As I read more and more about the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, particularly in Nebraska, I am becoming increasingly convinced there is something in their water - and it isn't oil. The hyperbole has grown to a point of being completely insane, particularly regarding the environmental protection aspect.
My experience in the oilfield wasn't on drilling rigs, but building pipelines. While this term isn't often used, it should be - these were transcontinental pipelines, in the same way the railroads spanned the continent. I spent the better part of two years on the Alliance Pipeline, which ran from Fort St. John, B.C., to Chicago. Ill., and a good chunk of a year prior to that working on Enbridge's Terrace B expansion.
I have worked on, or beside, nearly every single crew on the pipeline. There is precious little I have not been exposed to. And as an experienced pipeliner, I can tell you this: nearly all the hysteria is hogwash.
For example, every truck you see carries great big white cotton pads to catch or clean up any spill from a piece of equipment. If there's a hydraulic leak, you jump on it with these pads immediately.
At one point one of those projects came across a bird's nest in the prairie near Regina. So they spent $150,000 or so to drill a road bore under the nest. That's a crew of about 12 guys and five pieces of equipment for the road bore crew. Then they had to bring in a tie-in crew of four welders, four welders' helpers, five or six sideboom operators and their accompanying sidebooms, a foreman and bus driver. All of this for a bird's nest.
To protect the environment, pipeline owners and pipeline construction contractors spend millions of dollars on every project to avoid sensitive grasslands, sensitive watercourses, sensitive breeding and migration routes. It used to be that pipelines were built in the summer, the easiest season to build in. Now for projects like this you cannot strip topsoil between May and August in Canada due to concerns over nesting birds. If your topsoil was not stripped beforehand, you can't to the work until Aug. 1.
The mainlines have aerial over flights every day or just about every day, looking for leaks. I was buzzed every day, I recall, when working on the line. Smaller pipelines are also over flown regularly. This is addition to sophisticated monitoring systems and frequent remotely-operated shut off valves that are meant to shut down the flow quickly after any leak is detected.
And the Nebraskan's think they're concerned about the environment?
Pipelines are the safest way known to man to move hydrocarbon materials in either liquefied or gaseous states. Pipelines have a better safety track record than rail, sea or road. The reason no one has really squawked about them for the last 60 years is exactly because of their inherit safety record.
Keystone XL is supposed to carry 830,000 barrels a day of bitumen. In North Dakota, where there is insufficient pipeline infrastructure, unit trains are being loaded with 60,000 barrels of oil each train. You would need 14 trains each and every day running from Fort McMurray to Texas, through blizzard, flood, and -40 C, to equate the carrying capacity of Keystone XL's 36-inch pipeline. How many of those trains (5,110 per year; 204,400 trains over the next 40 years) do you think can run before there is a major derailment?
The pipeline infrastructure is largely responsible for our economic wellbeing. It is as important to the economy of North America as the blood in our veins. Without them, our lives as we know it would grind to a halt for lack of fuel and the products made from petrochemicals.
The safest route is selected considering population density, access and ecological protection is chosen in the planning stages. All these things are deeply considered long before the route is decided upon.
In the end, environmental opposition from landowners often boils down to economic compensation for land access. As for the crazies? It shows the American psyche can be whipped up in such a frenzy, there is no reason to be had.
Unless you want to go back to wool and wood and horse drawn cart, let the pipeline be built.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
