Pipeline Series: OIL SPILLS SMEAR PIPELINE COMPANIES’ REPUTATIONS
By Mary Lou Aurell
There are more pipelines crossing Minnesota than there are roads. They not only move crude oil, but may also carry liquid gas, other grades of oil, gasoline, and diesel or jet fuel. Spills are inevitable.
Those involving crude oil pipelines are many and often small. However, Jason Moran, Principal State Program Administrator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s (MPCA) Emergency Response Office, says that every spill is important.
Some of these occur at refineries and pumping stations because of overfills, pump failures, faulty values, seals or relief and bleeder values, because values are left open or equipment fails.
Since 1990 through June of this year there have been 141 oil spills over 1,000 gallons in Minnesota, according to material supplied by Moran. Among these, 40% belonged to Lakehead Pipeline/Enbridge Pipeline; 8 were tagged “Significant.” Minnesota Pipeline/Koch Pipeline spills numbered 37 (26%); of these 7 were considered “Significant.”.
The March 5, 1991 Lakehead Pipeline rupture near Grand Rapids ranks among the 13 top spills in the nation. The line leaked an estimated 1.7 million gallons of crude oil onto a field west of Itasca Community College and into the Prairie River. A weld failure was traced to “stresses created when the pipe was shipped to the construction site.”
The frozen, snow-covered ground stopped major soil contamination, but a frozen river hampered skimming efforts.
Ironically, this same Lakehead line was the source of the state’s second largest spill that dumped 1.3 million gallons in 1973 near Argyle, MN, according to “The 13 Worst Pipeline Accidents Since the Exxon Valdez.,” a paper by Bob Rackleff, nationally-known speechwriter and public relations consultant.
Lakehead Pipeline, one of the largest pipeline systems in the world, is now owned by Enbridge Pipeline.
Enbridge is often the target of environmentalists working to stop its crude oil lines from crossing areas they feel would be severely damaged by spills.
In late 2006 the Midwest Environmental Advocates claimed that Enbridge had a documented history of seam weld failures from fatigue cracks, according to an article in the October 11 Business North.
The Environmental Advocates Director Melissa Scanlan said it’s the nature of the pipeline to leak.
Enbridge Spokeswoman Denise Hamsher countered. She said Enbridge has a good track record with few spills. “We don’t accept leaks. Our goal is zero,” she said.
Native American Activists Nellis Kennedy and Winona LaDuke recently discussed the Enbridge pipeline accidents that have occurred between 1992 and 2008 when they were reporting on the destruction caused by extracting oil from tar sands. Among them were a 2002 spill of 48,000 gallons of crude at the Cass Lake pumping station; a 2003 spill of 100,000 gallons at the Enbridge Energy Terminal that dumped nearly 19,000 of those onto the frozen Nemadji River, a tributary of Lake Superior; and a 2007 spill of 15,000 gallons near Clearbrook, MN.
The spill near Clearbrook caused an explosion and massive fire that killed two men repairing a pin hole leak in a section of pipeline. According to November 29, 2007 MPRnewsQ, a member of the MPCA team at the site said the frozen ground prevented oil from seeping into the soil and that most of that spilled was destroyed by the fire.
The public radio station also reported that this same pipeline was involved in an oil spill of nearly one half million gallons of crude northwest of Bemidji in 1979. Enbridge continued remediation at this sandy spill site until 2004 when the cost to them became too high.
The Nemadji River contamination happened when a spill occurred during a delivery from the pipeline to a storage tank.
Another Lakehead spill happened on July 4, 2002 when a pipeline ruptured in a marsh near Cohasset, dumping 6,000 barrels or 250,000 gallons of crude oil. To keep the oil from contaminating the Mississippi River, booms were placed in Blackwater Creek and a controlled burn was set. Reportedly, no free flowing oil reached the booms.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the probable cause of the rupture was a fatigue crack along a seam caused by improper loading.
