On May 29, Peter O’Neil wrote an article entitled “Oil spills are rare and getting rarer,- but any risk is too much for some”. The article relates to the likelihood of pipeline and tanker spills associated with Enbridge Northern Gateway, a subject dear to my heart, as any reader of this website would have noticed by now.
Portions of the article, particularly where third party “experts” are cited, struck a chord with this marine oil spill prevention and response expert, who has participated in various ways in the review of the Northern Gateway project. For instance, Mr. O’Neil writes the following:
“Of particular relevance to B.C., since only tankers with double-hulls protecting both storage and engine fuel tanks will be allowed to approach Kitimat, is that only five spills have occurred in the world since 1992 from cargo tanks protected by double hulls, according to Keith Michel, a California-based Enbridge consultant whom the company describes as a world expert on shipping safety.”
On December 11, 2011 Coastal First Nations submitted the following Table, listing five such incidents, as evidence to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Panel. The Table is adapted from one I produced for Coastal First Nations in 2010. I reproduce the 2011 Table here, for the reader's benefit:
Double Hull Tanker Incidents
How very gratifying, then, to see that a “world expert on shipping safety”, one of Northern Gateway’s vast army of Expert Witnesses, has drawn attention to five such incidents, albeit over a year after the Table above first appeared on the public record for this particular project, thanks to yours truly, a local, home-grown expert.
Later in the article by Mr. O’Neil, another interesting statement appears:
“Det Norske Veritas, a Norwegian company hired by Enbridge to assess risk, concluded there is an 18-per-cent likelihood of a tanker spill incident – minor or major — over a 50-year span. For a spill greater than 31,000 barrels, the odds slide to 8.7 per cent — the equivalent of playing Russian roulette once every 50 years, with a single bullet in a 12-chamber revolver. For an Exxon Valdez-grade spill of 250,000 or more barrels, the odds tumble to just 0.3 per cent over 50 years.”
This paragraph piqued my interest as well, not least because in my August 29, 2012 Letter of Comment to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Panel, I wrote the following:
“Applying a formula for converting return periods into probabilities that was developed by Professor Shane Rollins, a Mathematics professor, for Mr. Kelly Marsh, and relying on calculations that were made, using that formula, by Professor Shane Rollins and Dr. Tom Haslam-Jones, a tanker spill of >40,000 m3 with a return period of 15,000 years translates, in layman’s terms, into a .3% chance of at least one spill greater than c. 252,000 barrels occurring over the fifty year lifespan of the project. So, not much chance of that happening, if Northern Gateway’s estimates are accurate. For the record, that's about the same size spill as the Exxon Valdez incident in Alaska in 1989.
But the risks are significantly higher for some of the other spill ranges for which Enbridge provides calculations; for instance, spills <5000 m3, and spills > 5000 m3. The estimated return periods for these types of spill are 570 and 550 years respectively. Put these into layman’s terms, and there is a 10.0% chance that at least one spill under 31,500 barrels will occur, plus an 8.7 % chance of at least one spill over 31,500 barrels. All told, there is an 18.1% chance that at least one spill of any size will occur.”
Again, it is extremely gratifying that some of “my” figures ( developed with the help of others, to be fair ) have essentially been corroborated by no less an authority than Det Norske Veritas, around nine months after my Letter of Comment appeared on the public record. And how curious it is that the Proponent, apparently in response to a request from Mr. O’Neil, has agreed to translate its incredibly opaque tanker risk figures from return periods and cubic metres into chances, probabilities and barrels. Until now, the company has rebuffed repeated requests from people such as myself for it to do so. On top of everything, the Proponent’s latest figures are virtually identical to the ones my colleagues and I came up with.
I should perhaps add that I mentioned some of those same spill probability statistics when I made my Oral Statement to the Joint Review Panel on January 7, 2013. Interestingly, the press picked up on some of these statistics in articles that appeared in the aftermath of my Panel appearance. See, for instance, the article by Larry Pynn of The Vancouver Sun, entitled “Tankers too risky on B.C.’s North Coast, oil-spill consultant says”.
There is at least coincidence between the content of Mr. O’Neil’s article and what I have put on the public record. In a blog entry of mine earlier this year on the subject of Northern Gateway tanker spill risks, I use the term “Russian roulette”. Mr. O’Neil uses the same phrase in his piece. Great minds thinking alike, as Mr. O’Neil reminded me in an email.
Perhaps Mr. O’Neil’s article is just one more example of a particularly Canadian tendency, especially prevalent in the media, to rely on foreign ‘experts’ when world class expertise is often right here on our doorstep. As the saying goes, “No man can be a prophet in his own country”.
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