Oil spill detectionKeystone XL pipeline: reliability of remote oil-spill sensors questioned
The oil industry plans to build thousands of miles of pipelines in the next five years, making leak detection a growing issue; many of the new pipelines will cross aquifers and rivers which are used for drinking water and irrigation; the Keystone XL pipeline has already experienced its share of controversies, and now there is a debate over the quality and reliability of the pipeline’s sensor system for remote detection of oil spills
TransCanada, the Canadian company behind Keystone XL pipeline has, made it a point to assure critics of the project that the pipeline will feature sensors that can detect oil spills quickly.
The company, for example, took out ads in Nebraska, where there is a local opposition to the pipeline, promising the pipeline will be “monitored through a state of the art oil control center 24-hours a day, 365-days a year. 21,000 sensors along the pipeline route will relay information via satellite to the control center every five seconds”
Bloomberg news notes that other companies have made similar claims about their remote sensors, sometimes promising that they can detect and isolate a spill within minutes.
Now an InsideClimate News examination of ten years of federal data tells a different story. The examination shows that leak detection systems do not provide the protection oil companies claim they do.
From 2002 through July 2012, remote sensors detected jut 5 percent of the U.S. pipeline spills, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). ordinary citizens reported 22 percent of the spills during that time frame; employees of various pipeline companies at scenes of accidents reported 62 percent.
Anthony Swift has researched pipeline safety for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for years. He says he was shocked by the findings. The NRDC opposes the Keystone XL pipeline project and Swift said he always knew that leak detection systems were inferior.
“The fact that 19 out of 20 leaks aren’t caught is surprising and certainly run counter to a lot of rhetoric we hear from the industry,” Swift told Bloomberg.
Experts in the oil industry were not surprised by the findings. “The reality of the science” is that there are limits to remote leak detection. “That’s just the way it is,” Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts, Inc., a consulting firm that provides pipeline expertise for government agencies and the industry told Bloomberg.
Kuprewicz has worked with TransCanada in the past, but is not involved with the Keystone XL project.
Operators of sensor systems may feel pressured to “tell people things they shouldn’t because it’s not true,” Kuprewicz said. While the companies “may not be saying that with the intent of lying, the reality is, it’s just difficult to detect releases remotely,” He told Bloomberg.
The industry plans to build thousands of miles of pipelines in the next five years, making leak detection a growing issue. Many
