The National Energy Board has announced it will release its decision tomorrow on Enbridge’s controversial plan to increase flows in Line 9 between Sarnia and Montreal and to also ship bitumen from the Alberta tar sands through the 39-year old pipeline. Local opponents are already pointing to problems with the regulator and its review process and have announced a protest rally at noon on Friday at Hamilton City Hall.
The NEB decision will be released in Calgary at 4:30 pm on Thursday. It is expected to respond to demands from the Ontario government and cities like Hamilton that the proposal be subjected to an independent engineering assessment and that Enbridge be forced to conduct hydrostatic testing.
Other issues raised in the hearings conducted last fall included Enbridge’s request for maximum operating pressures 50 percent greater than at any point in the last decade, and the company’s own admission that nearly a third of Line 9 leaks to this point have been first reported by others. There’s also widespread concern about the difficulties in cleaning up a spill of bitumen and the toxic diluents released when a rupture occurs.
Since the hearings concluded media investigations have revealed multiple spills that Enbridge failed to report to affected municipalities, and hundreds of Line 9 defects that have been found by the company since it filed its application. It’s unclear if these revelations will be considered by the NEB.
The Hamilton 350 Committee which has called Friday’s noon rally is predicting the NEB will likely approve the pipeline, but is certain the decision won’t address many of its major concerns “including the effects on climate change of increasing both the extraction and transport of fossil fuels, and the economic impacts on manufacturing of additional oil exports.”
These issues were excluded from the NEB’s decision a year ago to consider “the environmental and socio-economic effects associated with upstream activities, the development of oil sands, or the downstream use of the oil transported by the pipeline.”
The group points to the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that burning of oil and other fossil fuels is causing global climate change, and argues that extreme weather events in Hamilton including “torrential rain, ice storms [and] flooding” are likely evidence of the harm that has already occurred.
“It is clear that we must wean our society off fossil fuels,” says the group’s media release. “The minimum first step is stop making things worse. When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. Therefore, at minimum, no increase in the extraction or transportation of fossil fuels should be contemplated.”
The IPCC will release its fifth set of projected impacts of climate change at the end of this month. Last week the co-chair of the group drafting that report told the media that “the impacts of climate change that have already occurred are very evident, they’re widespread, they have consequences” and that humans are clearly not ready for what we are facing.
“I think if you look around the world at the damages that have been sustained in a wide range of climate-related events, it’s very clear we’re not prepared for the kinds of event we’re already seeing,” said Stanford University scientist Chris Field.
Hamilton 350 also questions the fairness of the NEB process that required detailed application forms from anyone wishing to even submit a written comment to the Board. And they suggest that the credibility of the board’s independence is undermined by its failure to require notification to even the city government for flow expansion last year in another pipeline running parallel to Line 9.