The fate of a decommissioned oil pipeline across rural Hamilton remains in limbo as Enbridge struggles to convince the National Energy Board to allow its sale to an American refinery. The city wants the old pipe removed but is now also confronted with another project that would leave a second one buried in Flamborough.
Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil, is proposing to replace a 63-kilometre segment of its Sarnia pipeline running between Waterdown and North York with the stated intention of decommissioning the existing pipe and leaving it in the ground. Earlier this year Imperial registered a half dozen officials to lobby Mayor Eisenberger and Waterdown area councillor Judi Partridge. Last week it began public open houses in advance of formally applying for permits from the Ontario Energy Board as well as affected municipalities and conservation authorities.
Imperial is the largest oil refiner in Canada and also has mining facilities in the Alberta tar sands. Last week it also announced the start of its new Aspen tar sands mine projected to extract 2.6 billion barrels a year.
Its main refinery operations are in Sarnia’s chemical valley adjacent to the Aamjiwnaang First Nation reserve whose residents have been fighting its toxic pollution of their community. They point to elevated cancer and asthma and a grossly skewed birth rate of two females for each male child.
The already decommissioned Enbridge pipe is a 35-km segment of the controversial Line 10 between Westover and Nebo Road that was replaced with a larger pipe last year. Enbridge is now trying to sell it to United Refining Corporation (URC) of Pennsylvania whose refinery receives most of the heavy crude exported through Line 10.
It applied to the NEB for authorization of the sale in early May, but approval still hasn’t happened. A major reason appears to be the sleuthing of an individual citizen who contends there are significant financial questions in the deal that could mean inadequate funds for future cleanup and possible tax dodges.
Louise Lanteigne has pushed for release of more information about the new URC subsidiary being created in Canada to be the new pipeline owner. That led the NEB to ask for “the most recent annual reports” of URC and to a subsequent response from Enbridge and URC that those must be kept confidential.
But Lanteigne found that those reports were already public on the internet as a result of URC being required to release them to its American financial regulator. The most recent NEB request asks for an explanation of why this information “has consistently been treated as confidential information by URC” and how its disclosure might cause URC “any material gain or loss”.
The inability or unwillingness of pipeline owners and other fossil fuel companies to conduct promised future cleanups got major media attention earlier this month. An investigation by the National Observer, Toronto Star and Global News uncovered an accumulated $260 billion liability that appears to have been hidden or ignored by the Alberta government regulator.
That led Green Party leader Elizabeth May to warn that “all Canadians should know that we have a very heavy debt load that we’re carrying on behalf of the oil industry, because they won’t be paying off their cleanup costs” as this industry doesn’t have much of a future.
May and the investigating media pointed to the latest international climate report calling for much more rapid cuts in the use of oil and other fossil fuels. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last month that the world must slash carbon emissions nearly in half over the next 12 years and eliminate them entirely before 2050 if there is any hope of minimizing unacceptable loss of life, property, coral reefs and multiple other natural features and species.
When Hamilton council pushed for removal of the decommissioned Line 10 pipes, the NEB inexplicably ignored them as though it had not read the city’s letter to the Board. In the wake of that, city council launched legal action but subsequently dropped it without explanations. So far it hasn’t had a chance to respond Imperial Oil’s plans to leave another decommissioned pipe in the ground with a promise that the company will take care of it forever.