retrieved from a lake on the Canadian boreal shield. We then spilled a scaled-down volume of dilbit — less than two litres — into the “lake.”

We left the tanks exposed to sunlight, temperature changes and weather while we monitored the viscosity and density of the oil slick on the surface of the water. These parameters are important for understanding when the oil might sink and how it can be cleaned up. We also tracked the oil beneath the surface, its chemical composition and its impact on the plankton living there.

Crude oil floats because it is less dense than water, allowing spilled oil to be skimmed off the water surface. But this isn’t always true for heavy Canadian crude oil.

Dilbit can sink under certain conditions, such as a turbulent river with a lot of suspended sediment and other particles. These particles can bind to the oil and make it denser, as happened on the Kalamazoo River in 2010.

Past research using wave tanks has suggested dilbit would not sink in a lake. Other studies in test tubes have shown that dilbit can sink, but only when vigorously mixed with much more suspended sediment than what is typically experienced in nature.

Our research showed that after only one day, dilbit became too viscous for conventional cleanup methods to perform well. When it rained eight days after our experimental spill, the dilbit slicks broke up and about half of them sank to the sediment in these mini-lakes.

Comparison of the dilbit surface slick on Day 0 (left) and Day 8 (right). Left: The freshly added dilbit initially covers the water surface as a smooth slick. Right: Overtime the dilbit slick grew thicker, developed a surface crust and changed colour. Following heavy rain, roughly half the oil sank to the bottom. Photo: BOREAL Study 2017

Implications for oil spill cleanup

After an oil spill into water, cleanup crews use booms, skimmers and sometimes even fire to remove the spilled oil from the water’s surface. None of this is possible if the oil sinks.

To clean up sunken oil, the submerged oil and sediment must be dug up. This invasive removal is both expensive and may further harm an ecosystem by removing entire communities living in the sediment and re-suspending oil back to the water column. Sinking substantially increases the cleanup costs and timelines and reduces recovery.

If the spilled dilbit gets too viscous, conventional skimmers don’t work well, but if it gets too dense it sinks.

Our results show that dilbit can sink in lakes given enough time, and highlight the need to consider different weather scenarios in risk assessments.

Life under an oil slick

Plankton are microscopic organisms that form the base of the food web that supports fish populations. They are also quite sensitive to environmental changes, such as a dilbit spill, making them an ideal group to study.

We found that dilbit spills reduced the overall amount of the zooplankton and algae in the water, but not all species were affected to the same degree.

Some algae species showed signs of recovery after the dilbit sank, but zooplankton appeared more sensitive in the long-term. Larger zooplankton are an important food for fish, so if their numbers drop for a prolonged period, fish could starve. Our initial study lasted 11 days, so we don’t know if this would occur.

Bacterial abundance, on the other hand, increased following the dilbit spill. The composition of the bacterial community shifted to include more oil-eating microbes, which could help mitigate some of the impact of residue oil.

We have seen this before in the ocean. After marine oil spills, bacterial blooms of oil-eating microbes are common.

Oil breakdown by bacteria offers a promise for some remediation following spills but is likely not a silver bullet, especially for heavy oils such as dilbit. After a dilbit spill, most of the heaviest petroleum compounds comprising natural bitumen will still likely remain, as oil-eating microbes prefer lighter, more accessible oil.

Research coming down the pipeline

We know that freshwater dilbit spills may have different implications for clean up and can dramatically affect aquatic life in the short-term, but we still need to understand the long-term impacts of dilbit in a variety of environments and spill sizes.

In 2018, we conducted a larger study using in-lake enclosures at the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, a research facility in northwestern Ontario that’s world-renowned for hosting experiments in whole lakes. Research from these experimental lakes has shaped water quality policies, such as acid rain and phosphates, by providing more accurate answers than those that come from a lab test tube.

However, unlike typical whole lake studies, we did not just release dilbit into a single lake. By using large in-lake enclosures, we created seven different spill sizes, using multiple levels of oil containment to prevent an intentional oil spill from becoming a terrible accident.

Last summer, a follow-up study evaluated different oil cleanup options in a freshwater lake using similar in-lake enclosures to figure out which methods work best. Combined, the results of these studies will help inform the risk assessments for dilbit spills, cleanup methods, environmental policy and hopefully mitigate the impacts of future spills.

No one wants an oil spill in their backyard, but sometimes recreating these accidents through small controlled spills is the best way to understand them.

Jeffrey Cederwall, PhD Student in Biology, Queen’s University, and Sawyer Stoyanovich, PhD Candidate in Biology, Spec in Chemical and Environmental Toxicology, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

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The Husky Energy oil spill in Newfoundland is a wake-up call for British Columbians as the National Energy Board conducts yet another review of the Trans Mountain expansion project.

The east coast spill brings into sharp focus significant questions regarding the limitations of oil spill cleanup and recovery. It’s also a reminder of the very real possibility that an oil spill in a marine environment off the coast would be treated with Corexit, a chemical dispersant that would make a real-time experiment of us all — humans and non-humans alike.

In June 2016 the federal government quietly approved the use of Corexit 9500, a substance which Trans Mountain indicated in their submission to the National Energy Board they would consider using in the event of a marine oil spill off the B.C. coast.

The intended purpose of dispersants like Corexit 9500 is to break up oil slicks on the water’s surface by increasing the rate at which oil droplets form and move into the water column.

Chemical dispersion does not reduce the amount of oil entering the marine environment; rather, it aims to change where the oil goes and how quickly it gets there.

The idea is to turn the oil into small droplets which are more easily degraded by naturally occurring microbes, but it turns out that this plan may backfire.

In research conducted following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Corexit was found not only to be toxic to naturally occurring microbes that can degrade oil, but to actually suppress their oil-degrading ability.

Efficacy of Corexit on diluted bitumen unproven

There are significant concerns about the use of Corexit on a spill of diluted bitumen (dilbit), a blend of bitumen and chemicals, which would be carried by the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline.

Corexit’s effectiveness in dispersing dilbit is unproven at best, and a growing body of research indicates that Corexit is toxic to fish, wildlife, and humans.

Past experience on the B.C. coast has taught us that the rough conditions commonly encountered can render traditional oil spill cleanup methods — booms and skimmers — not just ineffective, but unusable.

Further, in their application to the National Energy Board, Trans Mountain noted that diluted bitumen can submerge in the water column and sink, thereby “reducing the effectiveness of a conventional spill response.”

In general, chemical dispersion is much less effective on weathered oils than on fresh oils.

Because the lighter components of dilbit weather so rapidly (through processes such as evaporation), the window during which chemical dispersion may be effective is significantly smaller than it would be for conventional crude oils.

Both Trans Mountain and Environment Canada examined the efficacy of dispersants on dilbit.

Environment Canada found that in breaking wave conditions, dispersants were able to disperse less than half of the dilbit released into the water. In non-breaking waves, dilbit was not affected at all by dispersant application. The report concluded that the physical properties of dilbit “limit the effectiveness of currently-available spill treating agents.”

