Exclusive: TransCanada Keystone 1 Pipeline Suffered Major Corrosion Only Two Years In Operation, 95% Worn In One Spot
Julie
Dermansky | April 30, 2015
By Julie
Dermansky • Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 12:24
Documents
obtained by DeSmogBlog reveal an alarming rate of corrosion to parts of
TransCanada's Keystone 1 pipeline. A mandatory inspection test revealed a
section of the pipeline's wall had corroded 95%, leaving it paper-thin in one
area (one-third the thickness of a dime) and dangerously thin in three other places,
leading TransCanada to immediately shut it down. The cause of the corrosion is
being kept from the public by federal regulators and TransCanada.
“It is highly unusual for a
pipeline not yet two years old to experience such deep corrosion issues,” Evan
Vokes, a former TransCanada pipeline engineer-turned-whistleblower, told DeSmogBlog.
“Something very severe happened that the public needs to know about.”
When TransCanada shut the
line down, the company and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety
Administration (PHMSA) told the press that the shutdown was due to “possible safety Issues.” And although an engineer from
PHMSA was sent to the site where TransCanada was digging up the
pipeline in Missouri, no further information has been made available publicly.
Only after DeSmogBlog made
a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to PHMSA in August 2013 — which the agency partially responded to
this April — was the information revealing the pipeline had deeply corroded in
multiple spots exposed. The documents also disclosed a plan to check for a
possible spill where the corrosion was detected.
However, documents explaining what
caused the corrosion and findings concerning a possible spill were not included
in response to DeSmogBlog's request. According to PHMSA
spokesman Damon Hill, documents that might impact an ongoing compliance review
the agency is conducting of TransCanada were withheld.
A list of the documents
withheld was not provided with the FOIA or a date when the remaining documents would be released.
An email included with the
documents suggests Ken Crowl, a representative of TransCanada, sent an
email to PHSMA stating the he would provide the agency with “the media
talking points” about what the parties had discussed.
When asked why a list of
the talking points would not have been included in the FOIA
request, PHMSA spokesman Damon Hill told DeSmogBlog such a list might
not have been provided, and insisted the agency would have no use for such
a list. Yet, TransCanada's email indicates the two entities compared notes
before sharing information with the public.
Richard Kuprewicz, a
pipeline safety expert with more than forty years of experience in the energy
sector, reviewed the few documents that were obtained. While he found it
unusual to see such extensive wall loss in such a short period of time, he was
happy to report, “The process worked.”
“TransCanada caught this
before it went to failure,” Kuprewicz told DeSmogBlog. “Finding some corrosion
issues resulting in anomalies in a pipeline this big is to be expected,” he
said. “But the severity of a wall loss of 80% or greater would result in the operator
looking for a leak.”
Once a pipeline experiences
corrosion “somewhere around 80% — you're in Never-Never land,” Kuprewicz said. “You
have to be real careful, because the engineers will act like the calculations
are exact, but when you get to that kind of wall loss it doesn't take much
change in the corrosion rate to take you to failure.”
Kuprewicz wouldn't
speculate on the cause of the corrosion because he didn't have the documents he
would need to make such a determination. The missing documents also made
it impossible for him to ascertain if a spill took place before the line
was shut down, but he said it would not surprise him if a small spill had occurred.
However, the only PHMSA-generated
document included in the FOIA response, an internal email sent by PHMSA representative David
Barrett, confirms the possibility of a spill.
Though Kuprewicz commends
TransCanada for taking the appropriate steps after finding the initial problem, the
question remains why the company didn't catch the problem before there was 95%
wall thickness loss.
Vokes, who also reviewed
the documents, isn't surprised the pipeline had major issues. To him, it was a
predictable outcome. Not only has he witnessed TransCanada's risky
behavior first-hand during his five years on the job, Canada’s National Energy
Board had found TransCanada guilty of non-compliance prior to his
working for the company.