Enbridge is not the only pipeline company faced with the remediation of oil spills. On June 27, 2006, near Little Falls, an estimated 152,000 gallons of petroleum spilled from an underground Minnesota Pipeline conduit owned and operated by Koch Petroleum. The spill impacted about 4.7 acres of wetland and 5.69 acres of high ground, according to the Twin Cities Daily Planet.
Pipeline companies continually update their control, leak detection, internal inspection and maintenance systems, and Enbridge leads in the development and implementation of a Pipeline Control System.
In spite of media focus on its spills, the company still has one of the lowest numbers of pipelines incidents in the world.
photos accompanying this article courtesy of intuitiveblogger.com (top photo) and elaw.org (bottom photo).
Related Article: Enbridge Pipeliners are Back in Northern Minnesota
ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT SPILLS? CLICK ON "SUBMIT COMMENT" AND SHARE YOUR PERSPECTIVE!
If this is not a reason to reduce our consumption of petroleum products, I don't know what is. Let us begin to transition from reliance on fossil fuels, to local self reliance! We can do this by changes in our individual and communal lifestyles everyday. - Amber Ellering
Each additional pipe that is laid in these pipeline corridors increases their width by at least 50'. That is the minimal width. There are additional clearings made occasionally to produce work areas, and other things. A strip of land that is 50' wide and one mile long contains 6 acres. So multiply the length of these pipelines (hundreds of miles in Minnesota) by 6 to find out the extent of additional deforestation and land use changes that are taking place every time one of these two companies adds a line, which happens every few years.
They push the lines under wetlands and lakes, but they clear old growth forest when they come to it. It will never grow trees again, until we run out of oil. The pipelines are used for recreation, by all terrain vehicles, spreading noxious weeds about the landscape.
Think about what you would do with that acreage if you were a landscape planner. I'd keep it forested.
The oil bearing sand processing is a nightmare. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to extract oil from the sand and leaves a waste land in its wake. It makes a few people very wealthy so they can live extravagantly and waste more of our precious resources.
This project is truly a sign that our civilization is following a doomsday course. Anyone who is not outraged is not paying attention! - Harvey Tjader
There are more pipelines crossing Minnesota than there are roads. They not only move crude oil, but may also carry liquid gas, other grades of oil, gasoline, and diesel or jet fuel. Spills are inevitable.
Those involving crude oil pipelines are many and often small. However, Jason Moran, Principal State Program Administrator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s (MPCA) Emergency Response Office, says that every spill is important.
Some of these occur at refineries and pumping stations because of overfills, pump failures, faulty values, seals or relief and bleeder values, because values are left open or equipment fails.
Since 1990 through June of this year there have been 141 oil spills over 1,000 gallons in Minnesota, according to material supplied by Moran. Among these, 40% belonged to Lakehead Pipeline/Enbridge Pipeline; 8 were tagged “Significant.” Minnesota Pipeline/Koch Pipeline spills numbered 37 (26%); of these 7 were considered “Significant.”.
The March 5, 1991 Lakehead Pipeline rupture near Grand Rapids ranks among the 13 top spills in the nation. The line leaked an estimated 1.7 million gallons of crude oil onto a field west of Itasca Community College and into the Prairie River. A weld failure was traced to “stresses created when the pipe was shipped to the construction site.”
The frozen, snow-covered ground stopped major soil contamination, but a frozen river hampered skimming efforts.
Ironically, this same Lakehead line was the source of the state’s second largest spill that dumped 1.3 million gallons in 1973 near Argyle, MN, according to “The 13 Worst Pipeline Accidents Since the Exxon Valdez.,” a paper by Bob Rackleff, nationally-known speechwriter and public relations consultant.
Lakehead Pipeline, one of the largest pipeline systems in the world, is now owned by Enbridge Pipeline.
Enbridge is often the target of environmentalists working to stop its crude oil lines from crossing areas they feel would be severely damaged by spills.
In late 2006 the Midwest Environmental Advocates claimed that Enbridge had a documented history of seam weld failures from fatigue cracks, according to an article in the October 11 Business North.