Trans Mountain found that Corexit 9500 was ‘marginally effective’ on 6-hour weathered dilbit and ‘not particularly effective’ on more weathered dilbit. This very short time frame during which Corexit may be ‘marginally effective’ could pose major challenges given that in some locations, a full spill response could take up to 36 hours to arrive.

The risk would be magnified in the event that weather conditions prevented the use of booms and skimmers and dispersant was the only feasible option.

Corexit and wildlife

As noted, Corexit can also be toxic to wildlife.

For some species, such as herring embryos, toxicity occurs because Corexit does what it was designed to do: increase the concentration of petroleum hydrocarbons in the water column.

However, there is also a growing body of research, much of it conducted in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, which suggests that there is something else going on.

During this catastrophic spill, BP applied almost 7 million litres of Corexit, essentially turning the Gulf of Mexico and its human and wildlife inhabitants into an experiment on the short- and long-term effects of dispersant mixed with oil.

Blue crabs exposed to Corexit as part of a laboratory study to better understand the toxicity of chemical dispersants conducted by Louisiana Sea Grant. Photo: Louisiana Sea Grant via Flickr

Even at that time, there were concerns about the toxicity of Corexit: U.S. EPA administrators instructed BP to switch to a less toxic dispersant, but the company indicated that the alternatives were unsuitable and continued to use Corexit.

Now, research is showing that not only is Corexit itself toxic, but that a combination of Corexit and oil can be far more toxic than either product alone.

In fact, in marine plankton, Corexit and oil together caused toxicity up to 52-fold higher than oil.

This increased toxicity is due in part to the fact that dispersants can increase the exposure of fish and wildlife to the toxic parts of oil, to the extent that toxicity to rainbow trout embryos increased up to 300 fold.

U.S. Air Force pilots fly low over the Gulf of Mexico, releasing chemical dispersants as part of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup efforts on May 6, 2010. Photo: Technical Sergeant Adrian Cadiz / U.S. Air Force

However, some of the toxicity of Corexit 9500 also appears to be due to the surfactants it contains. One of these, known as DOSS, was found to be more toxic to the cells of rainbow trout than Corexit as a whole, while others (e.g. Tween 80 and 85) were also toxic, interfering with the ability of cells to metabolize petroleum hydrocarbons.

The combination of spilled dilbit and dispersants has the potential to negatively impact B.C.’s marine mammals, including endangered killer whales.

Trans Mountain vs. killer whales: the tradeoff Canadians need to be talking about

Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, 101 cetacean carcasses that washed up on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico were associated with spilled oil, although estimates of the actual number of mortalities ranged up to 50 times higher.

For cetaceans, which must surface to breathe, the inhalation of evaporating toxic components of dilbit combined with airborne Corexit 9500 poses a serious risk.

Human danger

Humans are at risk too.

Workers attempting to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill experienced coughing, wheezing, eye, skin, and lung irritation, nausea, vomiting, and rashes, with some continuing to experience symptoms over a year later.

In Coast Guard personnel who assisted with clean up, dispersant exposure was linked to acute respiratory symptoms. In addition to its own toxicity, Corexit can also increase exposure to the toxic components of oil by creating oil particles so fine that they can become airborne and enter the lungs.

Crewmembers from the vessel Braxton Perry recover a deflection boom after three days of controlled burns in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stumberg / U.S. Navy

This airborne mixture of oil and dispersant can travel up to 80 kilometres.

In Sweden and the U.K., Corexit has been banned due to the risk it poses to workers.

What stands out from this growing body of research is how poorly we understand the toxicity of dispersant combined with any type of oil.

There are a vast number of potential toxicity scenarios, depending on the chemicals present, exposure routes, weather conditions, and species, among many other variables.

Almost three decades ago, researchers warned about these complexities, stating that “rigorous toxicological comparison of untreated and dispersant-treated oil is complicated by the fact that when oil, sea water, and dispersants are mixed, a complex multiphase system results. In this complex system, aquatic organisms can be exposed to many toxicants, in many forms, which can have several modes of action.”

Why is Corexit on the table?

Why, then, would the federal government even attempt to pursue the Corexit route?

The answer may be largely a question of optics.

Undispersed oil can eventually reach shorelines, coating birds and mammals while creating a public relations nightmare for the government of Canada, the new owner and operator of the Trans Mountain pipeline and oil tanker project.

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For 18 months, the federal government has claimed that its support for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is science-based.

Despite pledges to increase transparency and elevate science in policy decisions — which earned kudos during the 2015 election — it’s hard to find the scientific basis for their science-based decision.

Some in the Trudeau government seem to be getting the message.

Less than three weeks ago, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna called for the creation of a new scientific advisory panel to reconsider concerns about the environmental risks of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. Many scientists — including ourselves — are eager to contribute.

An advisory panel of independent experts could address the deficiencies of a National Energy Board process that is widely acknowledged to have been both industry-biased and insufficient.

However, this begs an important question: if concerns are sufficient to convene a new science panel to address the NEB’s failures regarding the risks of diluted bitumen in B.C.’s coastal waters, shouldn’t the decision to approve the pipeline have waited for just this kind of information?

Prior to the November 2016 pipeline approval, we shared with government a peer-reviewed study that evaluated scientific understanding of 15 types of environmental impact to the oceans caused by the production and transport of diluted bitumen.

This heavy petroleum product would be pumped through the Trans Mountain pipeline at three times the current volume and create a seven-fold increase in tanker transport through Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet.

Our research found large gaps in scientific understanding of the toxicity of diluted bitumen products to marine species and how the products will behave in the ocean. Filling both gaps is necessary before determining whether the Trans Mountain pipeline is in Canada’s best interests.

In fact, our study was one of at least five major scientific reviews, published by the Royal Society of Canada and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Office of Response, among others, in the lead up to the approval of the Trans Mountain project.

All five identified major gaps in scientific understanding and preparedness for environmental impacts generated by the coastal transport of diluted bitumen.

The gaps in knowledge, combined with incomplete risk assessment and insufficient baseline data, make it impossible to address the full suite of threats to ocean species and their habitats, or to assess the effectiveness of emergency actions, including spill response.

Given the paucity of information on these key issues, the B.C. government’s call for additional scientific review and research, made last January, was well grounded, and has proven to be prescient.

McKenna’s proposal for a new look at the science followed on the heels of reports that a high-ranking government official had instructed public servants to find a “legally-sound basis to say ‘yes'” to the Trans Mountain project, while discouraging them from raising concerns identified by independent research, including our own.

A credible review, by a panel of independent scientists, at arm’s length from influence by industry or government, is long overdue.

In the absence of sound science, government has a duty to delay construction, and err on the side of coastal protection and climate progress.

Prime Minister Trudeau’s public commitment to transparency and evidence-based policy demands no less.

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A pipeline owned by Paramount Resources Ltd. released an estimated 100,000 litres of crude oil and 190,000 litres of produced water near Zama City, in northwest Alberta, according to an April 11 incident report filed with the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The release was discovered after company personnel looked into a low-pressure alarm from the company’s leak detection system, the incident report states. The emergency status of the spill ended April 16.

The report says that although “the release was initially believed to be minor” further investigation shows the spill to be around 290,000 litres and has impacted an area of 200 metres by 200 metres.