An advocate for pipelines,
Vokes had hoped to help TransCanada clean up its act. He believes
pipelines are the best way to transport crude oil and tar sands product, as
long at operators comply with the rules.
But if the rules aren't followed, all bets are off. Better a train carrying
petroleum products fail than a shoddily built pipeline, because a train
accident would have a limited scope, while a pipeline failure could cause
damage on a catastrophic scale. (Caveat, of course, would be a “bomb train”
oil-by-rail incident in a population center.)
An analysis of what
caused such deep corrosion in Keystone 1 in a short period of time would show
that “a bunch of professional engineers were behaving badly,” Vokes said, “because
there are adequate checks and balances in the regulations to avoid this.”
According to Vokes, “The
direct effect on shareholders of the estimated revenue loss for the shut down
lasting four and a half days is 20 million dollars.” He believes that
the shareholders, himself included, are entitled to know what caused the shutdown.
TransCanada's
non-compliance with regulations is nothing new. Vokes shed light on the company's
risky behavior in 2011 by turning over internal documents to the Canadian
National Energy Board and PHSMA. Later, he gave the same documents to the Canadian Senate,
resulting in a probe of the company’s compliance practices.
According to a recent
report by Reuters, Canadian regulators began investigating
TransCanada's safety practices again, after it received documents submitted
by another whistleblower.
The final
inspection report of the Keystone XL southern route (now
known as the Gulf Coast pipeline) was also obtained by DeSmogBlog. It offers
further evidence that TransCanada is not code complaint. The report
concluded TransCanada's work to be unsatisfactory in more then seven areas it considered.
Furthermore, last year,
when the Keystone
XL's
southern line was shut down shortly after it was put into operation,
many questioned TransCanada’s claim that it was due to planned routine work,
since shutting down a pipeline costs a company millions of dollars.
PHSMA confirmed it looked into the shutdown. However the
agency “did not dispatch an inspector since the shutdown was not reported to
have involved any safety issues,” Hill wrote in an email to DeSmogBlog.
Meanwhile, TransCanada is
seeking a recertification of the Keystone XL
pipeline permit from the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. The
permit expired last year.
The grassroots citizens
group Dakota Rural Action has retained lawyers Robin Martinez and
Bruce Ellison to challenge recertification.” The Dakota Rural Action group
plans to challenge TransCanada on its inability and/or unwillingness to put
safety first in its construction and operations,” Ellison wrote to DeSmogBlog. The
lawyers believe they have enough documentation to show the company’s pipeline
should not be recertified.
The hearing, scheduled to
take place on May 5, was postponed until sometime this summer after pressure
was put on the Public Utility Commission to give those testifying against
TransCanada more time. Many of those opposed to the pipeline made allegations
that they were given insufficient time to complete discovery before the hearing.
Vokes, who will be
testifying as an expert witness for the Dakota Rural Action group, recently
reviewed pre-hearing testimony that TransCanada's expert witnesses submitted
to the Public Utilities Commission. The company’s experts failed to
disclose the corrosion incident in the Keystone 1 line, and the fact that the
company is under a compliance review by U.S. regulators.
The Association of Professional
Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicist of Alberta's guidelines for giving
testimony make disclosing such information mandatory, according to Vokes.
The results of PHMSA
compliance review of TransCanada could impact the permit hearing in South
Dakota, as well as on the permit the company needs approved by President
Obama to complete the northern route of the Keystone XL pipeline.
When President
Obama vetoed the Senate bill that would have enabled TransCanada to finish
building the Keystone XL, he didn't rule out the possibility he might grant the
permit once the State Department’s review of the pipeline is complete. The fate
of the Keystone XL completion is still in the president's hands.
If PHMSA has evidence
TransCanada is not adhering to the rules, we can only hope the agency will release
that information before decisions regarding additional pipelines
TransCanada seeks permission to build are made.
Image credit: 2/18/2013 Southern
route of the Keystone XL pipeline being installed in Douglas,Texas ©2013
Julie Dermansky