The Environmental Advocates Director Melissa Scanlan said it’s the nature of the pipeline to leak.
Enbridge Spokeswoman Denise Hamsher countered. She said Enbridge has a good track record with few spills. “We don’t accept leaks. Our goal is zero,” she said.
Native American Activists Nellis Kennedy and Winona LaDuke recently discussed the Enbridge pipeline accidents that have occurred between 1992 and 2008 when they were reporting on the destruction caused by extracting oil from tar sands. Among them were a 2002 spill of 48,000 gallons of crude at the Cass Lake pumping station; a 2003 spill of 100,000 gallons at the Enbridge Energy Terminal that dumped nearly 19,000 of those onto the frozen Nemadji River, a tributary of Lake Superior; and a 2007 spill of 15,000 gallons near Clearbrook, MN.
The spill near Clearbrook caused an explosion and massive fire that killed two men repairing a pin hole leak in a section of pipeline. According to November 29, 2007 MPRnewsQ, a member of the MPCA team at the site said the frozen ground prevented oil from seeping into the soil and that most of that spilled was destroyed by the fire.
The public radio station also reported that this same pipeline was involved in an oil spill of nearly one half million gallons of crude northwest of Bemidji in 1979. Enbridge continued remediation at this sandy spill site until 2004 when the cost to them became too high.
The Nemadji River contamination happened when a spill occurred during a delivery from the pipeline to a storage tank.
Another Lakehead spill happened on July 4, 2002 when a pipeline ruptured in a marsh near Cohasset, dumping 6,000 barrels or 250,000 gallons of crude oil. To keep the oil from contaminating the Mississippi River, booms were placed in Blackwater Creek and a controlled burn was set. Reportedly, no free flowing oil reached the booms.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the probable cause of the rupture was a fatigue crack along a seam caused by improper loading.
Enbridge is not the only pipeline company faced with the remediation of oil spills. On June 27, 2006, near Little Falls, an estimated 152,000 gallons of petroleum spilled from an underground Minnesota Pipeline conduit owned and operated by Koch Petroleum. The spill impacted about 4.7 acres of wetland and 5.69 acres of high ground, according to the Twin Cities Daily Planet.Pipeline companies continually update their control, leak detection, internal inspection and maintenance systems, and Enbridge leads in the development and implementation of a Pipeline Control System.
In spite of media focus on its spills, the company still has one of the lowest numbers of pipelines incidents in the world.
photos accompanying this article courtesy of intuitiveblogger.com (top photo) and elaw.org (bottom photo).
Related Article: Enbridge Pipeliners are Back in Northern Minnesota
ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT SPILLS? CLICK ON "SUBMIT COMMENT" AND SHARE YOUR PERSPECTIVE!
If this is not a reason to reduce our consumption of petroleum products, I don't know what is. Let us begin to transition from reliance on fossil fuels, to local self reliance! We can do this by changes in our individual and communal lifestyles everyday. - Amber Ellering
*********
Each additional pipe that is laid in these pipeline corridors increases their width by at least 50'. That is the minimal width. There are additional clearings made occasionally to produce work areas, and other things. A strip of land that is 50' wide and one mile long contains 6 acres. So multiply the length of these pipelines (hundreds of miles in Minnesota) by 6 to find out the extent of additional deforestation and land use changes that are taking place every time one of these two companies adds a line, which happens every few years.
They push the lines under wetlands and lakes, but they clear old growth forest when they come to it. It will never grow trees again, until we run out of oil. The pipelines are used for recreation, by all terrain vehicles, spreading noxious weeds about the landscape.
Think about what you would do with that acreage if you were a landscape planner. I'd keep it forested.
The oil bearing sand processing is a nightmare. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to extract oil from the sand and leaves a waste land in its wake. It makes a few people very wealthy so they can live extravagantly and waste more of our precious resources.
This project is truly a sign that our civilization is following a doomsday course. Anyone who is not outraged is not paying attention! - Harvey Tjader
posted by Katie Carter at
9:51 AM
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