“The pipeline was isolated and depressurized, and clean-up is underway,” the incident report states. “No reported impacts to wildlife.”

The cause of the spill is still under investigation, Paul Wykes, spokesperson with Paramount Resources, told DeSmog Canada.

The spill is located approximately 10 kilometres northeast of Zama City, Wykes said.

The remote pipeline is part of a network in the Zama area obtained by Paramount Resources when it acquired Apache Corp for $487 million in 2017.

Between May 2013 and January 2014 Apache’s pipeline infrastructure was plagued by a series of incidents that included one of the largest recent pipeline spills in North America.

In June 2013, a pipeline released 15.4 million litres of oil and toxic produced water into muskeg, contaminating a 42-hectare span of boreal forest.

Apache pipeline spill, June 2013. Photo: Apache Corp.

“Every plant and tree died” James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha First Nation, told the Globe and Mail at the time.

The spill, which continued undetected for nearly one month, was originally reported to be only 9.5 million litres in volume due to an inaccurate meter reading, the company said.

Produced water can contain hydrocarbons, salt, metals, radioactive materials and chemicals uses in the oil extraction process.

An investigation later revealed the pipeline, which was only five years old at the time of the spill, cracked due to corrosion stress, caused by a pinhole leak. The company was later fined $16,500 for the spill and the Alberta Energy Regulator ordered a third-party audit of the company’s aging pipeline infrastructure.

Oil and gas exploration has been occurring in the Zama area since the 1950s.

In October 2013, Apache announced it had detected another pipeline leak after it had released an estimated 1.8 million litres of oil, chemicals and contaminated water over a three-week period.

In a statement of facts agreed to by Apache concerning the 1.8 million litre spill, the company admitted it failed to install protective fencing around the pipeline and that evidence indicated a bison may have rubbed up against the pipe, crushing it.

Two additional Apache spills occurred between 2013 and 2014, one smaller spill near Zama and one near Whitecourt, Alberta, which released nearly 2 million litres of produced water.

It was later determined Apache failed to install proper pressure valves on the pipeline near Whitecourt.

In 2016 Apache pled guilty to violations of the Pipeline Act and the Environmental Enhancement and Protection Act as was fined $350,000 by the Alberta Energy Regulator.  

In response to the April 11, 2018 spill, Paramount “immediately initiated its emergency response plan,” Wykes said.

“A team of personnel is on site as containment, clean-up and delineation efforts continue. There is no danger to the public,” he said.

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On a sunny August afternoon in 2010, the Clipper Adventurer hit an underwater rock shelf near Kugluktuk, Nunavut, carrying 128 Adventure Canada passengers and 69 crew.

The nearest ship capable of responding to the incident was the coast guard icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, 500 kilometres away in the Beaufort Sea, which arrived on scene the following day.

Adventure Canada was fined nearly half a million dollars in 2017 for environmental damage caused by 13 tanks carrying fuel, water and sludge that breached during the incident.

The fines were levied after the company unsuccessfully sued the Canadian government for $13 million over what they claimed was an unmarked shelf — it wasn’t marked on the ship’s charts, having only been discovered three years prior.

“It’s a part of the world where you do your best, but there are blank spots on the map,” Adventure Canada’s owner, Matthew Swan, told CBC at the time of the accident.

It wasn’t the first, nor the last marine incident in the Canadian North; just two years later, the fuel tanker M/V Nanny ran aground in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut. It hit bottom again — in the same inlet — two years later. Then, in 2016, a 67 metre fishing boat was torn open by ice off Baffin Island and had to limp across Davis Strait to Greenland.

Shipping and tourism are ramping up across the region, and more incidents are inevitable. That has local communities looking askance at their meagre response plans and capabilities.

“I think it’s widely accepted and widely known that if there was a major spill in the Arctic, the consequence would be devastating,” Andrew Dumbrille, shipping specialist with the World Wildlife Fund, told DeSmog Canada.

Sea ice, unforgiving weather, remoteness and sparse charts are just a few of the complications that responders would face in the event of a spill — challenges that would be daunting for seasoned responders, and much more so for untrained locals.

Dumbrille and a large group, including members of the Coast Guard and other government agencies, spent five days in Resolute in March, working with locals to develop a spill response plan tailored to that community, so that in the case of an accident, the community could contain the damage before it eviscerated the hunting and fishing many community members depend on.

“If there was a spill, the community doesn’t know what to do,” Dumbrille said. “There isn’t a plan in place, there isn’t training, there isn’t updating of any kind of plan or any way to mobilize the community around an event or a spill. So you hear that a lot. They don’t necessarily know who to call or what to do about it.”

Currently the community has a shipping container with some equipment to deal with a spill, but it’s not regularly tested and people in the community aren’t trained in using it.

It’s one of what the Coast Guard calls “environmental response caches,” of which there are 22 across the Arctic. The nearest Coast Guard base, however, is in Hay River, Northwest Territories, more than 1,500 kilometres up the Mackenzie River from the Arctic Ocean.

In an emailed response to questions from DeSmog Canada, the Coast Guard said that as part of the Oceans Protection Plan it was training and creating jobs for Indigenous communities across the Arctic.

That includes expanding the Coast Guard Auxiliary, made up of volunteers who are on standby to respond to incidents like search-and-rescue, though it is not clear if the auxiliary has a dedicated role in spill response.

The Coast Guard also says it’s working with its American counterparts to develop safer shipping routes through the Arctic, which would try to avoid risk to sensitive areas.

Dumbille says that was a concern raised during community meetings in Resolute: making sure that ship traffic avoids the most at-risk areas, like calving grounds for whales.

“Why don’t we make sure the ships transit away from our most important whale calving areas and migration routes, so that if there is a spill, then it would be far off from those important areas?” Dumbrille says.

The community also emphasized that what they really want is the capacity to respond to an emergency themselves, and to not have to wait for a ship that could be days away. That means proper equipment, regular training and paid responders.

The Clipper Adventurer was part of a much larger growing trend when it comes to ship traffic in the Canadian Arctic.

Between 1984 and 2004, a total of 23 commercial cruise ships transited the Northwest Passage, according to the Arctic Council. But in 2017 alone, Coast Guard numbers show 93 vessels made voyages in the Arctic: 19 passenger ships and 74 cargo ships and tankers.

“It’s not the Panama Canal,” Dumbrille says.

Numbers are still low, but with projects like the Mary River mine, one of the world’s most northernmost mines, adding bulk carriers to the equation (72 voyages in 2017), as well as fishing vessels (142) and tugs (42) now plying the waters of the Arctic, it’s becoming a crowded place.

Worldwide, there were 55 “incidents” in the Arctic in 2014, including one “total loss,” according to a report by insurer Allianz Global. A decade earlier, in 2005, there were three.

Currently, spill response plans are not tailored to each community; they’re developed at a regional scale. Dumbrille says the Resolute plan is still in development, and will act as a template that can be exported and adapted to communities across the Arctic.

