Red Deer River Oil Spill: Living With Pipelines Part 2 of 3

A boom stretches out to contain a pipeline leak on the Gleniffer reservoir, 

which provides drinking water for the city of Red Deer.

Photograph by: Jeff McIntosh, Canadian Press , Calgary Herald

Calls growing for probe of aging pipeline system

Recent spills highlight ongoing risk

By Stephen Ewart,

Calgary Herald

June 16, 2012

Amid the chaos on the conference floor of this week's Global Petroleum Show, Ron Laidman of Shawcor was touting his company's latest polymer technology to modernize pipelines in the field.

Pipelines were a big topic of conversation throughout the show because, at the same time, hundreds of workers were busy cleaning up after a rupture in a 46-year-old pipeline dumped up to 3,000 barrels of crude oil into the Red Deer River system.

The river is the source of drinking water for 90,000 people in central Alberta farm country.

In northern Alberta, workers are also mopping up at Rainbow Lake after a pipeline leak by Pace Oil & Gas spilled 5,000 barrels. It's the same area where Plains Midstream had released 28,000 barrels last year in one of Alberta's biggest spills.

It was a Plains pipeline that ruptured June 7 southwest of Red Deer.

"Unfortunately, it can take things like a failure to actually cause a change," said Laidman, who was promoting Shawcor's corrosion-prevention coatings, which address integrity concerns of aging pipelines.

Two spills in as many months increased talk about the safety and reliability of the 400,000 kilometres of pipelines that criss-cross Alberta.

The issue is politically sensitive with the proposed Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines from Alberta's oilsands now attracting significant attention from environmental groups. Within hours of the latest spill, Alberta Premier Alison Redford was on site, pronouncing it an un-fortunate but rare event.

With the Energy Resources Conservation Board listing 531 oil or gas spills in 2010 in Alberta, environmentalists questioned the comment that spills "don't happen very often."

There are growing calls for an independent probe of the network that will be relied upon to carry Alberta's fast-growing volumes of crude from the oilsands.

"I really don't trust the companies to be accurate in what they are reporting and (I) think we need an independent re-view," said Mike Hudema of Greenpeace.

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