A Spill Risk Assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project

Table 18: Recent Spill Record for the Keystone Pipeline (2010 -­‐ 2011)
Incident Date Cause of Incident
Volume of Oil Spilled
(bbl)
May 21, 2010 Valve body leak < 1
June 23, 2010 Pump station leak < 1
August 10, 2010 Unknown < 1
August 19, 2010 Equipment failure < 1
January 5, 2011 Faulty seal < 1
January 30, 2011 Pump seal failure < 1
February 3, 2011 Operator error < 1
February 17, 2011 Equipment failure < 1
March 8, 2011 Pump seal failure < 1
March 16, 2011 Seal failure 3
May 7, 2011 Valve failure 450 – 500
May 29, 2011 Unknown 50
Total 505 – 555
Source: USCG NRC (2012); USDS (2011 Vol. 2 p. 3.13-­‐13).
Evaluation: There are six major deficiencies related to the transparency criterion and
thus this criterion is not met.
Replicability
Replicability: Documentation provides sufficient information to allow individuals other
than those who did the original analysis to obtain similar results.
The ENGP regulatory application presents the methodologies used to estimate spill
return periods for tanker, terminal, and pipeline spills in a fairly straightforward
manner. However, insufficient information due to a lack of transparency prevents the
replication of key components of the methodological approach and important results in
the ENGP regulatory application. As suggested in the previous section, inadequate
transparency prevents individuals other than the original analysts from replicating the
following results and each component represents a major deficiency related to
replicability:
1. LRFP frequency data for grounding, collision, foundering, and fire/explosion tanker
incidents
2. Scaling factors for ENGP routes due to a failure to provide comparative navigational
routes used to determine scaling factors and methodology for determining scaling
factors
3. Conditional spill probabilities and spill size distributions estimated in the consequence
assessment for tanker spills
4. Mitigation measures that reduce spills from ENGP tanker traffic and marine terminal
operations
5. Incident frequencies and mitigation measures used to estimate return periods for
pipeline spills.
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