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While much of the country’s attention was focused on the rapidly escalating stand-off between Alberta and British Columbia over the Trans Mountain pipeline this week, another major environmental announcement went largely unnoticed.

On Thursday, the federal government quietly approved BP Canada’s plan to drill up to seven deep exploration wells off the coast of Nova Scotia between 2018 and 2022. In her decision statement, Environment and Climate Change minister Catherine McKenna wrote the project “is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.”

That conclusion ran contrary to serious concerns that environmental and fishing organizations have raised about the project — including BP’s role in the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the proximity of the project to critical fish and marine mammal habitats, the company’s dependence on toxic chemical dispersants in the case of an oil spill, and a blowout containment strategy that would require at least two weeks to ship and equip a capping device from Norway.

“We feel like we’re under assault,” said John Davis, director of the Clean Ocean Action Committee, in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “The coastal communities and fishing industry of Eastern Canada is just under assault by this government.”

The Clean Ocean Action Committee is a coalition of fish plant operators and fishermen representing more than 9,000 jobs in southwestern Nova Scotia.

The BP wells off the southeast coast of Nova Scotia are slated to be at least 3.5 times the distance from land and up to twice the depth of the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, which exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

ICYMI: BP Wants to Drill Underwater Wells Twice the Depth of Deepwater Horizon in Canada

McKenna’s approval isn’t the last word on the project: the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board still needs to oversee some final processes, including the creation of a spill response plan and issue a licence approval to drill.

But the offshore boards aren’t exactly known for interfering with development.

For all intents and purposes, this decision was the last opportunity for the federal government to make an intervention on a number of different issues: spill response, impacts of routine activities on marine mammals such as right whales, Indigenous rights or greenhouse gas emissions. While some legally binding conditions were included with the approval, none fundamentally addressed the major issues critics have with the project.

The 700 kilometre Scotian Shelf, which effectively divides the Continental Shelf and the deeper Atlantic Ocean, serves as the site of remarkable biodiversity, including whales, seals, sea turtles, fish, corals and birds. That contributes to highly successful fisheries such as the nearby Georges Bank.

“The edge of the Scotian Shelf is a remarkably productive area and important for a lot of animals,” Hal Whitehead, professor of biology at Dalhousie University, told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s that the drilling is actually on and near the shelf that worries me most.”

‘We’re Under Assault’: Feds Quietly Approve Deepwater Oil Drilling Off Nova Scotia https://t.co/4YwqVi9tLQ #offshore #NovaScotia #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/nF6vq0swy7

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 3, 2018

Limited Consultations Resulted in No Major Changes, Critics Said

There wasn’t much of a chance for the public to articulate its concerns at any point during the process, despite McKenna’s assurance there was “meaningful consultation and input from Indigenous groups and the public.”

“We were denied any opportunity for public hearings,” Davis said. “Any comments that we had to make about BP or the Environmental Impact Statement would have to be written briefs. And quite frankly, I work with a lot of really confident and thoughtful people, but most of my fishing community aren’t into writing briefs. But they would be happy to have a discussion. And we were denied that discussion. That really aggravated us.”

In its Environmental Assessment Report, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency reported that it received submissions from five organizations and 26 individuals.

But it’s unclear that the submissions had any discernible impact on the outcome, despite overwhelmingly opposing the project.

“Comments went in, but looking in particular at the spill response plan, I don’t see much change between the draft environmental impact statement and the environmental assessment report that just came out with McKenna’s approval,” said Gretchen Fitzgerald, director of Sierra Club Canada’s Atlantic region chapter.

The announcement occurs during a time of flux for the offshore boards and environmental assessment process in Canada

Next week, it’s expected that the government’s long-awaited overhauls of the country’s various environmental laws will be announced — with the new Impact Assessment Act and Canadian Energy Regulator Act having the potential to further entrench the regulatory responsibilities of the two petroleum offshore boards.

“We’re really going to be watching to see what the legislation is going to look like in regards to offshore oil and gas,” Fitzgerald said.

ICYMI: Canada’s Offshore Petroleum Boards Under Fire for Conflict of Interest

In addition, the federal government has been amalgamating regulations on offshore oil and gas activities under the primary consultation of industry players, moving from a prescriptive to a performance-based approach that gives companies far more flexibility in how it manages risk and prepares for situations like blowouts — such as not requiring a capping device nearby.

“When you’re drilling that deep, you better know exactly what you’re doing,” Fitzgerald said. “With the poor regulations and industry oversight that we perceive out there, we’re not reassured that’s happening. They’re very far from emergency and spill response.”

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Kelly Brown was awoken at 4:30 a.m. on October 13, 2016, by the kind of phone call nobody ever wants to receive: an environmental catastrophe was unfolding a 20-minute boat ride up the coast from his home in the community of Bella Bella.

“I had to call this guy back because I wanted to make sure — because I’m half asleep — wanted to make sure that I heard him right, that there’s a tug that ran aground in our territory,” he recalls.

Brown is the director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management department, the branch of the Heiltsuk government in charge of the environmental stewardship of the First Nation’s traditional territory.

Two hours later he was on site with a team ready to respond.

“It was total chaos,” says hereditary chief Harvey Humchitt.

The Nathan E. Stewart, a 30-metre tugboat owned by the Kirby Corporation based in Houston, Texas, had failed to make a turn as it headed south. Instead, it ploughed into a reef. The barge it was pushing — a fuel barge with a capacity of 10,000 tons of fossil fuels, but which was mercifully empty — was caught on the reef while boats and ships of all sizes gathered to watch helplessly.

ICYMI: Diesel Spill Near Bella Bella Exposes B.C.’s Deficient Oil Spill Response Regime

“No one knew who was giving the orders,” Brown says. The captain of the Nathan E. Stewart had declined aid from the three Coast Guard vessels at the scene.

“We could hear the barge banging against the rock,” he says. “When we got there, there was already some fuel in the water, but not a lot.”

That quickly changed when the tug sank. The fuel started coming faster and faster; in the end, more than 110,000 litres of diesel fuel, along with more than 2,000 litres of lubricant, were released into the fast-moving currents of Seaforth Channel.

That milky, foul-smelling mixture washed ashore along the coast, coating the shoreline where 50 people made their living harvesting butter and manila clams.

“About 90 per cent of the [commercial] harvest comes out of Gale Creek,” says Russell Windsor, who made a living digging clams there prior to the spill.

The clam harvest was cancelled last year. This year, it likely won’t go ahead either, and it’s unknown how long it could remain closed.

The loss was more than economic. Gale Creek is also a site of huge cultural significance to the community.

“When I was younger I was brought out here to learn how to fish, hunt, clam dig,” says Windsor, floating at the exact spot from which he watched the spill. “This is one of the learning grounds for the Heiltsuk people… You can feed all of Bella Bella right now with all the food that can be harvested here.”

No one has brought children to Gale Creek to learn to harvest this year. Other sites around the territory are being looked at for clam harvesting, but Brown doubts enough could be gathered to replace what has been compromised by the spill.

“It’ll be one year officially that this particular vessel ran ashore,” Brown says. “And we’ve been paying for it since.”

