The federal government has major gaps to fill to keep its promise to establish a world-class safety system for oil supertankers plying Canadian waters off the coast of British Columbia, an expert panel reports. Ottawa established the panel to recommend safety enhancements as part of its effort to win support from the B.C. government and First Nations for crude oil pipelines and tanker ports that would give the oil industry access to Asian markets. Transport Minister Lisa Raitt and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver released the report with its 45 recommendations in Vancouver on Tuesday.
The city councils of Surrey and White Rock say they are keenly interested in a relocation inland of the railway line that runs along their ocean shorelines. That message was welcomed by most of the 400-plus people attending a public forum on the topic that the two councils hosted at the Pacific Inn in south Surrey on Nov 26. The forum featured Surrey mayor Dianne Watts and White Rock mayor Wayne Baldwin. Each was given much applause when they declared that it’s time to move the line inland. The case for relocation of the BNSF line has long been compelling.
With two major studies now in hand demonstrating how poorly prepared B.C. is for a marine oil spill, Environment Minister Mary Polak says the government still doesn’t know what it would take to achieve a “world-class” response system. “We have not arrived at a place yet where we can say, ‘Here are the elements of a world-class response,’” Ms. Polak said in an interview Wednesday. Her ministry is reviewing this week’s report from a federal panel that found major gaps in the safety system for oil supertankers plying Canadian waters off the coast.
YENAGOA, Nigeria, Dec 2 (Reuters) - A large oil spill near Nigeria's Brass facility, run by ENI, has spread through the sea and swamps of the oil producing Niger Delta region, local residents and the company said on Monday. ENI said it was not yet possible to determine the cause of the spill. There are hundreds of leaks every year from pipelines that pass through the delta's creeks, damaging the environment and the profits of oil companies including ENI and Royal Dutch Shell , especially when production has to be deferred.
The first steam locomotive to arrive in Lac La Biche back in 1915 was greeted with cheers. Today the 100-car oil trains that run through the heart of the Northern Alberta town are met with a mixture of anger and worry. The tracks bisect the town. The hospital lies on one side, the fire station on the other. Over the past five years, as the oil boom escalated and more and more bitumen from Fort McMurray was shipped by rail, the oil trains grew long enough to block all the town’s railway crossings for extended periods of time.
Emergency crews ran for cover when they heard the noise, as they fought blasts of burning oil during the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. The kettle-boil scream meant one thing: Oil vapours were shooting out of a derailed tank car and another fireball was about to rip from the broken train. It wasn’t until four days after the July 6 derailment that the fires finally subsided.
For Eddie Brown, 54, a former refinery worker and now owner of the Kutz 4 Kingz Barber Shop in Port Arthur, Texas, enough is enough. "My mom died of cancer," he said. "My son had breathing issues. I have a lot of friends and relatives who have a lot of breathing problems. There's a lot of people with cancer in this area." So when he heard about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline bringing another 830,000 barrels of heavy oil into his beleaguered town, he was against it. "Sooner or later I think safety and health should trump the commercial side," he said.
Editor's note: In July 2012, the B.C. government announced five conditions which must be met before it would consider the approval of heavy oil pipeline projects in the province.
Long before disaster struck, the 5,900 residents of Lac-Mégantic had grown accustomed to the sight of large oil tankers rolling through their small, tightly knit community in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. A shortage of oil pipelines in North America had created a new kind of railway industry traversing the continent. In just a few years, tankers carrying crude oil from the resource-rich West had grown from a mere 8,000 in 2009 to nearly 400,000, and Lac-Mégantic is located along one of the main routes to refineries in the East.
There are two ways to look at Canada's oil wealth, found mostly in Alberta's oilsands deposits. One is to be amazed that Alberta has more than 170 billion barrels of oil - an immense resource by any yardstick. The other is to question what it all means. Will it have an effect on the global supply of oil, is Canada going to be able to sell it in the future, and how does the rest of the world view Canada - and its oil? Game changer. Oil is found just about everywhere on the planet.
