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Is The Enbridge Pipeline Really That Dangerous? Compared To What?

This article is more than 2 years old.

On October 4th, the Canadian government asked a U.S. federal judge to stop Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's order to shut down the controversial 67-year-old Enbridge ENB Line 5 oil and gas pipeline running along the lake bottom of the Straits of Mackinac, where the Great Lakes of Michigan and Huron connect.

Canada cited a 1977 pipeline treaty with the United States that restricts negotiations on cross-border pipelines to the two federal governments, giving state and territory governments no say.

Line 5 moves over 20 million gallons of petroleum liquids per day from western Canada to eastern Canada through Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac. It has more than 4-miles of twin underwater sections in the Straits, and fear of a rupture is uppermost in many minds.

Last year, Whitmer announced she would be revoking Enbridge's 1954 easement from the state to use the lake bottom for its pipelines, citing "Enbridge’s persistent and incurable violations of the easement’s terms and conditions," and the potential dangers of an oil spill to Michigan's environment and economy. That stop-date was in May and Enbridge ignored it.

Enbridge doesn’t have a stellar safety record, being responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history in 2010 when one of its large oil transmission lines near Marshall ruptured and contaminated almost 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River, taking four years and more than $1 billion to clean up. 

The real problem is oil consumption is the fastest growing energy source in the world.

Period. Full Stop.

We have made no headway in reigning in oil use. Twenty internal combustion engines are produced for every electric vehicle, and that is unlikely to reverse much until well after 2040.

So oil is going to keep moving around this country and the world, and will continue to increase in our continued energy boom, so the answer is not simply to stop it. The answer is to determine how to move it safely.

While many have called for shutdown of pipelines like Enbridge, and a moratorium on new pipeline construction, the correct reaction may just be the opposite. We really should be replacing old pipelines and building new ones, reducing the stress on each line. It is particularly good to supersize them - build bigger pipelines over old ones.

In keeping with this strategy, in 2018 the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced that the Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority (MSCA), in correspondence with outgoing Governor Rick Snyder, approved an agreement to build a multi-purpose tunnel that would house multiple utility lines. In addition, the Enbridge Line 5 would be removed & a new line would be constructed. Within the agreement, the MSCA approved the transfer of a property right, which allows Enbridge to construct the new tunnel in bedrock beneath the Straits of Mackinac.

In the U.S., 100% of our natural gas is shipped by pipeline. 70% of crude oil and petroleum products are shipped by pipeline. 23% of oil shipments are on tankers and barges over water. Trucking only accounts for 4% of shipments, and rail for a mere 3%. In Canada, it’s even more lopsided. Almost all (97%) of natural gas and petroleum products are transported by pipelines (Canadian Energy Pipeline Association).

But as pipeline projects fail, Canada is investing in more rail transport. Canada’s energy regulator announced in June that 200,000 barrels per day is being exported by rail, an all-time high, and estimates that the amount will double in less than two years. The government is trying to be pro-active, fast-tracking the phasing out of older rail cars that are prone to accidents with crude oil and flammable liquids.

So which mode is safer? For oil, the short answer is: truck worse than train worse than pipeline worse than boat (Oilprice.com). But that’s only for human death and property destruction. For the amount of oil spilled per billion-ton-miles, it’s truck worse than pipeline worse than rail worse than boat (Congressional Research Service). Even more different is for environmental impact (dominated by impact to aquatic habitat), where it’s boat worse than pipeline worse than truck worse than rail.

It depends upon what your definition is for worse. Is it deaths and destruction? Is it amount of oil released? Is it land area or water volume contaminated? Is it habitat destroyed? Is it CO2 emitted?

Take two spills for comparison.

The Quebec oil train wreck killed 47 people and spilled 1.5 million gallons of crude onto land. The Enbridge pipeline rupture spilled over a million gallons of similar crude into the Kalamazoo River but did not kill anyone.

Contamination of water is definitely worse for the environment than land and spreads quickly over more area and impacts more species and habitat, but killing people makes a big difference to the public. I don’t want to put a price tag on human life, but the Government has, and it’s about $7 million a person.

So the Quebec train derailment cost over $400 million in human life, plus another $150 million for clean-up and repairing the town. The Enbridge pipeline cost no human lives but will cost about a billion dollars to clean-up, and, like the Exxon Valdez, will never really succeed.

These are not easy questions and one’s vested interest has a great deal of sway in the answer.

You really do need to pick your poison.

It isn’t acceptable to just say we shouldn’t be moving oil, because we will for the rest of this century, no matter what happens. So, keeping in mind the difference between death/damage to humans and damage to the environment, which would you choose?

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