Slow Response, Little Follow-Through

The accident happened at 1 a.m. Witnesses saw the fuel leaking at 5:30 a.m. By 6:30, Heiltsuk first responders were on scene, but lacked the booms and pads that would be capable of containing and absorbing the diesel fuel.

The official responders, a team subcontracted by Western Canada Marine Response Corporation (WCMRC), meanwhile, were dispatched from Prince Rupert. But they didn’t arrive on scene until 7 p.m., 16 hours after the accident happened. By then, it was getting dark, and nothing could be done until the next day.

ICYMI: ‘Nothing Has Changed’: B.C.’s Botched Oil Spill Response Haunts First Nation

“There’s no ‘world-class’ spill response here,” Brown says, referring to the former Conservative government’s claim in 2015, which was intended to assuage fears of a spill along the Central Coast and help build social licence for oil pipelines from Alberta.

That lack of a response has bled into the ongoing monitoring of the health of the spill site. A week after the accident, Kirby gave the First Nation $250,000 to assist in cleanup efforts. But Brown says the last time the company conducted an assessment of the environmental health of the site was December 2016, just a month after the sunken tug was recovered.

He estimates the cost of a comprehensive assessment of the current and long-term impacts of the spill will be over $500,000.

In the interim, the First Nation says Kirby and the provincial government have been negotiating in secret to determine responsibility for, and scope of, future environmental impact assessments.

‘No World-Class Spill Response Here’: First Nation Pursues Lawsuit 1 Year After Tug Disaster https://t.co/35B13lF3vb @HeiltsukCouncil

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 13, 2017

Lawsuit Coming

The Heiltsuk First Nation plans to pursue legal action.

“Since this nightmare began, the polluter and provincial and federal governments have ignored our questions and environmental concerns, our collaboration attempts, and our rights as indigenous people,” said Chief Councillor Marilyn Slett in a statement released to media. “We have no choice but to turn to the courts.”

The First Nation is seeking damages for the incident, including its effect on the harvests in Gale Creek and all the associated losses that has meant for the community.

Speaking to the Globe and Mail, Kirby said it would rather “work to find pragmatic solutions” than “engage in media battles and litigation” — but the First Nation shot back with a statement Friday morning, saying it, too, wants to find pragmatic solutions. It just has a different definition of “pragmatic” — the First Nation wants comprehensive assessments of the impacts on human, natural and cultural values.

“It is difficult for Heiltsuk to have faith in Kirby discussing pragmatic solutions when they won’t engage in a full impact assessment, and has left Heiltsuk with a $140,000 bill for sampling that they conducted earlier this year,” Slett said in the second statement.

ICYMI: North Coast Oil Tanker Ban Won’t Actually Ban Tankers Full of Oil Products on B.C.’s North Coast

It also wants the government and industry to better prepare for future incidents. From the wrong booms being deployed too late, to unclear leadership on scene, to a lack of safety equipment and training, the First Nation says it has learned it can no longer rely on outside parties in an environmental crisis.

The Nation has decided to take its defence of its own territory a step further.

“We’re trying to work on setting up a marine response centre close to Bella Bella.”

Windsor has already taken it upon himself to scrutinize the marine traffic heading through Heiltsuk waters, taking note of their contents and crews. He says he has seen Kirby Corporation vessels near Bella Bella since the spill.

“The Nathan E. Stewart taught the Heiltsuk a great lesson about oil spills,” Humchitt says.

*Updated October 13, 2017 4:07pm pst. This article previoulsy quoted an individual who claimed Kirby corporation had begun passing through Heiltsuk waters at night in unidentified vessels. We have since found we could not verify this claim and have removed the statement as a result. 

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.

By Chief Councillor Marilyn Slett and Councillor Jaimie Harris, Heiltsuk Nation. This piece first appeared on The Tyee.

On Oct. 13, 2016, shortly after 1 a.m., Kirby Corporation’s tug the Nathan E. Stewart and its barge ran aground in the heart of Heiltsuk territory.

Less than eight hours later it had sunk, and 110,000 litres of diesel fuel and 2,000 litres of lubricants, heavy oils, other pollutants were released into the surrounding waters.

On charts, the area northwest of Bella Bella is known as Gale Passage, but to our people, this is Q’vúqvai.

For millennia, it has been the site of one our ancient tribal groups, the Q́vúqvaýáitx̌v; a home to ceremonial practices (past and present); and one of our richest harvest grounds. Until diesel saturated these shellfish beds last fall, our people harvested at least 25 food species from the area, including the red sea urchins, sea cucumber, herring roe, rockfish, halibut, and clams.

Despite deploying first responders as soon as possible, our people were helpless to stop the spill.

ICYMI: ‘Nothing Has Changed’: B.C.’s Botched Oil Spill Response Haunts First Nation

For us, the spill is a catastrophic injury to our food sources, culture, and economy and, thanks to Kirby Corporation and the governments of British Columbia and Canada, we expect the road to recovery will be a long one.

To date, Kirby Corporation has been unwilling to meet our requests for comprehensive post-spill research or a health impact assessment. Instead, the U.S.-owned corporation has purported to be proceeding with a limited environmental impact assessment, looking only at sampling and monitoring work conducted in a short period of time after the oil spill and a one-week period in early 2017. (Technically, impact assessments are not a required part of the federal and provincial government’s “world class” oil spill response.)

The B.C. Ministry of Environment and Kirby are apparently negotiating some kind of memorandum of agreement regarding the purported impact assessment, but have excluded us from those discussions.

In light of this inadequate and exclusionary approach, we are proceeding with our own impact assessment.

Why We're Taking the Gov to Court Over That Promise of 'World-Class' #OilSpill Response https://t.co/6FD36X483f #cdnpoli #nathanestewart

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 1, 2017

The assessment will have three parts: a Western science component, a traditional knowledge component, and a health impact assessment.

The Western science component will rely on the biological sciences to help determine the current and long-term impacts of the spill on the health of the ecosystem and marine resources.

The traditional assessment is based on Heiltsuk knowledge and will seek to understand how long it will be before harvesting can safely begin again.

ICYMI: North Coast Oil Tanker Ban Won’t Actually Ban Tankers Full of Oil Products on B.C.’s North Coast

Finally, the health impact assessment will be based on health, social science, and first person research used to determine the impacts of the events on our members. These include the social and economic consequences associated with the loss of harvest and the use of the impacted area.

In addition, we are preparing to take legal action, aiming to recover damages suffered by our people as well as to examine the actual state of Canada’s “world class” oil spill response system.

The case will be about recovering damages for loss of commercial harvesting of marine resources and loss of Aboriginal rights relating to food, but also relating to the social and ceremonial importance of marine resources — factors that the current oil spill liability framework does not account for. The existing framework excuses both the polluter and government from full responsibility for spill impacts on Aboriginal rights otherwise protected by the Constitution.

It is unacceptable that our social and cultural rights are paramount in principle, but evaporate in practice.

In light of this, along with the deficiencies we documented in the spill response and broader concerns related to the lack of consultation regarding marine plans in our territory, we will also be asking the courts to assess whether the existing regime of liability for oil spills can really be considered constitutional.

Based on our experience, the current system is anything but world-class, and government and polluters must be held accountable.

Councillor Jaimie Harris is visiting Salt Spring Island (Sept. 1) to share her account of the fuel spill. The tour is being organized by RAVEN (Respecting Aboriginal Values and Environmental Needs) as a fundraiser for the Heiltsuk’s legal defense. The event also features underwater photography from the spill site. For details, click here.

Image: The sunken Nathan E. Stewart. Photo: Tavish Campbell and the Heiltsuk Tribal Council

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On October 13, just after 1 a.m, and only eight months after British Columbia signed the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements — set in place to protect the world’s largest coastal temperate rainforest — the Nathan E. Stewart tugboat ran aground near Bella Bella.

Even though the 10,000-tonne fuel barge the tugboat was pushing was empty, the wreck managed to release more than 100,000 litres of diesel into the heart of the Heiltsuk First Nation’s traditional territory.

Now, six months after the American tug-barge on route from Alaska ran aground, the Heiltsuk First Nation has released a 75-page report on the Nathan E. Stewart oil spill that exposes the failures of Canada’s oil spill response system and a refusal from both the government and the company to share information with those affected by the spill.

“The first 48 hours were critical for mitigation,” Heiltsuk First Nation Chief Marilyn Slett told DeSmog Canada. “What the crew reported to us during interviews was that there was confusion about who was taking charge at the incident site.”

The First Nation’s integrated resource manager learned about the spill when he received a telephone call from the B.C. Ministry of Environment around 4:30 a.m. on October 13th. Vessels were on their way to Gale Passage by 6:30 that morning.

The report highlights delays in equipment arriving to the site, delays in deploying booms and an insufficient number of booms being made available.

Heiltsuk members who acted as first responders were not provided with any safety equipment or briefing on the health impacts related to the exposure to diesel, which is highly toxic.

The area most affected by the diesel leak, Gale Passage, is an important harvesting and ceremonial site and is considered a “breadbasket” of the Heiltsuk community. Since the spill the Heiltsuk has been forced to close its clam fishery.

It took responders over 30 days to remove the sunken tugboat from the water. By then the federal government had announced the “Oceans Protection Plan,”  which pledged $1.5 billion over five years to increase marine safety, marine oil spill cleanup research and restore marine ecosystems across Canada.

But according to Slett, the plan doesn’t amount to the world-class oil spill response regime British Columbians have been promised for years (a promise Premier Christy Clark reiterated in the wake of the Nathan E. Stewart spill).

“Nothing has changed since this spill,” Slett said.

“As it stands today, if something was to happen, we’re still under the same spill response regime.”

Slett added that, according to the Heiltsuk experience, “a real spill-response regime does not exist.”

One of the key-findings from the investigation was that the tugboat had been waived from requiring an onboard local pilot. And it appears that the tug replacing the Nathan E. Stewart is operating with the same waiver. Even though the tugboat repeatedly travelled through their territory, the Heiltsuk didn’t know about the waiver system until after the incident.

The proposed federal ban on oil tankers on the North Coast of B.C. also wouldn’t have prevented a vessel like the Nathan E. Stewart from traversing Heiltsuk water, because it falls just below the capacity limit proposed by the feds.

Since the Nathan E. Stewart spill, B.C. has approved the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, which would greatly increase the amount of oil tanker traffic in B.C. waters.

One of the conditions of approval — “world class oil spill response” — is something the province also failed to demonstrate in the wake of the 2015 Marathassa bunker fuel spill in Vancouver’s English Bay.

A report by West Coast Environmental Law in 2016 found the province’s oil response “overhaul” was seriously lacking.

“Changes that we recommend include that the policy level planning needs to be taken out of the hand of industry and led by both the provincial government and First Nations, with the opportunity for community input,” explained Gavin Smith, staff counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.

The report also recommended a citizens advisory council to allow for public input from people with localized knowledge.

Given that First Nations are often the first responders, Slett says First Nations and communities should be included in all decisions related to the movement of oil products through their land, especially oil spill response systems.

“We live on the coast. These are our traditional territories, we know the areas, we know the tides, we know the weather patterns, and we’re the first ones out there,” she said.

“What we can take from this and what we would like to see happen in conversations with B.C. and Canada is a recognized role for First Nations as first responders.”

Image: Diesel spill from the Nathan E. Stewart. Photo: Heiltsuk Tribal Council

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.

The Alberta Energy Regulator — responsible for regulating more than 430,000 kilometres of pipelines in the province — has finally started to try to clean up its image.

In the last two weeks of February, the agency launched a “pipeline performance report” that graphs recent pipeline incidents, it levelled a $172,500 fine against Murphy Oil for a 2015 spill that went undetected for 45 days and it shut down all operations by the notoriously uncooperative Lexin Resources, including 201 pipelines.*

But critics suggest there are major systemic flaws in the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) that still need to be addressed if pipeline safety is to be taken seriously.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Mike Hudema, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada. “You’re talking about a spill that went undetected for 45 days. And the company was fined an amount that they could likely make in less than an hour. That doesn’t send any message to the company. It definitely doesn’t send any message to the industry. And it doesn’t reform company behaviour.”

Ecojustice lawyer Fraser Thomson agrees there are major gaps in oversight.

“There are still significant, significant issues with transparency and accountability on what the AER calls ‘incidents’ within the oil and gas sector,” Thomson said.

AER Accused of Mixed Mandate, Industry-Friendly Structure

The AER was formed in late 2012 with the merging of the Energy Resources Conservation Board and some duties of the ministry of environment and sustainable development.

It’s been under fire from critics ever since.

For one, it’s often accused of having a mixed mandate. Only a month-and-a-half after forming government in 2015, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley suggested the AER can’t do the job of environmental protection and monitoring when its “overarching mandate is to promote energy development.”

Notley reported the government would review the AER’s mandate and potentially split it into two agencies: one for monitoring, another for approvals. But only six months later, the AER received a letter confirming the current organizational structure would be maintained.

“We haven’t really seen much sea change,” Hudema said. “Until that happens, unfortunately Alberta will be plagued with the pipeline problems that has plagued it for decades.”

It hasn’t helped matters that the AER’s chair Gerry Protti was a former Encana executive and founding member of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or that the AER is entirely funded by industry.

In 2013, Notley — then serving as the NDP’s environment critic — called on AER CEO Jim Ellis to resign due to his involvement in a scandal about the suppression of anti-oilsands dissent by government, describing the situation as “banana republic stuff.”

It’s a sentiment reflected by renowned ecologist Kevin Timoney, who recently reported that the AER has vastly underestimated spill volumes and recovery efforts between 1975 and 2013.

“There was some movement towards improving monitoring [in recent years] but those efforts have been undermined by senior management,” he writes in an e-mail. “Enforcement is still little more than a facade.”

Online Database An Improvement, But "Pretty Frail"

Duncan Kenyon, director of the Pembina Institute's responsible fossil fuels program, says the AER first made it a serious priority to deal with pipeline spills following the 2012 release of 461,000 litres of sour crude oil into the Red Deer River by Plains Midstream.

That same year, the provincial government ordered a pipeline safety review, which ended up being itself criticized by Notley and others for failure to consult or actually consider incidents (instead opting to simply compare regulations to other jurisdictions).

Recent spills haven’t exactly bolstered the regulator’s reputation.

The aforementioned Murphy Oil spill in 2015 resulted in 9,000 barrels of condensate spilling onto public land near Peace River. A spill at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake facility that same year released 31,000 barrels of emulsion between June 11 and July 15, despite being a brand new pipeline.

Around 1,500 barrels of oil emulsion was also spilled by Trilogy Energy near Fox Creek in October 2016.

Thomson notes that an incident first reported in 2013 involves a Canadian Natural Resources Limited in-situ project near Cold Lake in which bitumen started bubbling to the top over the period of months and years. The AER’s compliance dashboard lists the incident as “ongoing” with the “emergency phase over July 17, 2013.”

He says that he still can’t get an answer to whether the spill is happening or not.

“When it comes to the information that people want to know — what’s the risk here, is it safe, is there a safety risk to humans, wildlife environment and treaty rights — the compliance dashboard is a pretty frail tool to access it,” Thomson said.

In addition, he notes that language used by the AER often confuses things for the public: for instance, the regulator will use “produced water” in reference to “toxic water” with a high concentration of salts that are dangerous to local environments and often have oil residue in them.

Similarly, he says the AER will report “no recorded impacts” as opposed to “impacts unknown.”

“I think it would be reasonable for the public to read that and assume there weren’t impacts, when it’s really a turn of phrase,” Thomson says.

#Alberta’s Pipeline Oversight a ‘Facade’: Experts https://t.co/4942NmkdkM @james_m_wilt @HuffPostAlberta @ProgressAlberta #ableg #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/nq8N7xd0CJ

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 23, 2017

Self-Reporting Only Works If Regulator Ensures Compliance

The AER claims that the length of pipelines in Alberta has grown by 11 per cent over the last decade, with “incidents” dropping by 44 per cent.

But Timoney’s recent report complicates the matter even further, suggesting that many spills weren’t recorded, and that many former oil spill sites that have reportedly been reclaimed are still contaminated from pipeline leaks.

“According to the data that I have received from the regulator, the number of spills has declined in recent years,” he explains in an e-mail. “However, it is important to remember that those data are based on industry self-reporting; they are not independently verified. Incidents occur that are not reported, but the frequency of unreported incidents is not known.”

Kenyon agrees: “If you don’t have a regulator who’s going out and actually seeing if people are complying — going out there and doing audits and seeing if what they said in their self-report is accurate — then none of that data is worth anything.”

Alberta’s Fines Well Below National Average

That’s why many point to the lack of enforcement as a key problem.

That starts with fine limits, which is established by the province. Alberta has fairly low caps on penalties compared to other provinces, Thomson says.

Data compiled by Ecojustice and shared with DeSmog Canada indicates a clear trend: the provisions that are most often used — Section 108(2) and 109(2) of the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, concerning the “release of substance causing adverse effect to environment” — has a cap of $500,000 in Alberta, compared to a cap of $1 million in B.C., Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

In Ontario and Quebec, the maximum limit for first conviction is $6 million. The only provinces that have an equal or lower cap are Manitoba ($500,000) and Prince Edward Island ($50,000).

Cheaper to Pay Fines Than Maintain Pipelines

But the “administrative penalties” issued by the AER often fall well below that $500,000 mark.

The largest fine issued yet by the regulator was $250,000 against Pengrowth Energy for the 48-day spill of 537,000 litres of oil emulsion in late 2013. The recent fine against Murphy Oil was also one of the highest penalties in the AER’s history; Thomson says it was calculated based on every day the company failed to report it, which is a “positive development.”

The strange reality is that many pipeline companies do have leak detection systems in place. It’s just that companies often don’t direct resources into maintaining them, following what Kenyon calls a standard compliance versus non-compliance cost comparison model; in other words, it’s cheaper to ignore and risk the fine than pay for annual maintenance.

In the case of the Murphy Oil spill, the company failed to check for internal corrosion and perform maintenance on the leak detection system for three straight years even though it was required to check annually.

“You can put a management system in and then have it down in paper, but not everything is operating the way it’s supposed to,” he says. “And then you can claim when there’s a foul up that it just wasn’t operating as it was supposed to. But you never turned it on the way it was supposed to.”

More Boots on the Ground Needed

An AER spokesperson emphasized in an e-mail that the agency is working on addressing data collection issues and improving reporting spill clean-up.

In addition, the spokesperson said the regulator requires operators to implement “comprehensive integrity management programs and safety and loss management systems,” conducts “pipeline inspections on a regular basis” and provides “education on pipeline integrity.”

However, changing the trajectory of the AER ultimately requires new “marching orders” from the provincial government via an expansion of mandate, pressures to prioritize compliance and an increased limit on fines. It’s something the NDP has appeared reluctant to do; Kenyon says there “might have been more pressure coming on pipelines under the previous government.”

The press secretary for energy minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd says via e-mail there are no plans to revisit the government’s decision to keep the AER as is.

Thomson says he’s not convinced that splitting up the regulator would address some of the systemic problems, which ultimately require more boots on the ground: “Industry needs to know that if they submit data and monitoring to the AER, that there’s a good chance it will be checked.”

Meantime, the Alberta government continues to push for any and all new pipelines, from Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain to Trans Canada’s Keystone XL and Energy East.

“I really feel like the government should get its own pipeline problems in order before it’s pushing for new pipelines to new jurisdictions,” Hudema concludes.

“When you’re averaging over one spill a day, it’s not something that you should be bragging about or pushing into new communities.”

*Correction: The article originally stated that the AER had recently launched its compliance dashboard. The dashboard has in fact been available for a few years. The regulator recently launched a “pipeline performance report” that graphs recent pipeline incidents

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.

This article originally appeared on The Tyee.

A study commissioned at the request of a First Nation says the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) has not reported accurately on the scale or impact of daily crude oil and salt water spills in the petro province.


The regulator has not provided “the public with accurate, credible, complete, unbiased and timely information and fails in its responsibility to protect the environment,” the study concluded.


Kevin Timoney, author of the report and an independent ecologist based in Alberta, called for the province’s auditor general to audit “the failure of the regulator.”


Timoney’s review of the regulator’s spill database found spills that were not recorded in the database at all, or didn’t include information on volume spilled. 


In addition, he found the regulator routinely reported that 100 per cent of the spilled contaminants had been recovered after pollution events, although scientific studies have found clean-up rates for spills on land typically recover less than half the oil.


Timoney also says that AER spill reporting lacked scientific credibility because it suggested there had been almost no damage to wildlife and animals in Alberta.


The problem is immense. Spillage from the province’s well pads, pipelines and batteries onto farmland, forests, muskeg and rivers is extensive and averages 1.7 crude oil spills a day and one salt water spill a day, says the report.  


Aging oil wells typically produce more salt water than they do oil, or approximately 10 barrels of toxic water for every barrel of oil produced in North America. Produced water can also contain hydrocarbons and radioactive material. 


In Alberta, industry is required to report any release of hydrocarbons into a waterway, or “any unrefined product release” that flows off an industry lease, or spills greater than 12 barrels on an industry lease site such as a well pad.

As part of his research, Timoney examined Alberta’s spill database over a 38-year period between 1975 and 2013 and visited major spill sites to gauge the impacts on water, land and plants.


In that time period, industry spilled at least 1.6 million barrels (256,712 cubic metres) of crude oil and more than five million barrels of salt water onto the land and waterways, according to Timoney’s analysis of the AER database.


That works out to 42,105 barrels of oil spilled every year across the province, whose landscape has been marked by 400,000 well sites and 415,000 kilometres of pipelines.  


In contrast, Enbridge spilled more than 23,809 barrels of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It cost more than $1 billion to clean up the disaster.  


But Timoney found that the AER’s spillage statistics did not reflect the real scale of the problem because of missing data and other issues.


“There are a lot of spills unaccounted for with no volume specified,” said Timoney. For example, he found many documented spills that appeared in newspapers aren’t in the database.


The AER database also does not include thousands of spills prior to 1975; spills from federally regulated pipelines; spills reported to Alberta’s environment ministry; or spills that classify oil or salt water as the second or third contaminant. 


In addition, the regulator has often reported perfect recovery rates from most spills even though Timoney could find “no scientific studies” that documented total recovery of spilled oil or saline water on land. Saline spills can be more damaging to plants and vegetation because salts don’t degrade over time.

The regulator’s claim of full recovery is “patently false,” concluded Timoney in an interview.



Scientific studies show that there is impact, large or small, and that the recovery rate for spilled oil on land averages around 43 per cent while the recovery rate for ocean spills averages less than 15 per cent of the hydrocarbons recovered.


“Industry-reported impact rates from outside of Alberta are 30 to 50 times higher than those reported in Alberta,” says the report. “Evidence demonstrates that AER is failing to record animal deaths or injuries in its incident database.”


Timoney found, for example, that AER data indicated harm to habitat in less than one per cent of crude oil spills and even less for saline spills. 


Yet a 2005 peer reviewed study in Oklahoma showed that 34 per cent of oil and saline water spills “resulted in reported injury to environmental receptors (surface water, crops or livestock, soil, fish, or wildlife).” 


Peter Murchland, a public affairs manager with the AER, told The Tyee that it couldn’t verify exactly how Timoney was determining or defining perfect recovery. “As Mr. Timoney’s report has not been made publicly available, the AER cannot provide specific responses to the claims made regarding the accuracy of spill reporting data in the province.”


He added that the data set that Timoney used on spill response in the province between 1975 and 2013 “provides only a partial picture of spill clean up and damage to habitat as a result of spills in the province” and doesn’t tell the full story.

The regulator’s low estimates of damage from spills may be partly explained by the fact that other regulators such as Alberta Environment may have been involved in the process.

Prior to 2013 the board only tracked what was in its mandate and impacts on wildlife and wildlife habitat were not under the board’s jurisdiction, added Murchland.

“If the spill caused damage to a sensitive area or wildlife/livestock outside of the regulator’s jurisdiction, it may have been marked (for lack of a better option in the system) as not affected,” Murchland said.


The AER is largely funded by industry and chaired by a former energy lobbyist. 


In 2013, new legislation governing the regulator centralized duties formally carried by three ministries into the AER and dropped the board’s original mandate to “provide economic, orderly and efficient development in the public interest of the oil and gas resources in Alberta.”




Its job now is to provide “for the efficient, safe, orderly and environmentally responsible development of energy resources.”

“It is important to note that when the Government of Alberta brought together three regulators to form the AER in 2013, it was about building a regulator capable of ensuring public safety, protecting the environment and managing cumulative effects,” said Murchland.

But landowners who’ve fought the regulator in recent years say that is nonsense and that the agency is now more unaccountable than ever to the public.

Timoney attributed shortfalls in spill reporting to the board’s conflicted mandate: “The AER is there to serve industry and somehow try to protect the environment. But the AER serves their funding source which is industry.”



‘No record’ of spill



Timoney also visited 14 former oil spill sites in Alberta to measure the impact over time. At one site in northwestern Alberta where oil was released in 1998, the ecologist found the soil contaminated with 21.7 per cent crude oil (210,000 mg/kg).



“There is either no record of this spill in the AER database or the spill took place in 1998 and was later certified as cleaned up,” he told The Tyee. 

Timoney adds that wherever he looked at spill sites, he found “detectable soil, water and vegetation impacts.”

Regulator claims about “cleanup recovery dates, indicating completion of oil spill cleanup, are managerial decisions that are unjustified by the available scientific data,” says the report’s abstract. 

Dene Tha First Nation requested the spill study, while the Keepers of the Water helped to fund it. It took a year and a half to produce and will soon be published as a 200-page book.

The study reinforces the findings of a Global News investigation in 2013 on pipelines regulated by Alberta from 1975 to 2012. Using the same database it found that pipelines alone were responsible for 28,666 crude oil spills, an average of nearly 775 per year or two oil spills every day for a period of 37 years.


Given that farmland and waterways can take decades to recover from oil spills, “the industry is causing wholesale, long-term damage to ecosystems,” concluded the report.

Contamination of groundwater can take centuries or thousands of years to heal.

Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey on oil spills in Oklahoma “clearly show that significant amounts of salts from produced-water releases and petroleum hydrocarbons still remain in the soils and rocks of the impacted area after more than 60 years of natural attenuation.”


Alberta has a long and dramatic record of large oil spills. In 1970, Suncor spilled 50,000 gallons of synthetic crude into the Athabasca River while Imperial Oil flooded farmland west of Edmonton with 28,000 barrels of oil.

In recent years industry has authored more spectacular spills in Alberta, including an Apache-operated pipeline that dumped 9.5 million litres (60,000 barrels) of industrial wastewater into a muskeg in 2013.

Two years later, a Nexen pipeline released 5 million litres of bitumen wastewater into the boreal forest near Fort McMurray.

Regulators across North America employ a haphazard approach to reporting spills that rarely involves fines or enforcement orders. In North Dakota, industry must report all spills greater than one barrel while Oklahoma doesn’t require any notification unless a spill exceeds 10 barrels. 


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the U.S. petroleum industry spills anywhere from 10 to 25 million gallons of oil a year (793,650 barrels), and that these oil releases contaminate groundwater, damage farmland, harm wildlife, devalue property and threaten public health and safety.

Nigeria may have the worst record in the world for toxic oil spills. The volume of oil spilled in the Niger Delta ranges from 100,000 to 300,000 barrels of oil a year. It is considered one of the most oil spill vulnerable areas in the world.


A 2011 United Nations report warned that oil spills in Ogoniland alone had contaminated groundwater, killed mangrove swamps and exposed the local population to toxic hydrocarbons in the air and water. A billion-dollar clean up began last year.

In 2011 the New York Times reported that the oil pipeline network had spilled 110 million gallons of mostly crude oil since 1990. Most of the contamination occurred in three oil-exporting states: Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

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.